Abuse of the Rift Engine #4: Personal Adventures

If you logged on to the Rift servers today you would have found out a new patch was deployed.  This patch included a new part of the game called “Personal Adventures.”  By hitting the period key (.) you bring up the menu, a single toggle to turn on Personal Adventures.  These personal adventures teleport you to a group of people who will have to complete a number of objectives and then finally meet up with a boss.

It’s another use of the rift engine, that is whoring out their product.

What is the Rift Engine?

The Rift engine, also known as the dynamic content engine was designed by Trion Worlds for their game Rift.  The purpose of this engine was to generate content randomly throughout the zone.  The idea was that this engine would create events within the zone that would make your experience leveling different and unique.

The Rift engine deploys a chain of content that can be halted by a player or allowed to become powerful.  The model was simple.  Content would start off in planar elements.  These are potential zones for change.  A player can activate them or a planar element can trigger on it’s own over time.

These planar elements will transform into rifts, what the game is named for.  Rifts are fissures in time that will spawn units from another realm.  These will also drastically change the layout of the zone.  Death rifts for example will spawn skulls and darkness.  Fire rifts will spawn fire and brimstone.  This dynamic content can spawn anywhere and alter a zone to an experience specific to you.

The next phase of this dynamic engine is to make the rift do something so that it is not a stationary element.  So as long as a rift is opened a set number of units called an “invasion” with a boss will move across the map along the roads.  These will cause an inconvenience and will attack in every which direction.

A fourth aspect of this dynamic content engine is the foothold.  The foothold is activated by the invasion.  The foothold will take control of key points and towns further inconveniencing you and forcing you to finally address this problem… or forever be unable to turn in your quests.

So that’s the rift engine.  It is something that is complicated to develop and revolves around constantly having unique events spawn around the map.

So what are the abuses of this Rift engine to date?

#1: The Zone Wide Event

The first one to develop was the zone wide event.  This concept focused around a group of people  working together to close down a specific grouping of rifts, invasions and footholds that would just spawn,

This concept was whored out like crazy.  Most major updates including more zone wide events.  These were casual friendly events that would activate randomly all over Telaria.  The concept here is the rift engine doing it’s job with a focus and a direction.  This is an addition to the dynamic engine in that the game will dynamically and randomly spawn mass events all over the world.

#2: The Story Event

A second abuse of the rift engine is the storyline event.  Trion puts forth a very minor story line.  And I do mean very minor.  As in nothing really happens.  Quests will involve killing rift monsters or closing rifts.  Usually it will involve a specific type of mob therefore during high populated times the game will spawn extra types of this rift in all zones.

#3: The Raid Rift/Epic Rift

This next part of the rift engine was to create a brand new type of rift that players can call upon.  These rifts unlike other rifts would give raid valued rewards.  This was designed for casuals to be able to gain gear in a raid scenario without having to try too hard.

Epic rifts would have 5 people in a group together to take out a rift and gain a single reward for it.  The raid rift would require an entire raid.  These would also require specific lures that you would have to purchase with planarite.

This solved the problem of mass amounts of stockpiled planarite and the problem of gearing up for content.

All they have to do was tweek their engine to make more powerful rifts and make them for cheap.

#4: The Personal Adventure

This is the final whoring out of the rift engine and the most recent one.  I’m sure there will be more.  Trion spent a tonne of money developing this engine and they have whored it out ALL over the game.  Most people when they develop something this expensive either deploy it to all of their games (like Cryptic Studios did) or they will sell it off to other games (like Everquest did).  Trion Worlds however has no other games (at the moment) and no one is really interested in this dwindling studio.

So this has really caused a money problem for Trion.  They need to get this engine to max use, but only have one game.

Solution?  Over use the engine in the one game.

And they are.

The new “personal adventure” is just another adventure involving rifts and rift creatures.  Sometimes you will go to a zone and have to clear out some mobs that aren’t rift creatures, but for the most part you are just killing rift beasts.  The personal adventure brings absolutely nothing new to the game.  You are teleported to a public zone that anyone can join and you kill off objectives that were in the game before the patch.

It’s 100% nothing new.  Just a new way of doing the same thing you always did.

Personal adventures have no stories to them.  Personal adventures are also not personal adventures.  They can involve up to 20 people.  How personal can things get when you have a full raid?

Overall personal adventures are another failed attempt by Trion to pimp out their content and add nothing.

Where Am I in Rift?

About a week ago I announced that I was T2 dungeon ready and had found a raiding guild. So where am I now?

Well after one week I am now geared for Hammerknell (tier 2 raid dungeon) and am pushing through the content with relative ease. I spent about 70 hours grinding out dungeons and another 30-40 hours grinding out my professions. I have gone with Apothecary, Butchering and Foraging. I’ve been make very good platinum with butchering and foraging. 300 Apothecary isn’t paying off just yet, still need to get flask recipes.

