New MMO - Rift - due March 2011

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Re: New MMO - Rift - due March 2011

Post by Coo »

Beta 5 update from the Trion team. Lots of great-sounding stuff.
Beta 5 Preview – It’s been a busy couple weeks!

We’ve tried to take as much advantage of the relative calm between Beta 4 and Beta 5 as we possibly could. Here are some of the highlights to look forward to in Beta 5 tomorrow. We’d like to detail a number of them and also shed some light on a few things for Beta 6 and beyond.

New For Beta 5

We’re expecting Beta 5 to be at least twice as big as beta 4!

By the end of Beta 4, we were running a total of 18 servers. 8 in our Europe datacenter and 10 in the US. This time we’re opening up with 16 in each region, for a total of 32 servers, all with higher population caps, more than doubling the number of people who can be online at once.

If you get caught in too long of a queue during the middle of beta, know that we’ll be keeping an eye out to see if we need to open even more.




Target Frame


Public Grouping. This was a big one for us — just about the single most requested item — and we’re really happy to have it in game for you to try out already.

First, as you’re wandering around the world and target people, if they’re solo or ingroups/raids that are willing to accept new public members, you’ll see a new button in the target frame that lets you join their group or merge your group into theirs if it fits.

Second, when you walk into an area where there’s an event occurring (or an event like an invasion walks up to you), if there are other friendly players in the area who are open to grouping, you’ll see a button up on the top of the screen that lets you join the nearest Public Group.

Note that if your group merges and gets automatically upgraded into a Raid, you shouldn’t take a huge XP penalty as with most games. Since Raiding is a valid way to play through the levelling up experience in Rift, most notably in mass zone events, we want to ensure that XP gains there are meaningful and fun.




Join Button


Planar Foci and Currencies. An entire new character sheet awaits! Foci weren’t as clear as they could be and Planar Currencies were taking up too much inventory space. The stats display was a little crowded at times as well. We’ve got a new version of the character sheet in place the addresses many of the issues people had been commenting on. Expect continued polish and functionality here in the future, and we hope you enjoy the inventory space reclamation in the meanwhile.

In terms of currencies, to make the whole system make more sense in general, the older per-zone token currencies are now various tiers of Sourcestone, and the common event tokens are now a single currency called Planarite. Expect to see more uses for these over time, including expansions of wardstone reinforcement and other world offense/defense metagame elements.

Rogue Energy. Rogue energy regeneration got a rework this update, and it definitely does feel a lot better. Give it a crack and let us know if you like the new responsiveness and lack of energy starvation!

Tab Targeting / Target Nearest. Tab targeting got a significant usability upgrade, and Target Nearest Friendly / Target Nearest Enemy are now bindable functions with F6 and F7.

Key Bindings. “How do I bind hotkeys?!” If you’ve been in beta, you’ve seen this question. A lot.

Our method of keybinding hotbars where you just mouse over the hotbar then press the letter was confusing a lot of people. It was the most asked “how do I” question throughout the beta so far. Our original way is still there, but the old-school method of listing out each keybind in the keybinds window has been added as well.

Discoveries and Firsts. As items, creatures and achievements get discovered for the first time, the game now keeps track of how many you’ve been the first to find. The messages around this are going to be a bit too frequent through the opening of beta, but will calm down rapidly as elements in the world are Discovered. It’s a system that we’re still tuning, and your feedback is definitely appreciated.

Ranged Weapon Sounds. We’ve had comments in the past on the sounds of these not being meaty enough. We’ve been taking those to heart, and we agree. We’ve started to improve some of these sounds and will continue to do so throughout the life of the game. See if you can pick out the new ones, and let us know what you think!

PvP Auto Flag. This is now an option available under Settings -> Interface -> Combat. You can disable it if you wish to not be automatically flagged while in PvE areas/servers.

Invasion Improvements. Invasions as a whole got some significant love this update. Expect a lot more variance in their size, and much better adaptability to the sizes of defending forces. (Which means you’ll be a lot less likely to see a rift send out three waves of elite packs to deal with a relatively undefended area. They’re not supposed to be Global Steamrollers.)

