Rift Livestream Summary – June 1, 2018

The June 1st livestream is here, and with it we have Archonix, Amary, and Yaviey to discuss the Summer development letter and plans for Rift and Rift Prime.  The dev letter can be found here: https://www.trionworlds.com/rift/en/2018/05/31/summer-2018-rift-updates-dev-letter/ and forum questions used in this livestream can be found here: http://forums.riftgame.com/general-discussions/news-announcements/505147-summer-2018-rift-updates-official-dev-letter.html

As always, you can join in the discussion of Rift and Rift Prime on both The Ghar Station Discord and on the Rift focused Heroes of Telara Discord.  Please follow us on twitter @TheGharStation.

 

First, let’s recap some bulletpoints from the Summer Dev Team letter. (Thanks to Doranbolt over on The Ghar Station Discord for assembling this!)

Some history:

• Devs are pleasantly surprised to see Seeker event finished so quickly
• GSB was released on prime
• Costs of new role slots have been reduced
• First balance pass for warriors arrived and buff stacking groups were “fixed”

Souls and Balance:

• “These balance changes are definitely not considered the end of ongoing soul work”
• Legendary abilities, more warrior improvements and cleric healing and dps are high on the list
• Patches will be available for testing on PTS before being integrated with live and prime

Events:

• Summerfest coming up with related cosmetic sales.
• More frequent bonus events like the xp bonus event we had recently
• Rivers of souls prelude event apparently being worked on
• Not clear if this will also be available on live servers
• Subtle hints at bringing back the old promo events

Live:

• More rewards: daily calendar changes, mount drops from dungeons/raids and cash shop revamp.
• The game continues to move away from mounts in lootboxes
• Warfront queue level banding is going to be looked at with the goal of speeding up queues
• Revisiting eternal weapon impact on builds
• Reducing planar fragment RNG and cost also mentioned again

PTS:

• Expected to be able to run Alpha and Omega at the same time soon
  
• Alpha will have live ruleset while Omega has the prime ruleset
  
• PTS will be taken down for a few days for this to happen

 

On to the summary! (Thank you to Holyroller for helping fill in some of this info!)

• Captain Cursor jumped in right at the start to scare everyone because he can. And did.  My ears are still ringing as I write this.
• Yaviey is returning as Rift’s Community Manager, with Brasse returning to her duties in a Director role.
• Balance work is not done.  Warriors are still the focus.  The team knows that balance changes are long overdue and is needed.  
  • They are evaluating things like legendaries, eternal weapons, cleric healing and dps, and warrior dps.  They want to get this fixed up before they add a new tier of content, because adding bigger numbers on top of broken balance causes problems.
• Shiny Shenanigans might be coming back.  No ETA.
• The team is happy to see how constructive the Legendary Abilities forum thread turned out to be.
• The team is updating PTS to allow both Live and Prime testing to run simultaneously after the lack of Live testing on the Prime balance changes that occurred on PTS’s Omega server.
• Some legendaries and ability locations will be shifting in the trees.  Expect changes in the near term.
• Fragment upgrade prices are being looked out, targeting for June, but could slip to July.
• Live store is being looked over top to bottom.  There is a lot of stuff there that does not set a positive perception, and are not high sale items in the store.  It makes no sense to keep those items there, so they are looking to remove them.
• Re-reviewing the Challenge 2 winners.  Thanks to Keepro & Clowd.
• Summerfest start date is scheduled for July-ish.  Hopefully this will not slip into August.
• Scott Hartsman (CEO of Trion Worlds) joined in on the stream to participate and presumably show his support for Rift and the Rift team.

Q: ETA on the two Horn wardrobe models that were shared on the forums.  
A: Soon-ish.

Q: What will be the new upgrade item for crafting items & eternal weapons?
A: Unknown right now, a new item level for the next content tier has not been selected.

Q: Will there be changes to mechanics of bosses in GSB?
A: Maybe? Going to look at least at pulling bosses to the entrances.

Q: Will there be additional ways to obtain Legion Datagram without running BoS?
A: Punted to Tacitus. In chat: “More added to activities outside of BoS”

Q: Will you be giving us some weeklies like you did in SL and NMT (Dendrome and PTW open world weeklies) with likewise currencies for Live PoA?
A: No plans to add these to Live with PoA at this time.

Q: Still planning on Moonshade/Droughland IAs?
A: No.

Q: Unisex tutu for wardobe? Need this for male dwarfs!
A: Uhh… good question

Q: When will the new datamined dragon mounts come out?
A: While we do love datamining, just because you find it there doesn’t mean we’re ready to talk about it.  There ARE plans for them.

Q: Fatestone for the Tyrant’s Throne zone event Leviathan?
A: Not out of the question.

Q: Will you do “gigantic” raids again?
A: 10 might be a lot.  The team does not think they will see a raid with more than 5 bosses at one time.  That does not count out a winged raid that might release more than one wing at a time.

Q: Will there be new lockboxes?
A: Debating this.  Probably under a new format once again.  Making something “not shitty” (team’s words).  There are people who do enjoy lock boxes, but the team is always evaluating them.  The team is looking for ways to make lockboxes more “stellar” and interesting.

Q: Conquest on prime?
A: This has been discussed. Ideas are being thrown around, like opening up twice a week, making it an event thing where everyone is bolstered to a certain level.

Q: Any cool rewards for conquest?
A: Uhh… we need to decide on Conquest first!

Q: Any more details on RoS opening?
A: We are reworking the RoS opening event.  It will not be like the launch version, we don’t want to do that fiasco again.  We want to bring this River of Souls related opening event to Live as well.

From chat:

Q: Does the team have any plans to address the platinum issues that a lot of people seem to have? I know that fragments are being worked on, but short of playing the AH or farming crafting rifts all day and selling matrixes, there aren’t too many efficient ways to farm the large amounts of plat you still need in the meantime to level up fragments. We haven’t heard anything since the nerf to dust
A: Tacitus: We are interested in places where the NEED for plat is out of whack more than we are interested in arbitrarily increasing the supply of plat.