The content thus far has been pretty easy and newbie friendly. By easy I mean, not impossible. Everything in here is balanced around a regular gearing progression from normal dungeons to T1 dungeons to T2 dungeons to T1 raids to T2 raids. So if you do that progression (or skip some of it by purchasing gear) then you will do pretty well.

I’ve been posting some of our raid kills on my YouTube channel and will continue to do so.

As you can tell by the image above I have made my return to Rift PvP. Quite a bit has changed in Rift PvP.

Most importantly they released a new Warfront. Library of the Runemasters is available from Level 10 up and the architecture is modeled after Hammerknell. The warfront has four floors. The top floor is where you spawn at and you gain a no fall damage buff until you fall.

The third floor is a ring around the room joined to the middle by two sets of stairs.

The first floor (basement) is a ring around the room joined to the middle by two alternate sets of stairs.

The middle is the second floor and has a few pillars for line of sight. Control of the middle means easiest access to what you need to win.

There are various fangs around that when you hold them will deal damage to you but will also score you points at a rate of 1 per second as long as you’re holding it. Kills are worth 2 points. First team to 1000 wins.

It’s one of these warfronts where how much gear you have actually matters a tone, as does how many healers you carry.

Battle for Port Scion used to be a hole. It sucked in every way. There were two major problems with Port Scion before. The first was that people didn’t actually understand how it worked. People were only delivering the Sourceshards and no one was going for bosses or bases. Now that people get the game it seems to be granting a tone more Prestige (PvP xp). The other thing is that it is the only 20-man warfront that promotes massive battles.

Another important change is that they have added in Unreal Tournaments voices into the game. If you score three kills without dying a sexy voice will yell “Killing Spree.” There are healing related yells (Savior) and tanking related yells (Juggernaut). Most importantly if you are doing well at any of these you get RAMPAGE and then UNSTOPPABLE.

Highest rank is now Rank 8 and it provides Hammerknell equivalent loot. I am currently at Rank 4 and much like last time the curve gets higher and higher. Rank 4 took me roughly 5 days to get. The gear I’m getting at Rank 4 is probably around T2 dungeon loot. This is of course worthless to me in PvE. The big promise at the end of all of this is that once I hit Rank 8 I will gain access to four of the BiS pieces for rogues and some weapons that I would otherwise not get for a while.

It should be no surprise that grinding out PvP on a rogue is far easier than a warrior. I am able to snipe people out with Strafe and Deadeye shot and then run and re-stealth. Even when I had no PvP gear I was pretty successful eliminating casters.

My current raid schedule is three nights a week. It’s a pretty lax schedule. This is mostly because my guild is still recruiting. It’s hard to 19-man Hammerknell content some nights.

So overall it’s been pretty good. I’ll be continuing to raid, PvP and make tones of platinum. If you’re on Threesprings I’ll see you in game.

Developing Rift Material

I’ve decided I’ll start working on some Rift material for the site.  I’m starting off with dungeon guides and moving on from there.  If my subscribers see these and think… this seems basic.  That’s because it is.  I’ll be doing guides from T2 dungeons, T1 raids, and T2 raids.

I’ll still be doing one one daily article outside of these and I will publish these as soon as I finish them.  I’ll also be doing my best to update them as new patch information is available.

Personal Dungeons/End Game Advancement

So as I’ve been playing this Rift game at Level 50 and I decided I should write about both end game advancement (leveling while max level) and personal dungeons. But both of these topics are such short reads that I decided to publish these as a single article. If they seem disconnected, that’s because they are.

Personal Dungeons

When Rift makers Trion invented the personal dungeon or the “chronicle” they did so under a massive risk.

The personal dungeon is something that people have wanted in MMOs for quite some time. Some games have done it at a very low level. A good example of this is Lord of the Rings Online used personal dungeons as a way of introducing players to the game and giving people a chance to see the lore without needing massive 6-person groups. It worked pretty well and so by the time you hit Level 20 you got a little bit of an idea of how the dungeon worked.

It was however not insanely popular because it was just regarded as part of the tutorial.

Another attempt at the personal dungeon is Hellgate London. Hellgate London invented levels for a person to go through that would be massively multiplayer if you wanted or individual if you wanted. It was a way of removing the social away from the game so that in the end you can play this game 24/7.

And that’s the massive risk.

The problem with the personal dungeon is if your game begins to involve too much of it you will eventually get rid of the multiplayer aspect of the game.

Multiplayer is very important to the sustainability of the MMO. Multiplayer assumes that you will need to have different things from different types of characters and preparation time; preparation time being the establishment of a guild, creating an activity schedule and collecting resources.

A personal dungeon would remove all of this.

Hence if the personal dungeon is too popular and they make it too much a part of their game, instead of a casual’s side game, it will actually kill this game. It’s weird how something that someone demands and wants can actually kill a game because of how potent it is.

End Game Advancement

Rift recently introduced an alternate advancement system called Planar Attunement. Planar Attunement would allow a person to grind experience and continue to level up. You would grind XP like normal and when you would level up you would gain points that you could invest into specific stats. This gives people who play the game 24/7 something to always do.