On their Leashing and Social Aggro: Invasions were previously an all-or-nothing kind of experience. With larger numbers of players getting involved, they would leash and reset the whole invasion too frequently, and it was an item we got a lot of feedback on. We’ve addressed this in Beta 5. If you can peel one off while the others are distracted, more power to you!

New Visible Stats. Along with the new character sheet, you’re going to see two stats that were previously not being displayed: Toughness and Valor.

Toughness is a PvE Tanking stat. Its purpose is provide a defensive upgrade path in upper tiers of PvE content, and is one more way to ensure that tanks can progress in PvE without being broken-overpowered in PvP due to their PvE gear. (PvE gear is still very useful, just not overpowering.)

Just like high end casters need Focus and physical DPS need some amount of Hit, high end tanks need Toughness to deal with more difficult monsters. All that said, Toughness, Focus and Hit make up a small amount of the overall stat distribution that you’ll see on your PvE items.

Valor is a PvP damage reduction stat. It’s been in the game for quite some time and is now showing up on the new character sheet and in the tooltips for items that provide it.

Our game supports both PvP and PvE progression. A stat like Valor gives us an important tool to use in tuning the high end of those progressions.

NPCs and Players are not balanced identically, nor should they be. The pace of play is very different between the two styles. Fun PvE and fun PvP are generally two very different things. Nerfing PvE abilities for the sake of PvP, as other games have found themselves forced to do, is something that we’re trying to avoid wherever possible,

In providing a good PvP progression, we need to ensure that we can provide good rewards, without forcing people to play a part of the game they might not care to.

PvE gear remains competitive in PvP, and PvP gear remains competitive in PvE. It just won’t be a trump card in the opposite style of play. You shouldn’t expect to need to “grind” two full sets of gear just to have fun.

A stat like Valor is one more tool we can use to ensure that, for instance, the ideal PvP rewards do not become the de-facto best PvE Tanking rewards in the game. (Without Valor, significant PvP survivability also becomes PvE survivability…and, conversely, the best PvE DPS loot would become the de-facto best PvP DPS loot). We’d effectively be forcing people to gear up one way just to succeed at the other, since NPCs are balanced much differently than players.

Some people think these are a great idea, and others are less than thrilled due to negative experiences with related-sounding mechanics in other games that provide E-Sport style PvP, which we have intentionally not included and do not have plans to. Other games have their issues to design for, and we have ours. The two are definitely different.

Q: Am I going to have to “grind” two sets of gear the entire time?

A: No. Gear from each kind of play is competitive in the other side. It’s just not overpowering to the other side. It remains a great head start. We expect that the highest end PvP and PvE’ers will choose to care, but the majority won’t find that its existence impacts their gameplay in a negative way, since we are not balancing the game around any kind of E-Sport style Arenas, as other games have.

Q: Why can’t you balance everything around Health?

A: Players are infinitely smarter than creatures, and abilities are used in both PvE and PvP. Having PvP damage reduction be purely about health would create a situation where almost necessitate PvE tanks to have to gear up via PvP. We are primarily trying to ensure that people who choose to only take part in one style of play aren’t “forced” to take part in the other.

We like to think that we’ve so far been pretty good at reacting once things have proven to work or not work in Rift. As with any other mechanic in the game, we’ll be keeping an eye on it. If it’s making the game not fun, it will be addressed.


Here’s what’s on deck for future Betas:

Activated Racial Abilities. We know that some of them are overpowered and bring the whole concept out of whack. Our original idea was: “let’s make sure these things are really fun.” In our doing this, they’ve almost turned into a powergamer IQ test. It’s not good for anyone if we effectively lock a race to a given play style. (e.g. all Tanks must be one race and all DPS must be another, or you’re Doing It Wrong). Expect updates to the racials following this beta.

Master Loot. Yes, it’s coming! Groups and raids will be able to have a Master Looter who’s in charge of assigning out loot.

Collections merge into the new Character Sheet. “Where are my mounts? Where are my titles?” Now that we’ve designed a character sheet that can fit them in a way that looks good and is more usable, collections will make their way into it as well.

