Rift: Planes of Telara

I have to say leveling rift at release was one of the best leveling experiences I have ever had although too short. The trees gave you some sandbox, the rifts and PVP around them was always there, the invasions were fresh at the time and the game looked pretty good. It was great... then i reached end game and the raiding just didn't get it done with me..

Honestly I could have gone level 1-100 if there was content there... it was just too fast at that XP rate. Many folks quit because there just wasn't enough there-there.;

they should have unleashed that damn invasion engine and had mobs take over towns... there are your dungeons.

Yeah if anything, you level too fast in Rift

The never ending, unachievable quest for PVP balance destroyed the game. Like WoW, it seemed every patch brought a pile of nerfs because of fucking PVP. In Rift's case they tore down entire souls in the name of the almighty PVP balance, forcing you to come up with new builds and a new playstyle over and over. Sometimes coming up with new stuff is fun, but other times you suddenly find yourself with only one viable option and it's some stupid fucking build with five or ten short-duration buffs/dots/debuffs whatever that you have to maintain and you go from smashing 2 or 3 buttons to 20 and it's EQ2 all over again.

I quit over the most heavy-handed, destructive nerf in the name of PVP I had ever seen. This warrior combo gives you too much burst in PVP and you could almost solo a tank+healer godmode cleric to under 90% hp, so NERF FIVE SOULS AT ONCE. I hated that shit in WoW and I didn't like Rift enough to tolerate it. That's probably the key right there - Everquest and WoW could piss me off and I'd keep playing. But by the time I got to Rift, nope, not doing that shit anymore. Fuck you, bye.

This is why I hate PVP and can do without it. For me, PVP is a fun side game to do when other shit is taken care of. But it is not something I want the entire goddamn game tuned around. Even minor pvp fixes tend to affect everything else you do and that's fucking obnoxious. Sure, in Everquest you had massive imbalances that persisted for months or years or even the entire 14 year life of the game - but at least your class didn't transform every fucking month. I'd rather not have PVP at all than put up with a game like WoW or Rift again.

Why in the filpping fuck can we not have abilities that do one thing in PVE and another in PVP? Oh, it'll "confuse players." Fuck you, we're not all idiots. The rest will figure it out.

Kreugen_sl said:

This is why I hate PVP and can do without it. For me, PVP is a fun side game to do when other shit is taken care of. But it is not something I want the entire goddamn game tuned around. Even minor pvp fixes tend to affect everything else you do and that's fucking obnoxious. Sure, in Everquest you had massive imbalances that persisted for months or years or even the entire 14 year life of the game - but at least your class didn't transform every fucking month. I'd rather not have PVP at all than put up with a game like WoW or Rift again.

Why in the filpping fuck can we not have abilities that do one thing in PVE and another in PVP? Oh, it'll "confuse players." Fuck you, we're not all idiots. The rest will figure it out.

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This exactly right here. I actually really enjoy PvP...but as a side game, something to do when no one else is on, something to vent the days frustrations, but not as a core requirement/part of the game.

Everquest, 14 years ago, had the ability to code a spell to do one thing to a PvE target and something different to a PvP target. It was glorious, and it was around then, but it seems like no developer since has wanted to take the time to make that happen again. The wow dev response to "EQ had it, why can't you do it" was always "we don't want to have to balance two completely separate spell designs for each aspect of the game." It's not like every spell had to be different from one aspect to the other, they were just being lazy. It didn't confuse us back in EQ, it was understood and accepted.

It's annoying, and agree with Kreugen, it was really annoying every patch to have to re-do tons of testing and parsing to be able to figure out what they screwed up for PvE by making PvP changes.

Ancallagon_sl said:

This exactly right here. I actually really enjoy PvP...but as a side game, something to do when no one else is on, something to vent the days frustrations, but not as a core requirement/part of the game.

Everquest, 14 years ago, had the ability to code a spell to do one thing to a PvE target and something different to a PvP target. It was glorious, and it was around then, but it seems like no developer since has wanted to take the time to make that happen again. The wow dev response to "EQ had it, why can't you do it" was always "we don't want to have to balance two completely separate spell designs for each aspect of the game." It's not like every spell had to be different from one aspect to the other, they were just being lazy. It didn't confuse us back in EQ, it was understood and accepted.

It's annoying, and agree with Kreugen, it was really annoying every patch to have to re-do tons of testing and parsing to be able to figure out what they screwed up for PvE by making PvP changes.

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Coding a spell to have a different effect or value in pvp and pve is a trivial thing. It has nothing to do with being lazy and not wanting to put forth extra effort, its about making the game not be overly complex from a player point of view. For players like us, people who are all over forums to be informed of every detail and always constantly up to date, it wouldn't really be a big deal. But the average player, the people that make up a majority of a games player-base, it would be overly complicated to have every or even a majority of spells perform differently in different instances.

I completely understand the argument of wanting PvE and PvP balanced separately so both can be balanced better and so that changing one doesn't effect the other, but if you take WoW as an example they have had both the most balanced PvP game and PvE game ever in existence since around the start of WotLK and they've done so while very few spells outside of crowd control effects operate differently in the 2 situations. Even if the 2 were separated, there will always be slight imbalances and cookie cutter builds and flavor of the month classes/specs, that part is just a consequence of the existence of math and you're not going to get rid of it without completely homogenizing every class and spec which obviously isn't a valid option.

WOW, Rift, DAOC, etc, etc haven't been able to properly make a game so both sides were fun.

Designers should make ones MMO about PVP or PVE and forget about the other except for side games.

It's more than even just PVP and PVE. Fuck trying to make all classes perfectly balanced. Make the game fun, and allow for out of the box thinking. Every MMO has a simple design that they simplify even further upon release due to timid design thinking and a desire to make classes equal in many regards. Fuck that noise. Make the game fun and allow for imbalances and add on to ones classes, instead of making them boring fucking copies tuned to within a few percent in all regards.

Rift was probably the worst of the lot with what they did to all their classes.

So, how is the free to play working out?

Also bring back eq classes where everyone had a niche and all was broken as fuck, that is the best kind of balance. Vanguard bloodmage, sleeper, jboots, ghoul root, fbss.

F2P doesn't happen for a couple more weeks. Lots of people coming back now though, and new players too with the Rift Raptr deal. Most of the servers are at high during primetime and the Euros are complaining about queue times.

Edit: free weekend, may 30th to june 3rd.

Beta was about more things happening in world than instances (besides tradeskilling and quests). The zonewide "something wicked comes this ways" were awesome. That's what the whole thing shoulda been about.

Rustling the planar jimmies through a variety of means to call down the mega bad guys.

During the beta they spawned some monsterous treant fucker and turned the whole zone basically into plane of growth almost instantly and the NPCs made a march on the capital. Was a great time. Never really saw it on live. For shame.

All taken away in the name of World PVP.

Where's it say that pal

Kreugen_sl said:

All taken away in the name of World PVP.

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That's completely wrong from what I know. They never let it happen that way again because they didn't want to disturb Timmy the Adventurer from turning in his kill 10 pig quest whenever he wanted. The completely screwed up their design by thinking that people cared more about turning in stupid quests than playing the better version of their game.

Unfortunately they weren't confident in their own design to think people might enjoy playing something different, so instead people thought that the only way to play the game was quest turnins and if they couldn't do that they go frustrated. They did a bad job of creating a game based on their dynamic rift system unfortunately. The moment you stepped into the game you were trained to follow the quest train. Meh.

Any MMO that comes out that does not have a quest system will be king. GW2 almost did it but their system wasn't dynamic at all.

If mobs scaled with current zone population whats the problem? The game was a bland piece of shit, it might have been different with some risks taken.

I'm not sure what Rift you played Draegan because quest npcs being cockblocked happened all the fucking time, especially in leveling zones where nobody was around to kill off all the shit spawned by invasions and what have you. Eventually they may have fixed this by decay timers or whatever but even in SI I ran into unkilllable shit that had taken over a town and there was no one in the zone to kill it. Buggy decay code? Whatever, if they killed off the magic beta content to prevent that then they royally fucked up.

The focus of the game became the faction PVP, and faction PVP is a pile of dogshit that sucks every single time yet the same fucking people keep insisting every game has to have it.

Kreugen_sl said:

I'm not sure what Rift you played Draegan because quest npcs being cockblocked happened all the fucking time, especially in leveling zones where nobody was around to kill off all the shit spawned by invasions and what have you. Eventually they may have fixed this by decay timers or whatever but even in SI I ran into unkilllable shit that had taken over a town and there was no one in the zone to kill it. Buggy decay code? Whatever, if they killed off the magic beta content to prevent that then they royally fucked up.

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I played at release and I leveled 1-50 two weeks before the expansion. Quest NPCs were almost never cockblocked. Or if they were, it was simple little thing you could clear in two seconds. Trust me.

I didn't really play through SI because gameplay was soul crushingly boring. I think I got three levels into the expansion.

When I say cockblocked, I meant that whole fucking zone was cocked up. They had it coded that multiple planar mobs attacked each other. They even had faction invasions going on in the newbie zone (and never anywhere else for some reason?) They could of easily had uber invasions and if it was raging for a while, could of set off uber faction invasions to clean things up as well.

I would assume their servers and network couldn't handle it, but the tech was there and I saw it in action on a few different scales.

And that's all neat and all but they were also incredibly boring to actually do more than once. Just like what they eventually did with invasions.

What you describe is basically developer masturbation, because for a player you are hardly more than a spectator. It sounds neat - once. After that, get the shit over with so I can get back to actually playing the game.

Any content is boring as fuck if you do it enough times. The thing is, they had the tech to make it more than just the same thing over and over. They had the tech to spawn 4 different massive invasions at the same time that fought each other. Toss in some dragons and some other crazy shit, and that is fun.

The other problem is that they made the rewards from the rifts/invasions dogshit. During beta your bags started to fill up with goodies, then at release they become more and more rare. Yawn.

They quickly gave up on faction pvp when all the Guardians left the pvp servers after free transfers became available. There is only one PvP server now and even if they open up new servers due to F2P, there wont be any new PvP servers.