It’s not a new idea.

In fact, it’s one of the first ideas.

Everquest is one of the first MMOs to come out and it came with, no end game. It didn’t even have a single dungeon. World of Warcraft invented the instanced dungeon. Everquest would develop world dungeons and world bosses. The actual end game for Everquest was by becoming the most powerful character in the game.    The game didn’t have any real factions and was instead split entirely into guilds. The primary way of getting stronger was constantly doing a single type of action. Every single move and action you could do would level up infinitely. The most ridiculous thing was leveling up your swim speed using a bot. After a ridiculously high level you would almost go warp speed through water, making you the scariest person to encounter in the world. Gear in Everquest was a bonus you would get after spamming your attack button on a boss for a while. You were leveling your move and getting stat bonuses at the same time.

Alternative advancement or end game advancement is something that sort of vanished. It vanished specifically because it was originally designed to appeal to the typical Korean gamer. Grinding things did not make sense to the average gamer. Every game post World of Warcraft would seek to set a cap to leveling and find some other way of keeping you entertained. They essentially changed the nature of the game from developing an end game character to developing an end game.

World of Warcraft was the game that kicked end game character advancement to the curb… and ironically it was the one that decided end game character advancement should happen.

World of Warcraft in their Cataclysm expansion announced the minimization of the talent tree. This is actually what gave them the indication that people enjoyed a complicated end game character development. That is, people want to individualize their characters very heavily.

So Blizzard invented Archaeology. The idea behind archaeology originally was that you would collect artifacts from various sources (gathering, raiding, dungeons, grinding, and exploring) and then you would assemble them. After assembling them you would get some vendor trash or some gimmicky item and then you would get some points that you can spend on post Level 85 leveling. You would choose a path that would emphasize a certain attribute set and from there just sink the points into the thing infinitely.

Rift essentially just took that idea and put it into place before WoW could. Now it’s hugely successful. When I ask for advice on whether something is worth doing they indicate “it’s good XP.” That is to say, now suddenly everything that was pointless has a point. Why are you doing dailies? It’s good XP. Why are you discovering all the areas? It’s good XP. Why are you doing dungeons? It’s good XP. It gives people who want to play their own way a logical reason that the community can understand.

Rift and the Gear Grind

So I’m finally moved into my new apartment and already to rock and roll.

I’ve been doing a little bit of work in Rift to get my guy raid ready and with less than a day played I’ve gotten into T2.

Gearing

So the first step in gearing is to get the max level Sigil. This will hold two greater planarites and two lesser planarites. This means as a minimum this should be around a 46 dexterity upgrade for someone who has not grinded rifts while leveling. This alone should get you into T1 content. I leveled twice as fast as normal and I ended up with 140P at max level.

I purchased two crafted epics off of the auction house and grinded enough T1 to pick up two pieces of gear. This was all I needed to get into T2.

To be fair I did strike it pretty lucky. When I was leveling I did pick up quite a few pieces of gear from Normal Caldera and Normal Precipice. As well I did pick up a nice few pieces of gear from the actual T1 dungeons. But most of it was a pretty normal grind.

The current event gave rise to a decent opportunity. There is a level 50 epic helm available for 500 of the token. Of course, I missed out on this and accidentally bought a helm instead.

T2

Well the T2 grind is… interesting.

Last time I did the T2 grind people were struggling with it and they nerfed the content.

The first time I did the T2 grind no one was doing it, everyone was skipping off to raids.

So now we’re in a T2 grind that’s not too hard and can be done while raiding… and nobody’s doing it.

Yeah the queue is pretty dead. I can play as Support or DPS and it takes me about 30-40 minutes to get a queue. It’s pretty ridiculous.

On top of that you’re not exactly getting the best and the brightest. What you’re left with is the group of people who stand in fire.

Rictus the first boss of Runic Descent has been a point of contention. The guy just seems bugged as hell and will not die without some crafty wall exploiting.

Rictus is a little different from other subpar wipes in that he is… bugged.

The folks at Trion decided to change the color of his ground AoE to a light green that slowly fades away. Problem is the AoE stays there a lot longer than you would expect and so you’re always running into invisible AoE.

Other than that it feels more worthwhile doing T1s (for emblem gear) than T2s. The only thing that really sways in the favor of T2 is the 6 emblem reward at the end if it is the daily. Otherwise I’m pretty sure I just won’t be doing them.

The raiding guild I got into is called Elite of Threesprings. They’ve cleared T1 raid content meaning they are a progression guild.

It’s important when looking for a guild to consider their progression. A guild that has no progression is less likely to start raiding soon or just has too much fail in the raid to kill anything. A guild that is too progressed is recruiting to survive due to too many losses during progression. The guild that is done all the content and is farming actually doesn’t need you and your role there will be more as a student and less as a player.

I have also put up a new video on my Youtube channel, me vs. Heroic Pyromaster Cortilnald as a Bard. Enjoy: