I have been away from Rift for several days now because I am low on cash, but I can't wait to get back in and see how many new players this brings. Trion is one of the best MMO devs out there and Rift is one of the best MMOs. This is a no-brainer for what you are getting for nothing. As for the P2W-aphobes, I am not sure why they always scream and howl and throw themselves at their keyboards if there is anything remotely useful in a cash shop. It isn't really P2W if you aren't winning anything. Basic gear doesn't win the game. Hell, it barely gets you into the parking lot.
Currently playing: Rift Played: SWToR, Aion,EQ, Dark Age of Camelot World of Warcraft, AoC
Originally posted by marz.at.play Nice quick write up. I am looking forward to this as this was HUGE news imo especially considering the cash shop is NOT a P2W cash shop. RIFT is doing this right similar to Aion's cash model. This will inject a nice population into RIFT. I only quit because I don't have enough time to play anymore to justify a monthly sub. This is perfect. Go Trion!
Originally posted by Astraeis I used to like Trion, but I have learned to distrust and dislike their marketing videos. But maybe we have come to expect worse, making the author claim Trion to be a shiny example of honest clarity.
I just finished reading this article today and the spirit of it fits nicely here:
"I wonder why companies spend billions annually in attempts to create loyalty, when the only way to achieve it is by running businesses honestly, fairly, and transparently. Amazon communicated all three qualities to me for $.16.
The point imo is that i have access to the full content of the game. no ridiculous restrictions like swtor. i can do every quest, enter as many times i want to every dungeon, to every raid, sliver, battleground or whatever else.
i can accept the gear they will sell from cash shop. its a p2w but its the minimum you can have from a f2p game. its not top tier gear, it isnt even better than top gear from dungeons, planar or pvp gear.
so imho its still a great f2p model. as long as they let me and my friends have access to every inch of the content and keep the gear from cash shop to this range, i m perfectly happy.
Most rifts will attract multiple players to close it, so grouping up to make things simpler becomes a priority. Trion anticipated this and put in the easiest grouping mechanism I've ever seen. Any time you get near some sort of rift event, if there's another player nearby, the option to join a public group pops up. If there are two separate public groups near each other, the same button can merge them. It's super simple and completely hassle-free.
Originally posted by velmax I buy pre-raid gear from other players, this is the same thing just in the cash shop!
It's true, I think being able to buy expert dungeon gear is alright. You can get that gear in so many ways within the game, paying for it is just a short cut to what end game players consider to be the "real" game (endgame raiding).
I'm interested and excited to see what happens with this F2P switch. RIft is a great game which I've given up lately because of the subscription.
From the beginning of the article, I realized we weren't going to see eye-to-eye on this. Perhaps you should go into more depth on the "more excitement" part. I do agree that you are likely not part of Trion's target audience. But I guess that's not unusual... With this change, I have come to believe that Trion doesn't really understand their target audience either.
What? I am very...VERY amazed of people saying this is not pay 2 win. That this is OK to buy gear with cash. That they were doing it indirectly , and now it's better. Bah really? One year ago, even a loli pop was catalogated P2W, and now not even GEAR is .. catalogated as P2W ? But what it's P2W then?
WTF?
And the fuck it's wrong with that one ( or more ) guy(s) who said that this is the best along with Aion. Aion? Aion....wow, I loved that game, until they made it F2P and of course P2W like VERY P2W. Same goes for Lineage 2.
But I am pretty sure that the ones who say that Aion, L2, Rift, etc cash shop is not P2W are :
1) The ones who usually buy items with cash
2) The VERY casual players, who plays several hours a week, and they don't see the impact the items have on the game play.
3) The no cash players, who they played all their life F2P titles ( implicit P2W ), and they think that this is normal.
I will NEVER touch* a game like this. NEVER.
*touch = I sometimes.."play" beta's of the games like this, for curiosity only, but they will never be a game to invest time ( not to say money ) .
Reporter: What's behind Blizzard success, and how do you make your gamers happy? Blizzard Boss: Making gamers happy is not my concern, making money.. yes!
What? I am very...VERY amazed of people saying this is not pay 2 win. That this is OK to buy gear with cash. That they were doing it indirectly , and now it's better. Bah really? One year ago, even a loli pop was catalogated P2W, and now not even GEAR is .. catalogated as P2W ? But what it's P2W then?
WTF?
And the fuck it's wrong with that one ( or more ) guy(s) who said that this is the best along with Aion. Aion? Aion....wow, I loved that game, until they made it F2P and of course P2W like VERY P2W. Same goes for Lineage 2.
