Why rift failed

Code of Conduct. Community Blog Advanced Search. Page 1 of 2 1 2 Last Jump to page: Results 1 to 15 of Why RIFT fails. Here's what was bad enough to make us leave. Too many servers- they must have started out thinking they were going to be huge, and should have slowly added more servers, not put so many in the beginning.

Now when they condense it shows failure, instead of expansion. Not enough players per server to get raid groups, lvl 50's waiting for hours to group, warfronts queue sucks. This was on Regulos, Lotham and Deepstrike servers. Warfronts lame: totally lame having lvl 10 - 19, , etc. Should have actually put some thought into the system and made it lvls , , and so on.

Not too mention the total randomness of it all. Needs to have more in depth system. Pvp system is as lame as Wow and Warhammer, but RIFT is a carbon copy of those and just after money, so nothing much will ever change about that.

With a half of brain you could realize, pve servers should be like the system they have now and make true pvp servers with pack looting, random player loot drops or something. And obviously address drop to gank ratio. So many quests for death rifts, not enough death rifts.. Aggro distance is totally crappy. Boringness of grinding out lvls. No way anyone wants to roll alts, because the total boredom of raising a new character.

Instance blue drops should not be random. Most players today are not new to MMO's and there isn't any excitement of running through instances for hours. Take a look at Iron Tomb, players are trying to rush through it as fast as they can just to get the quests finished and move on.

RIFT thought by making things lengthy, they would drag more money out of players taking months to get items, but the wow days are over. Most players want to have consistency and be able to plan out what items they want to go for that day, group and go get them. Not wait around for hours to get a group, then fight for an hour in an instance only to get all drops for one class and it isn't even the class you were playing. Especially agree with the comment on the over usage of token systems in MMOs.

Some thoughts other than the standard content issues: - Bland and uninspired visual style and effects. Also no AA. There should not have been 4 base classes and players should have been allowed to unlock all the souls in the game through various methods. Epic questlines to unlock souls would have been fantastic. Of course there will be some redundant skills with the soul system, however there should have been an active skill limit in place or some other mechanic to limit redundancy.

You'd have 10 line macros full of skills that you just spammed. Again, if all souls were available to all players, they could have had souls much more focused and not had to include the full gamut abilities in each soul. The PVP matches felt tacked on and were extremely frustrating and the classes were not well balanced for battleground style PVP.

Why even have it? The spontaneous would pvp was pretty fun on its own. Edit: Here's a macro that was common at launch. Thengel Golden Knight of the Realm. It didn't.

I wouldn't say Rift failed exactly, but it certainly wasn't as big success. To me the game failed to have a "killer" feature, it was just an extremely well done average at everything game.

I prefer a game that has a few memorable features, and a few bad ones than something that is just forgettable in almost every ways. The rift, invasions and zone events were the only memorable thing about the game It could have been a great game, but ended up being just good enough. For me personally, it was because it was absolutely indistinguishable from wow at launch.

I throw the term 'wow clone' around a lot, but holy shit this felt more like wow than any game I've ever played, right down to the aesthetics and game engine.

There were rifts, yeah, but I was pretty much over that from WHO already. The class system was supposed to be its big thing, but at launch every class had like viable builds, with a lot being broken to the point of feeling mandatory.

It kind of came down to it feeling like "why the fuck am I not just playing wow? There's more content, I have more invested in it, and this game feels completely the same but will probably die soon. Skill bloat - already covered. Terrible questing system - walking into town and seeing five exclamation marks above NPC's heads is very tedious. Uninspired WoW clone design for no reason - dual factions, exact same bag system, tons of skills that are the exact same though to be fair they had at least some creative ones.

Movement and response time of button presses was inferior to WoW. I think the last two can be applied to pretty much every failed MMO and several upcoming ones too.

Out of that whole post you saying "exact same bag system" made me laugh. Damn trion for copying their bag system! They neuter even the current one. On my mage, I found a neat build that would let me get two passive skills to reduce my pet's GCD by. Was fun as hell, and still not top DPS but nope, that and everything else was nerfed.

If you didn't dump all 61 points into one soul, you were gimped. Raiding - I tried once again with the FoH board guild, and dreaded logging on for raiding. Whether it was lag or them failing, we'd fail and get one shotted.

So dull! It was so fun rooting things normally magic immune, and knocking bosses back! Everyone played range, even warriors. It was just a low scoring heal fest and dull as hell. Rift fell off the face of the Earth and was largely ignored. So how did this happen? The name of the game is Rift and so rifting was intended to be a major part of the game.

It seemed no matter how much they tried to encourage people to go rifting it was not something people wanted to do. There was something fundamentally wrong with rifts, and I know what it is. Unfortunately for rifts, rift grinding is just formalized group mob killing. It is no different from killing pigs over and over. The only difference was you were supposed to get predictable gear upgrades and bonus to XP. As people found out…. At late game with the planar atunement system rifting transformed into another grind, grinding experience, grinding planarite, grinding inscribed.

