Low population last weekend...

[Puremallace]

Rift is not a AAA MMO. Ask anyone who does progression raiding.

Sure I'll ask the Paragon members who moon lighted in Rift during Hammerknell...opps did I say that out loud

[Weiland]

Both WoW and Rift will be losing a high ammount of Subscribers when SWTOR comes out Easily.

SWTOR is total kiddie fodder. Graphics on par with the animated Clone Wars cartoon.

Raiding in rift has been much more pleasurable that any raiding i have done in wow outside of BC content

BTW Beta tested SWTOR last weekend couldn't play more than 30min. due to the total let down in the graphics. I signed up for the SWTOR community back in 2008 long b4 anything was released (pics vids ect). I stayed away from all media and news of this game so i could go into it with the same expectations i had when it was announced.

I guess it is more important to release a game that can be played on ipads than something that is visually appealing to the more mature crowd.

[Syce]

its so stupid that people constantly try to sway people away from games. IF YOU DON'T Like the game DON'T PLAY IT. People can play what they want, not because you say they shouldn't because the game sucked to you.

[Fencers]

Rift is not a AAA MMO. Ask anyone who does progression raiding.

Not many MMOs have the funding or development of Rift. It is objectively, a AAA MMO. There are only two other AAA MMOs currently on the market.

AAA is a title denoting production quality and funding. Not whether someone is killing raid bosses.

[Leodegrance]

The thing is we haven't had many serious MMOs on the market since the very early days of MMOs. When WoW came about and gained in popularity over the older EQ/DAOC/SWG communities, it pushed other MMOs clear off the table.

Since TBC, how many MMOs even had a sizable presence? Basically none. With many failed also-rans. To some degree we got used to that state of the market; you played WoW or some niche MMO.

With Rift, Trion was the first company since Sony to open the MMO market a bit and gain a respectable base and reputation as a quality AAA made game unlike Warhammer, AOC, Aion, etc.

Soon we will have SWTOR on the market as well- also quite high in quality. The last time we had 3 AAA MMOs out was circa early EQ2. Though Warcraft kinda trumped everything in the end- there was a time when players had more than 1 MMO to choose from. Several in fact.

So what I am saying is; Blizzard's iron grip on MMOs is loosened. Now we have other MMOs, such as Rift and TOR, that are in a position to have their own decent sized player bases.

It's not fair to conceptualize other MMOs in comparison to Warcraft's populace. The market forces that resulted in 9 million AFK in Orgrimmar were kind of a phenomenon. +1 million subs for Rift 1 year out? That's a successful product and very sustainable game.

As long as Rift and TOR put out a decent product with good support, we can expect MMO gamers to be spread out among several games in the coming years rather than bulked up in World of Warcraft.

Don't forget you will have a forth AAA MMO game coming out at some point.

If Guild Wars 2 lives up to its hype then you will have a fourth MMO that will garner alot of attention.And being how well done the original Guild Wars was and how well it went I cannot see them dropping the ball with this one.
Not to mention some of the more innovative designs and stepping outside the typical MMO box with the game will be another reason to keep an eye on it.

[Fencers]

Indeed. We just don't know when GW2 will get here. But TOR and Rift are essentially out-of-box right now. What's it... 3 1/2 weeks till TOR is official?

Looking ahead to the next year we could potentially see The Secret World, Guild Wars 2 and Planetside enter the market as well. A market newly fragmented for the first time in almost a decade. A decade.

Each of those games in the next year have some degree of marketing and $ cache to their development too. The circumstances that created Warcraft as a genre powerhouse are a little less than what they were even a year ago.

Though not truly AAA yet, the quality/support offered by hybrid and F2P games has risen fair bit over the last 2 years. With some F2P games such as Wildstar, Dragon's Nest, Tribes and Firefall garnering unusually high attention for being F2P games. We haven't really seen that too often. What's more, lots of demo players have been quite positive on these games which stray from WoW-formula.

Market is changing faster than ever. The perception / expectation of an MMO <10 million sub as a failed game is utterly false. Heck, even 4 million subs would be a smashing success for an MMO. Holding on to a million or two with more diverse games competing for the same gamer dollars is damn good.

