The second month of Rift is wrapping up and I’ve been following the various blogs and the impressions of their writers. I’m pretty happy to say that most seem to be enjoying the game still. You will get an occasional person who will ask if Rift is already fizzling but, as Syp pointed out, that just isn’t the case yet. As much as the trolls that comment on Massively want us to believe the game is already in decline that just isn’t the case either. Rift is one of the strongest MMORPGs out right now.
Iniquity has been growing since Rift’s release to a level we haven’t seen in a while. We’re always looking for new talent and we’re finding it but we’ve also seen the return of some old faces. It is like a family reunion and our ability to get things done is at an all time high. I’m stoked about that and it shocks me that even two months later I’m bringing in players outside of regular recruitment. You can usually judge how a game is doing by the trends in guild recruitment. When a game is slacking members disappear to their old MMORPGs. We’re not seeing that. We’re gaining from both within the game and out.
I’ve also heard people claiming that servers are empty. That too is a pretty big fallacy. Byriel is busy at all levels of the game at all times of day. I took last Friday off of work and ended up in an extremely successful PUG that took minutes to create. I’ve been on late at night and found people. My low level rogue can’t run twelve feet without seeing someone. PvP is always available, people are questing, and the market is busy. I’ve heard similar anecdotes from others.
Am I suffering from rampant fanboyism? I’m sure someone would say yes but the truth of the matter is I’m really having a good time. I’m not supporting the game because I’m just a fan. I’m supporting it because for the first time in a while I’m having fun playing an MMORPG. Each day in Rift someone points out an area I haven’t been to or some new activity I can do. I’m still completely addicted to chasing Rifts and zone wide invasions. I’m loving the clearly defined and tightly controlled gear progression. All of these items are things I like to do and keep my guild interested. Each day brings new challenges and activities. We also get to look forward to two group raiding. If Trion continues to push content at the rate they are I’m not sure how we’ll get bored given our pace.
How is Rift doing? If you’re on Byriel and playing with Iniquity it sure feels like it is at least the second most successful MMORPG on the market.
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“…people claiming that servers are empty. That too is a pretty big fallacy. Byriel is busy…”
Byriel was one of the pre-announced headstart servers. I would be very curious to hear whether the complaints are clustering on the servers that were added afterwards, which never had substantial queues to speak of even before the inevitable first month drop. My gut says that the pre-formed communities all ended up on the original servers because it’s so hard to move a large group after the fact, and that the new servers were more populated with tourists.
Yeah, everyone who plays Rift has fun…
It used to be that there were these things called GAMES where the only criteria that was evaluated was how much fun you had playing it.
But alas now all we can do is dissect any potential fun found in a game and find greater meaning.
Do you have fun for 6+ months?
Will you have enough fun before game X comes out?
What about the fun progression factor?
Will you just have fun regrets in the morning after a casual late night download?
Is this kill 10 rifts the same fun I had in game Y?
Can we categorize the fun into it’s proper meaning?
What about an intelligent conversation about fun can we have that please?
If I don’t know what fun is will I know I’m having it in Rift?
What about the Fun Per Hour FPH vs Game Z?
Will I be able to min max my fun without having to Look for Fun LFF?
What if I just have the same fun over and over again?
Isn’t this the same fun except random fun invasions?
The rate of fun progression really concerns me?
What If I run out of fun content before the next fun patch?
Im all burned out from Fun so I am going to take a break When will Space Fun be out?
Green Armadillo may have a point about beta servers vs ones added later, however, I still do not see rampant “Low” marks on servers at prime time US. Maybe at other parts of the day but not consistently all the time.
I too play on Byriel, and i feel the same as Ferrel, this is a fun game, I am having fun. My guild actually has merged with another guild which the majority of their group went back to wow…but it was still 10-12 players that stayed.
Last night I took my guild (19 folks made it) to do elite rifts which are geared for a group of 5, we steam rolled them but had fun. Then we went to shimmer sand and fought Akala the 20 man raid boss for the daily quest in Shimmersand. That thing was hard, took us 4-5 tries and the fight lasted about 10 minutes on the try we got it…but my entire guild had a blast.
For me there’s only exciting things to come. It’s now may, and i still have not seen all of Rifts content. It has been a very long time since I could say I was having fun in a game…but I, and everyone in my guild is having fun.
The guys on Rift Watchers discussed a thread this week about how no US server ever displays “low” population – even in the dead of the night, all servers bottom out at medium pop. Back in headstart, even the horribly queued servers would go down to low in the early hours. No one outside Trion can know for sure whether the definitions were changed to make the servers look more populated. What we can say is that the current definition of ‘medium’ is set in a way that prevents it from being used to for meaningful comparison of server populations.
I don’t think that the conspiracy theorists are right when they suggest that Trion is trying to hide that no one is playing the game anymore. I do think it is reasonably probable that they added too many servers in response to the headstart queues, that some servers are now underpopulated as a result (specifically the “new” ones for the reasons I mentioned in my comment above). My guess is that they don’t want to exacerbate this problem by revealing which ones are “low” population, causing new players to avoid them.
(Blizzard does the same thing for WoW, I don’t think servers ever hit low unless they’ve just come back up after maintenance.)
Thats a good point. I don’t really play wow, but i do know in everquest 2, they told you it was low when it was low, and there were some servers that felt like ghost towns at prime time. I haven’t experienced that at least on the 4-5 servers I rotate through (one of which is one of the after launch servers)
I have toons on two servers: Wolfsbane and Threesprings. I can assure you both servers are very busy… albeit I don’t spend much time on Wolfsbane because the weekend queue to just logon is easily over an hour. Perhaps that is what folks are seeing?… people migrating to servers they can easily access on the weekend?
I have all my characters on Belmont, and it seems to be consistently medium, with a few spikes during typical prime-time hours and days of the week. It was consistently high before the free month was over, though, and I believe we were one of the head-start servers (though I did not participate in the bank).
At any rate, I always log off in the manufactory of Meridian (the Tradeskill area) and every time I log in, no matter when it is, there are people hanging around.
That said, the zone balance is another matter. “The herd,” as we like to call it in my guild, has definitely moved into the 40s+ content. The newbie zones, Freemarch, and to a lesser extent Stonfield and Scarlet Gorge (our 10-30 level areas) are frequently thin and without much rift activity going on, at least not compared to the glory days of what felt like 3 major invasions a day.