War Powers. We have a lot of consumable items in the game that are focused on the idea of the war between the planes and the rifts and the land-control meta game. Expect a special place for them in the Abilities tab and a resource to power them soon. Time to get them out of your inventory, provide a better sense of discovering them, and get them into a place where they make a whole lot more sense. Expect more details here in the future.

We’re looking forward to this largest Beta we’ve ever run. While there will definitely be some bumps, we’ll be right there with you the entire time to make sure everything goes as well as it possibly can.

- The RIFT Development Team
Source:
http://rift.incgamers.com/tracker/Posts ... lic-forums
Coo
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Re: New MMO - Rift - due March 2011

Post by Coo »

PVE - Shatterbone - Defiant
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Re: New MMO - Rift - due March 2011

Post by Sprungjeezy »

PVE? Come on, don't be like that.
Servers going down for half an hour now and I have class in half an hour, gosh.
I rolled a Cleric on Defiant on Dayblind (PvP).
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Re: New MMO - Rift - due March 2011

Post by Zalaz »

Currently I can't get into the game. I keep getting a failed attempt error when connecting. I'll try tonight.
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Re: New MMO - Rift - due March 2011

Post by derretimos »

made a rogue and warrior on tearfall (because the other servers were full) whatev.

game seems decent, basically WoW with a better engine. i chose defiant, even though they all look gayballs. reaver/champion warrior = op
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Re: New MMO - Rift - due March 2011

Post by war-barney »

Its not to bad... the pvp is a bit imbalanced atm, no point in pvp till your rank 15-16, hoping they fix this. was in a fight today were i hit a mage for 20 and he hit me for 171. Still its worth giving a test to those who havnt yet and im going to keep trying to level to see if pvp is fun later on. At the moment though im very on the fence, the pvps a bit to.. unfeeling, you just spam buttons at these odd moving shapes no real feeling your fighting or killing a person
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Re: New MMO - Rift - due March 2011

Post by derretimos »

pvp is just like wow. my reaver/champion/void knight warrior owns face. i was dueling people 4 levels higher than me and winning.
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Re: New MMO - Rift - due March 2011

Post by war-barney »

it is a bit silly.. dps healers are owning evrybody and rpds are masters of all while melees suffer horribly
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Re: New MMO - Rift - due March 2011

Post by derretimos »

war-barney wrote:it is a bit silly.. dps healers are owning evrybody and rpds are masters of all while melees suffer horribly

you just don't know how to play :p
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Re: New MMO - Rift - due March 2011

Post by Zalaz »

Finally got in last night, Just hit 12 an hour ago. I went Bard/Rift/Ranger with a few friends on Reclaimer.

While I have no interest in committing to a fantasy game such as this, I am still enjoying the beta. It's a fair amount of new concepts thrown into the typical fantasy MMO formula we've all seen before. The rift events are enjoyable, with just enough chaos going on all around you to keep you on your toes. The automatic public group formations are a neat idea, which consist of any players in the event's radius banding together until the rift is gone. However, I could see a flaw in this if the population diminishes at launch. As far as I've seen, you NEED allies by your side when you're fighting off the enemies from a rift, particularly the patrol parties, or they will straight merk you. I encountered a rift that spawned right next to a small settlement area with only merchants around. Even with their help, I was still heavily overpowered. It was until a few others showed up that we were finally able to make some progress on closing the rift. While they can easily add guards to fix the settlement areas from falling, I can see the outer areas being a pain in the ass to defend against if you're the only one around.

The graphics look great and the engine is very polished in terms of stability. I don't have the greatest machine (i5 dual core, 4gb ddr3, GF 360m gts), but I was able to maintain 40~60 frames in all areas with everything maxed except shadows (I turn shadows off in all my games, I never miss em) and multisampling set to smooth (it's between off and 2x). When an engine delivers performance like that on average specs like mine, I take notice. There's even a low render option for older machines. I would give anything for a sci-fi/cyberpunk MMO to implement a stable, good looking engine like this one.