[Faaip]

got to say, i just resubbed to this game yesterday, and so far i've found wolfsbane (spelling perhaps) to be a very populated server with a good healthy friendly community. i asked a noobie question, and instead of being set on fire by trolls in trade, i was actually helped, both in channel and in whisper.

Glad i've resubbed, to the point where i've done a yearly sub.

also, i think SWTOR will find its audience, just like every other mmo that has come out in recent years. right now, there are a lot of unhappy wow players, many of which will goto SWTOR. then, after the initial boom, they'll figure out if its the mmo for them or not. who knows, they may quit wow, try out SWTOR and see its not for them, and try rift due to it being fantasy with a dash of steampunk, somewhere in the middle.

Diversity in the mmo market is not a bad thing. even if blizz stays at 5mill subs and SWTOR has 2mill and rift has 1-2 mill.. itll make all 3 games better as they will compete with each other.

[Deleted]

got to say, i just resubbed to this game yesterday, and so far i've found wolfsbane (spelling perhaps) to be a very populated server with a good healthy friendly community. i asked a noobie question, and instead of being set on fire by trolls in trade, i was actually helped, both in channel and in whisper.

Glad i've resubbed, to the point where i've done a yearly sub.

also, i think SWTOR will find its audience, just like every other mmo that has come out in recent years. right now, there are a lot of unhappy wow players, many of which will goto SWTOR. then, after the initial boom, they'll figure out if its the mmo for them or not. who knows, they may quit wow, try out SWTOR and see its not for them, and try rift due to it being fantasy with a dash of steampunk, somewhere in the middle.

Diversity in the mmo market is not a bad thing. even if blizz stays at 5mill subs and SWTOR has 2mill and rift has 1-2 mill.. itll make all 3 games better as they will compete with each other.

I must say I feel the same about community. Played trial a little, asked for help and got friendly replys and I ran a dungeon and some where there with alts willing to help and 3 of us coming from wow felt that it was a great run, with relaxed and friendly people
Looking good so far, hope it keeps going =) Im playing the underdog inquisitor cleric spec and heard scary stories they aren't popular in high end warfronts, but I played shadowpriest in bgs before they were completely accepted too so I'm used to it a bit =)

[Orange Joe]

So here are some things about Rift people are obviously not understanding because 1. it is not WoW or 2. They are just idiots

1. The soul system is designed so you do not have to roll endless alts that you have no intention on actually gearing up...hurrr derr I got 10 lvl 85s, but only 1 is actually geared or I want to see the story behind each one while I make my guild wait for me to decide..they can be patient right? This obsession with alts all of a sudden literally just started with Rift when people where trying to extravagant small problems and make them major.

These are like the same idiots who could not find major flaws like massive grind or constant crashes and qq cried about the squirrel animations not looking realistic enough.

2. Rift is dying...Joseph Goebbels(go wiki pedia) used to say if you say something enough times then you will get people to eventually believe it even if it is un true. So far Rift has been a one month game...3 monther....6 monther....12 monther...now Rift will die when ToR launches...if it doesn't die then it will die when GW2 launches...if it doesn't die then it will suck because it is not F2P

3. Class imbalance. I am under the full hope in my life that their is a special place in hell for these idiots to burn in for over exaggerating every single issue to be the end of the world...zomg mages do 100 more dps then warriors. Min/max'rs have turned minor differences into major issues and have made it seem like the class is dead. Pretty sure I would have noticed if every warrior in my guild just quit.

4. Here is one of my favorites. Fast content updates are a bad thing...quality over quantity..go play Aion if you want to know what bad quality updates look like...most I see for "bad quality" rift updates is a 30min hotfix at 10am in the morning while I am at work to fix small issues. Yet another case of "welp we need to find issues, so lets make this one seem like the end of the world"


Pretty sure Rift has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that after I am done with Rift whenever that is I am done with mmorpg's all together. The crazy's have taken over the insane asylum.

can i go back and quote all the times you said wow is dying?

[Ravoks]

Indeed. We just don't know when GW2 will get here. But TOR and Rift are essentially out-of-box right now. What's it... 3 1/2 weeks till TOR is official?

Looking ahead to the next year we could potentially see The Secret World, Guild Wars 2 and Planetside enter the market as well. A market newly fragmented for the first time in almost a decade. A decade.