But I am pretty sure that the ones who say that Aion, L2, Rift, etc cash shop is not P2W are :
1) The ones who usually buy items with cash
2) The VERY casual players, who plays several hours a week, and they don't see the impact the items have on the game play.
3) The no cash players, who they played all their life F2P titles ( implicit P2W ), and they think that this is normal.
I will NEVER touch* a game like this. NEVER.
*touch = I sometimes.."play" beta's of the games like this, for curiosity only, but they will never be a game to invest time ( not to say money ) .
Maybe you should check which gear will be buyable in the shop. The entry level gear. if you want to be a top player, you will have to play the game and get the loot from raids or the currency to buy top PvP gear...
victor, your statements regarding the worth of the "patronage" and people probably being pleased with it, are clueless.
Rifts patronage system is not worth the money, since it lacks a monthly game-currency stipend and something special like the monthly subscriber item that tsw has.
I will definitely try this out again once it becomes f2p.
Rift is a good game and i had a decent amount of fun with it, it will be interesting for me to see all the changes and the progress the game has made since the last time i played, which was long before the release of the Storm Legion expansion.
Originally posted by Victor Barreiro Jr. Trion Worlds has to be one of the most outstanding companies in the MMO world today in terms of treating customers right
I wholehearted disagree with this statement. In my experience with Trion through three betas and two releases, they are by far the WORST MMO developer when it comes to treating customers right. Three examples off the top of my head:
1. Having an issue with Rift that caused my account to be unplayable; It took Trion nineteen days to reply with a form letter.
2. Using misleading language when describing their games (Calling Defiance's exploration 'endless' and claiming it had 'open-world' PvP)
3. During the recent release of Defiance, they had a major server issue that caused a 3+ hour rollback. While that's not unheard of, their shameful attitude of pretending it never happened was. They deleted countless posts and threads off their forums without warning, without giving reasons and without even acknowledging that players were screwed over (including players who had used real money to purchase things, only to not have their purchases anymore).
The only 'right' thing they ever did was quickly fixing a 'wrong' when they overcharged me once for my Rift sub.
While I hate to see any gaming entity suffer the hardships Trion is going through, treating customers poorly is always a good indicator that things are not going well... (THQ for instance). I don't want Trion to fail, but if they want any more of this player's money, they need to fix their laissez-faire attitude about customer relations.
At this low point in MMO gaming, I refuse to play even the shiniest turd.
if trion stay true to their word, upon release this f2p model will be best f2p model in the market and also the standard for all f2p games to follow. this model is the future of mmo market.
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
I'm thinking about DCUO, when I see the "gear bought in shop" part. Rift's content isn't 100% "gear gated", but to get up to speed for later game raids and dungeons, you need to grind through older content. I WISH DCUO would let me buy earlier tier gear in their shop. I'd still be playing it if I could.
So while it's a little concerning, I also think I'd make use of the feature if I jumped back into F2P Rift and wanted to play the new content, not the old.
Try to be excellent to everyone you meet. You never know what someone else has seen or endured.
this is one of the best free to play models ive seen out here currently , people here complaining about crappy expert gear being sold are way to jaded seriously. If you hate it so much dont play it , its that simple. Make a statement with something other than your mouths about it. Expert Gear is going to make you still have to run the 2.0 raids if you want to move up into the current stuff when this patch releases and f2p starts its common sense. Also Rift switching its target audience is a good thing, their current audience obviously were not loyal or paid their bills forcing them to switch to free to play to begin with. Its time for a change to this game , it had all the small features to be a great title and now they might actually be able to afford to spend time polishing things other than raiding with a constant stream of new players who will continue to come in for at least the next year or more. People here complain about gear being sold and would rather bash them for that instead of all the features they leave open to free players unlike games like star wars and lotr online or eq2 for that matter....
The 10% mount thing is def a PTW item and necessary for almost every account. Rift was a decent game but I couldn't get into it like other MMOs. WPVP was quite dull even at release when we has packed servers and battlegrounds are always a snooze. I even came back for for storm legion but it was a wasted buy as the same fun level was present. I wish we could have a fully fleshed MMO with Darkfall's FPS style but yet plenty of decent PVE content. I'd play DFUW if it Tasos wasn't still at the helm.