I'm still low level, but I figured I'd toss in a few thoughts on what I've seen and done so far. It's a polished AAA mmo as stated by others before, but for $49.99 they're basically diminishing the one thing that this game will want to thrive on when it comes to taking out a Rift: Population. Also, innovative ideas are what merit a price like that. While this does throw in some new concepts, it's still just another fantasy cliche with nothing too mind blowing.
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Re: New MMO - Rift - due March 2011

Post by war-barney »

Rifts and invasions are suppose to scale based on how many people are in the area, im not sure if its working right now but when the population reduces in a certain area those there should be able to close rifts by themselves. As for pvp you can't really complain atm as its the very first pvp beta so its not likely to be perfect, hell neocron kept rebalancing classes after years being out and rift has tons and tons of possible combinations to try and balance (and duels dont count!!). Pvp definitely needs lots of tuning before release though if im ever going to give it a try rather than just wait for something else, collision for example is a must, and something needs to be done about the fighting... iv never felt so detatched from the fighting as i do in rift.
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Re: New MMO - Rift - due March 2011

Post by Zalaz »

war-barney wrote:Rifts and invasions are suppose to scale based on how many people are in the area, im not sure if its working right now but when the population reduces in a certain area those there should be able to close rifts by themselves.
That's what I thought before as well. A preview mentioned the patrols ganking everything in sight. Being that is what killed me multiple times, perhaps the rift itself is scalable with the patrols outside of the radius just being a set difficulty.
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Re: New MMO - Rift - due March 2011

Post by Coo »

I played beta 5 and will play the next 2, but I doubt I'll purchase. I got a cleric (warden) to 15, a rogue (bard) to 12, a warrior to 8 and a mage to 6.
  • Combat felt disconnected. Same thing war-barney mentioned. Hard to explain. Maybe it's the 1 second global cooldown on nearly everything. Maybe it's the half-second ability queue. But it didn't feel right or engaging. If you were not spamming this button or 11 others just like it, you were not going to kill the mob effectively.
  • The global cooldown is annoying. As a rogue or warrior it's very hard to drain energy so you end up spamming buttons until the mob is dead. Between button presses your used energy is basically back to full. I imagine it gets a little slower later in levels.
  • Public quests are great. Otherwise it'd be like playing a single-player game. I rarely heard anyone talk in group or raids (I was in many). But there was plenty of zone chat.
  • There's a billion skills and many overlap. Daunting at first. But I guess it can add some strategy later on.
  • I tried 1 warzone and felt it was a crazy mess. But I expected it in a newb level range and within a beta. As a warrior I somehow did very well. Not exactly sure how.
  • Rifts and PQs were fun and I began to see how they might turn into something more than a gang rape. As a bard I felt in my prime with AoE heals and buffs (but 2 required casting every 30 seconds; ugh).
  • I played as often as I could and kept wanting to play more. So I guess that's a good thing. But I couldn't _really_ get into it. I was more like going through the motions to level up and see if things changed.
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Re: New MMO - Rift - due March 2011

Post by war-barney »

The pvp does get better at 20, i hit 22 on a paladin/warlord/beastmaster and it starts to even out, even managed to kill a few ranged folk and my energy does run out at that rank (not sure if thats just ranged are fucked or its just fucked at lower ranks). The 1s GCD does annoy the hell out of me though, warhammer had half a sec and thats the max it should be! its utterly dumb having 1s, however as for the next skill queue time you can alter that to either the original setting or make it so you press 1 button and it waits till gcd is over then uses that skill (though if you get rushed and press another before that skills uses it changes it which happens often to me as gcd is so fkin long)

Basically aye its got flaws, but i do see some potential.

For 1 thing those rifts and base invasions will end up being pvp hot spots later on i imagine on pvp servers, from what i can gather the bases can all be attacked and have their npcs then crystal killed to change who control it, and im guessing this depends who controls zone (not to sure on this aint tried open world pvp yet) If this is so there will be lots of attacks then defences from players or perhaps players attacking when the enemy realm is defending a base from mobs. and ofc they have 2 or 3 betas left, this was the very first pvp beta and trion seem to listen very well to the community so there could be some great changes if other people have noticed those same problems.

All in all im waiting till the last beta till i decide if im buying it, right now it has great pve but thats only ever meant to be a slight entertainment while i wait for some pvp or as a side attraction now and then
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