Don't forget Diablo 3 and the possible SC:II expansion.

[Orange Joe]

Sure I'll ask the Paragon members who moon lighted in Rift during Hammerknell...opps did I say that out loud

so they played it then quit? are you sure you want to point that out? that paragon members played but found it boring and went back to wow

[MaximusRex]

SWTOR is total kiddie fodder. Graphics on par with the animated Clone Wars cartoon.

Raiding in rift has been much more pleasurable that any raiding i have done in wow outside of BC content

BTW Beta tested SWTOR last weekend couldn't play more than 30min. due to the total let down in the graphics. I signed up for the SWTOR community back in 2008 long b4 anything was released (pics vids ect). I stayed away from all media and news of this game so i could go into it with the same expectations i had when it was announced.

I guess it is more important to release a game that can be played on ipads than something that is visually appealing to the more mature crowd.

Lots of irony in this argument. Also, several advanced graphics options, like AA, was turned off for the stress test.

TOR has an art style, like WoW has an art style, like RIFT has an art style. I don't see how art style has to do anything about being mature. Dali had an art style, Picasso had an art style, Rembrandt had an art style too. I might not like all art styles, after all art is a subjective taste, but I would hardly go around calling them kiddie fodder, especially if I wanted to act like I was the mature person.

As for the greater topic, I think all 3 MMOs will do well, and I think that's good for the market. WoW has been getting a bit stagnate, and has shied away from making and real changes to the game, and I think they have gotten too conservative in fixing class performance issues, a little competition would do them good.

I also wouldn't be shocked long long term to see any or all of these MMOs adopt a hybrid F2P model. Even Blizzard has said that the pay to play market is very saturated making it hard to spur growth, and the more top end MMOs there are in the space the more they will just cannibalize each others subs. While the Hybrid F2P model is still fairly new, so far it has been very successful financially in the games that have done it. Games with larger sub numbers have a much larger risk in making the change, but at some point the inability to maintain subscriber numbers is going become real, and Hybrid F2P which has greatly increased revenues for the games that have used it, not all of which were failing, is going t become more tempting. One of the other advantages of F2P is that it looks more like the single player game market, players might get bored and put down the MMO for a few months, but when there is a lull in whatever other game they are playing, they are very likely to pick it back up again.

[mische]

Look I love Rift, it's way better than wow, so I'm not bashing it.
But did anyone else notice it was a ghost town last weekend when SWTOR was beta testing?

I guess the good news is that Rift will go f2p so I could play both...

Um, I play Rift. Yes, it's better than WoW. I've not been on since Skyrim came out.
Unfortunately, for Rift, I have not been able to put Skyrim down - yes, even with v1.6 in all its prettiness!

[probert]

I bounce back and forth between WoW and Rift.

My WoW realm -- a medium sized realm, dating back to vanilla -- is a ghost town the past 2 weeks. I have consistently run census plus multiple times a week for the past 3 years... I've never seen such low active numbers.

On a weeknight, mid week, used to get 1500-2000+ alliance. Last week I got 450 one night. Horde side was even worse. Now, part of this is the stagnant end game while we wait for 4.3... and part of it, is the get on/get off culture instilled with point caps and LFD queues. But even in late Wrath, it never was this low in terms of active population.

I'm taking a month off from Rift (too much to do!), but I don't think quiet Rift shards is a big issue. Skyrim, Battlefield 3, Call of Duty MW 3, Saints Row 3, and SW:TOR Beta all hit within the last 2 weeks! Add to that the low period between patches for Rift and WoW, and its to be expected.

My guess is WOW and Rift will see population pressures for several months, then people will start drifting back in January or February. SW:TOR won't hold everyone (i've found it disappointing to be honest), Skyrim is a good 3 month distraction for many... but eventually the populations will even out.

[Puremallace]

Um, I play Rift. Yes, it's better than WoW. I've not been on since Skyrim came out.
Unfortunately, for Rift, I have not been able to put Skyrim down - yes, even with v1.6 in all its prettiness!

I am just the opposite. Skyrim is the first single player RPG I have picked up in going on 10 years and while it is awesome it does not really change. Like in a mmorpg I have a guild and other people I can play with.