Present: Current offerings are low quality or soloable
Past:AoC, DCUO, FFXI,FFXIV 1.0 and ARR,WoW,Fallen Earth, Tabula Rasa, TSW, SWTOR, Rift, Aion, WAR, Darkfall, STO, CoH/CoV, GW2, Diaspora, EQ2, DDO, and a bunch of forgettable ftp games
I'm thinking about DCUO, when I see the "gear bought in shop" part. Rift's content isn't 100% "gear gated", but to get up to speed for later game raids and dungeons, you need to grind through older content. I WISH DCUO would let me buy earlier tier gear in their shop. I'd still be playing it if I could.
So while it's a little concerning, I also think I'd make use of the feature if I jumped back into F2P Rift and wanted to play the new content, not the old.
If by "old content" you mean that you need to run any of the level 50 (former level cap) dungeons or raids, that would be absolutely incorrect. You can skip all that entirely and you will level much more quickly if you do. If you're just talking about the level 1-50 grind, well... yeah. Same as every other game pretty much.
I'm thinking about DCUO, when I see the "gear bought in shop" part. Rift's content isn't 100% "gear gated", but to get up to speed for later game raids and dungeons, you need to grind through older content. I WISH DCUO would let me buy earlier tier gear in their shop. I'd still be playing it if I could.
So while it's a little concerning, I also think I'd make use of the feature if I jumped back into F2P Rift and wanted to play the new content, not the old.
I'm thinking about DCUO, when I see the "gear bought in shop" part. Rift's content isn't 100% "gear gated", but to get up to speed for later game raids and dungeons, you need to grind through older content. I WISH DCUO would let me buy earlier tier gear in their shop. I'd still be playing it if I could.
So while it's a little concerning, I also think I'd make use of the feature if I jumped back into F2P Rift and wanted to play the new content, not the old.
You are forgetting the biggest difference between DCUO and Rift model. In DCUO you can have only 1500 credits max. I think gear should be of last concern. Putting restrictions on credits is just awful.
Rift has one of the best F2P model right besides Tera and Aion.
"The problem is that the hardcore folks always want the same thing: 'We want exactly what you gave us before, but it has to be completely different.' -Jesse Schell
"Online gamers are the most ludicrously entitled beings since Caligula made his horse a senator, and at least the horse never said anything stupid." -Luke McKinney
Is always sad news when some decent game is forced to f2p. Just hope sub gives so much to be worth to play. I will never ever again play any f2p (actually f2p is always false statement) that does not have also sub mode. Exception can be to some degree b2p and here Gw2 excells.
Comments
Currently playing:
Rift
Played:
SWToR, Aion,EQ, Dark Age of Camelot
World of Warcraft, AoC
^ What he said!
I just finished reading this article today and the spirit of it fits nicely here:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathansalembaskin/2013/05/09/amazon-earns-customer-loyalty-with-integrity-not-rewards/
I particularly like the last paragraph:
"I wonder why companies spend billions annually in attempts to create loyalty, when the only way to achieve it is by running businesses honestly, fairly, and transparently. Amazon communicated all three qualities to me for $.16.
Everything else is just marketing."
The point imo is that i have access to the full content of the game. no ridiculous restrictions like swtor. i can do every quest, enter as many times i want to every dungeon, to every raid, sliver, battleground or whatever else.
i can accept the gear they will sell from cash shop. its a p2w but its the minimum you can have from a f2p game. its not top tier gear, it isnt even better than top gear from dungeons, planar or pvp gear.
so imho its still a great f2p model. as long as they let me and my friends have access to every inch of the content and keep the gear from cash shop to this range, i m perfectly happy.
It's true, I think being able to buy expert dungeon gear is alright. You can get that gear in so many ways within the game, paying for it is just a short cut to what end game players consider to be the "real" game (endgame raiding).
I'm interested and excited to see what happens with this F2P switch. RIft is a great game which I've given up lately because of the subscription.
What? I am very...VERY amazed of people saying this is not pay 2 win. That this is OK to buy gear with cash. That they were doing it indirectly , and now it's better. Bah really? One year ago, even a loli pop was catalogated P2W, and now not even GEAR is .. catalogated as P2W ? But what it's P2W then?
WTF?
And the fuck it's wrong with that one ( or more ) guy(s) who said that this is the best along with Aion. Aion? Aion....wow, I loved that game, until they made it F2P and of course P2W like VERY P2W. Same goes for Lineage 2.
But I am pretty sure that the ones who say that Aion, L2, Rift, etc cash shop is not P2W are :
1) The ones who usually buy items with cash
2) The VERY casual players, who plays several hours a week, and they don't see the impact the items have on the game play.
3) The no cash players, who they played all their life F2P titles ( implicit P2W ), and they think that this is normal.
I will NEVER touch* a game like this. NEVER.
*touch = I sometimes.."play" beta's of the games like this, for curiosity only, but they will never be a game to invest time ( not to say money ) .
Reporter: What's behind Blizzard success, and how do you make your gamers happy?
Blizzard Boss: Making gamers happy is not my concern, making money.. yes!
Maybe you should check which gear will be buyable in the shop. The entry level gear. if you want to be a top player, you will have to play the game and get the loot from raids or the currency to buy top PvP gear...
Signatures are boring things.
victor, your statements regarding the worth of the "patronage" and people probably being pleased with it, are clueless.
Rifts patronage system is not worth the money, since it lacks a monthly game-currency stipend and something special like the monthly subscriber item that tsw has.
lots of ppl came back including me. world is full and now there is a point of being in the open world.
rift cant be played else. you need many ppl outside. now that i play into a full server i can see its full potential. its very very nice indeed.
hoping at 12-06 more ppl will come, so more servers go full. its indeed a very good game and has a lot of fun.
I will definitely try this out again once it becomes f2p.
Rift is a good game and i had a decent amount of fun with it, it will be interesting for me to see all the changes and the progress the game has made since the last time i played, which was long before the release of the Storm Legion expansion.
I wholehearted disagree with this statement. In my experience with Trion through three betas and two releases, they are by far the WORST MMO developer when it comes to treating customers right. Three examples off the top of my head:
1. Having an issue with Rift that caused my account to be unplayable; It took Trion nineteen days to reply with a form letter.
2. Using misleading language when describing their games (Calling Defiance's exploration 'endless' and claiming it had 'open-world' PvP)
3. During the recent release of Defiance, they had a major server issue that caused a 3+ hour rollback. While that's not unheard of, their shameful attitude of pretending it never happened was. They deleted countless posts and threads off their forums without warning, without giving reasons and without even acknowledging that players were screwed over (including players who had used real money to purchase things, only to not have their purchases anymore).
The only 'right' thing they ever did was quickly fixing a 'wrong' when they overcharged me once for my Rift sub.
While I hate to see any gaming entity suffer the hardships Trion is going through, treating customers poorly is always a good indicator that things are not going well... (THQ for instance). I don't want Trion to fail, but if they want any more of this player's money, they need to fix their laissez-faire attitude about customer relations.
At this low point in MMO gaming, I refuse to play even the shiniest turd.
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
I'm thinking about DCUO, when I see the "gear bought in shop" part. Rift's content isn't 100% "gear gated", but to get up to speed for later game raids and dungeons, you need to grind through older content. I WISH DCUO would let me buy earlier tier gear in their shop. I'd still be playing it if I could.
So while it's a little concerning, I also think I'd make use of the feature if I jumped back into F2P Rift and wanted to play the new content, not the old.
Try to be excellent to everyone you meet. You never know what someone else has seen or endured.
My Review Manifesto
Follow me on Twitter if you dare.
Current PC Build
http://pcpartpicker.com/b/p8RBD3
Present: Current offerings are low quality or soloable
Past:AoC, DCUO, FFXI,FFXIV 1.0 and ARR,WoW,Fallen Earth, Tabula Rasa, TSW, SWTOR, Rift, Aion, WAR, Darkfall, STO, CoH/CoV, GW2, Diaspora, EQ2, DDO, and a bunch of forgettable ftp games
If by "old content" you mean that you need to run any of the level 50 (former level cap) dungeons or raids, that would be absolutely incorrect. You can skip all that entirely and you will level much more quickly if you do. If you're just talking about the level 1-50 grind, well... yeah. Same as every other game pretty much.
Agree 100% very good point
You are forgetting the biggest difference between DCUO and Rift model. In DCUO you can have only 1500 credits max. I think gear should be of last concern. Putting restrictions on credits is just awful.
Rift has one of the best F2P model right besides Tera and Aion.
"The problem is that the hardcore folks always want the same thing: 'We want exactly what you gave us before, but it has to be completely different.'
-Jesse Schell
"Online gamers are the most ludicrously entitled beings since Caligula made his horse a senator, and at least the horse never said anything stupid."
-Luke McKinney
OMG RIFT is going P2SG!
?(Pay to skip the grind)
same here. feels too much like being screwed over.