The epic of this was thrown out the window in favor of making it into a grind. This is largely because of massive grind requirements to gain very small things. Events attracted at least people per server not because they wanted to do it, but because they had to do it. On launch everyone was doing rifts to grind out their reputation, that is the hardcores. But as the game started moving along, no one did rifts. Eventually people started moving away from the game and the only people doing rifts are those that were grinding them for XP or inscribed.

Trion did release Zone Events. These are world bosses that would require man groups to kill and came after doing a number of objectives. But all of these got boring and repetitive.

None of these world bosses required any organization, you just joined a bulk group and spammed your DPS or heal button. I would go as a bard and sneakily leach off of peoples efforts by only buff spamming so not to risk aggroing mobs.

The main focus of the game inevitably failed and represented a side activity for when you were not raiding. They added in holiday and lore related events that all revolved around just grinding out rifts. Not only did these make rifts suck, they also made holidays suck. While holidays in most games are well orchestrated quest lines with fun stuff.

This was a cheap content creation model that made bland boring content. Most people who joined this game came from World of Warcraft. Because of this they wanted something a little bit different from the WoW grind, Rift could not offer it. Within the first year they released six raid dungeons three man and three man , four world events, 6 major patches, and created a brand new zone. There is also a new one coming out after the holidays.

Only a couple of weeks later they announced a partnership with Syfy to develop a science fiction multi-platform joined game play MMO. They moved the developers from Rift to these new projects and put a new team in charge of making content for Rift. This means that Rift is just a cash ship that they have to milk as much as possible.

Something you want to milk out means you give it as little maintenance while still performing maximum results. They were trained in a content creation model that would allow them to easily design dungeons, rift events, warfronts, minor edits and game balance. It is all in fact very lazy programming. The same dungeon designs over and over and over ad infinitum. But the player base was happy doing these feeling like it was unique content. It felt like with this model Rift could actually survive and make expansions.

Atunement is post-level cap leveling. You gain experience and invest into stats. Some stats included 1 dexterity, 0. It seemed like a perfect idea. Until it dawned upon people, Rift will never be able to have an expansion. The second you make post level cap leveling is the second that you make an expansion impossible.

Eventually there will come a point that the game will become grossly unfriendly to new players. If this game has an expansion it will destroy the existing community. There is no surer sign that they are just trying to milk out their subscriptions while they still can. Free to play is not a terrible payment model. But when a game goes free to play it is a surefire sign that it is sinking in value. The game was insanely hyped up because it was introducing a lot of world content. In truth world content was in a high demand from a niche crowd.

These same people have always demanded world bosses. The problem with world bosses has always been the problem of the mass. Either you have so many people in your group that the fun factor moves away to a mass people factor or because there are so many people available to screw you up on killing them these bosses become almost unkillable. Kazak was a re-make of a vanilla boss and was actually very unpopular. The boss had the exact same problem as previous ones, too hard in a PvP world.

Rift developers created a stupid number of out door bosses. But at the lowest of levels people who bought the collectors edition had a massive advantage, speed. When people hit level cap Level 50 they were stuck with very little to do. The game launched without a dungeon finding tool. This is a problem if you are trying to find a group since you have to basically stay online for hours looking at Level 50 chat for a group.

This social system is supposed to create bonds, what it does instead is create guild elitism. Guild elitism exists when raid guilds maintain control of a rare resource. A rare resource in the game might be… tanks. Tanks really only want to raid and will only pug until they are geared. There is no reason to continue afterwards. This meant that the second wave of 50s were… screwed.

A dungeon finder was introduced again for a third wave of levelers after their first discount sale. This dungeon finder was actually worse than the social method. The dungeon finder was awful. T1 dungeons did not have a very good queue either.

The T2 queues were really the only ones that ever had any one in their queue. It was awkward because you had stat requirements you had to meet to queue up. So you spent a stupid amount of game grinding. When one grind ended another grind would begin, then another and another and another.

It was a game that just grinded out stuff. Some people like grinding. This game attracted a lot of grinders. There are people who capped out their achievement points and were waiting on the next patch just to cap them out again.

There were tones of cool puzzles that required intelligence to do them. But they were organized in such a way that they were not all that fun. Bejeweled is a fun puzzle game. Plants vs. Zombies is a fun puzzle game. Tetris is a fun puzzle game. But what Rift offered us in puzzles is not fun. They were just things you did to grind out.

So the game was obviously not going to interest people who solve puzzles to keep playing. There was also lore. There are people like myself who love lore. They thrive on reading the books that become collections. They love reading quest text and figuring out the story arch. They enjoy watching events or videos telling stories. But the developers at Rift were not really all that into story telling, nor are most MMO developers. These elements create a fantastic story arch that is exciting and nail bitingly interesting.

But… this game does not have it. You really do not have any connection to any of the characters and you do not see any reason to hate your enemies. This was something WoW was also weak at. The main problem is that both of these games are trying to build the story through the people you are trying to kill. Villains are designed in a story to create a challenge for a hero.

A hero-villain has become popular because they are the ultimate tragic figure. But by telling a story through the villain all you end up doing is demonizing your own side and thus making the gaming experience unfun and disinteresting. The game just stunk of a blandness that had something missing.