Ever since 1.6 came out I have not touched Skyrim in two days because there is certain stuff I am used to in mmorpg's that is missing. You notice the world seems dead? Like I run through a forest and maybe get ganked by some wolves I can one shot. Everything seems instanced honestly and if I do kill something in open world it never respawns and is perma dead.

I guess pure RPG players get a kick out of this, but the quest that send you half way across the map and seem designed to waste time are seriously getting old. If they did that shit in WoW or Rift people would unsub over it, but single player rpg's get a pass somehow? The mount movement is awkward at best. This is not a dig at Skyrim because there are some parts that are awesome, but it is not some replacement for me atleast to a solid mmorpg.

My view in the long run and I have said this for a damn long time....15% of the WoW population is a hell of a lot more then 15% of the Rift population, so Rift will not feel it as bad as WoW is + slow content updates are just killing WoW right now honestly. You know you are screwed when practically your entire sub base is asking why are you charging me a sub for this?

Like if you look at ti honestly. Rift counter to ToR was shit people are getting confused and calling it a expansion because there is that much to do. WoW's counter is a Raid and 3 five mans, transmog, and x-server LFR. The hilarious part is I can tell you right now next Rift patch is probably December 27th or Jan 4th while WoW's 4.4 is maybeeee March??April??

[Primalthirst]

I've spoken to many people in the SW:TOR beta and none of them have said it's better than either WoW or Rift except for voice acting in quests.
I know no-one in Rift, from my current guild or previous, who is even planning on trying SW:TOR.
I wish I could say the same about GW2, everyone seems to be planning on trying that. What do I do when all my IRL friends want to play Oceanic times and my murkan friends want to play NA times.
#firstworldproblems

[Slothanator]

I was just thinking the same thing LOL

Doesn't agree with me he's biased

Honestly its hilarious people can't accept obvious flaws in a game they like. I still play rift, having been rank 8 for months you find yourself wondering what is there to do but find a raiding guild now which I don't really have the time for.

[Fencers]

Doesn't agree with me he's biased

Honestly its hilarious people can't accept obvious flaws in a game they like. I still play rift, having been rank 8 for months you find yourself wondering what is there to do but find a raiding guild now which I don't really have the time for.

Most rational people can admit flaws in a product.

The trouble is these "flaws" are often just subjective.

"This is boring!"

Well, it's not boring to everyone.

"This isn't working as it should!"

Well, many folks are fine with it.

Et cetera.

It is totally impossible and impractical to engage someone on issues they may find irksome to one degree or another. Most of what you had to say was the forum equivalent of "I don't like the start button in that position!"

And honesty, that isn't a talking point anyone can rationally speak to you about.

[Daarksoul]

its so stupid that people constantly try to sway people away from games. IF YOU DON'T Like the game DON'T PLAY IT. People can play what they want, not because you say they shouldn't because the game sucked to you.

its so stupid that people constantly try to sway people TO NOT QUIT games. IF YOU Like the game PLAY IT. People can play what they want, not because you say they SHOULD becasue the game DID NOT suck to you.

[Rooflesstoofless]

Doesn't agree with me he's biased

Honestly its hilarious people can't accept obvious flaws in a game they like. I still play rift, having been rank 8 for months you find yourself wondering what is there to do but find a raiding guild now which I don't really have the time for.

'Not accepting' is very different than 'not caring' or 'having a laugh about it' and being able to carry on and enjoy myself. Bias aside (I doubt there is a way to prove that I am not), I can accept obvious flaws, but someone pushing very subjective and often petty squabbles about the game starts to come off as a very tired rhetoric after a while and deserves a "rollseyes".

You are an R8 and have been for months (or claim to be) and you don't have time to raid; and if your posts are any relation to your true feelings about the game it doesn't sound like you are enjoying yourself so I have to ask: Why are you playing a game you aren't enjoying? I can't say I enjoy beating my head against a wall; so I don't. As soon as a game isn't fun for me anymore I don't play it anymore. That will go for Rift and applies to the countless other games I've played in the last few decades. If you are enjoying it, then why the constant attempt at a cautionary tale under the false notion that "people can't accept obvious flaws in the game"?