No to Arenas in Rift, yes to cloaks/capes...maybe

[Slipmat]

Trion have started up a new Devs Q&A with hopefully regular updates and future plans, amongst the gems talked about....

Q: Have you considered adding cloaks? Who doesn’t look awesome in a cape?

A: Cloaks of all types (Guild or otherwise) are something we really want to do. However right now we’re developing the game with an eye towards performance, Rift is unique in the fact that we have many activities that encourage hundreds of players to play together and we don’t want to negatively impact that experience. You all will be the first to know if/when we solve this particular problem since you know we could never keep something that exciting under wraps for long!

Q: Arenas – some love them, some don’t. Are there any plans for an Arena or similar idea in RIFT at this time?

A: We have no plans for arenas at this time, RIFT is a massively multiplayer game and we really want to embrace the mechanics of getting large groups of players together and arenas are counter to that. That being said we are adding leaderboards to both PvE and PvP content complete with divisions and rankings so players looking to compete will have a great tool for measuring how badass they are. We’ve also got some exciting new PVP content cooking but it’s still too early for us to give any details.

Raiders got their spoke in as well

Q: How many boss encounters are there in Infernal Dawn?

A: There are 7 different raid bosses in infernal dawn. Some bosses, such as Maelforge, are actually multiple encounters with their own rewards. In addition there are a few smaller mini bosses that also offer minor rewards for killing them.

Q: How is the feedback for the dungeon after several weeks of testing?

A: Infernal Dawn testing is going really well, and we’ve got a number of major guilds both EU and US helping us test out the encounters. It’s so nice to have such a dedicated and experienced group of testers since it allows us to get much better results (and quicker) then we did when we were working on Hammerknell and many testers were still pretty new to the game.

Full Q&A session at Source: http://community.riftgame.com/2012/0...oaks-and-more/

[Acquiesce of Telara]

Slip,

Start a damn newsletter so I can subscribe to it already! I don't even bother following a twitter feed from Trion because you'd tell us when they've posted before we can see it for ourselves

[Deleted]

Some exciting new pvp content, hope it's not a too slow cooking going on there, since they add cooking ingame they should give us the performance of masterchefs :P

Ah well, too soon means no rush back to the game... or well maybe, is fifth dubloon obtainable yet? I need that mount =)

[Pachycrocuta]

That's good news to hear about the no arena crap. And I always wondered why Rift didn't have cloaks when practically every single other mmorpg does. I guess I can understand that they could increase the gpu sucking of Rift by adding those in.

[Tarien]

Some exciting new pvp content, hope it's not a too slow cooking going on there, since they add cooking ingame they should give us the performance of masterchefs :P

Ah well, too soon means no rush back to the game... or well maybe, is fifth dubloon obtainable yet? I need that mount =)

I think we'll see PvP content in 1.9 in a bid to keep people interested what with GW2 right around the corner.

[DeltrusDisc]

Thank God for no arenas!!!

[Puremallace]

Trion is not stupid. They see where mmo pvp is about to head and is definitely moving away from Themeparks. We got maybe 3 server in US that are pvp and only thing pvp'rs have been useful for in Rift is encouraging other people to quit over extremely minor shit. I love how they want a pity party from everyone now, but they blew their chance.

Imagine if it was still half pe and half pvp server, but nope.

For the record btw. This is where most of us get our opinion on the subject

http://wow.joystiq.com/2009/11/13/bl...re-a-mistake/5

John Funk of WarCry recently interviewed Blizzard's VP of Game Design, Rob Pardo, about WoW's five-year anniversary, and he shed some light on a number of topics, including their total subscriber numbers (twice to three times as much as its current 12 million), what audience their new MMO is meant for, and what he thinks WoW's greatest successes were. But some other very interesting information came up when the interviewer asked what he thought WoW's biggest mistakes were.

He begins by saying that he wishes that the servers had been more stable at launch, and that there had been more of them, but he says that in terms of design, Arenas were the single biggest mistake in WoW's history.

Says Pardo:

We didn't engineer the game and classes and balance around it, we just added it on, so it continues to be very difficult to balance. Is WoW a PvE cooperative game, or a competitive PvP game? There's constant pressure on the class balance team, there's pressure on the game itself, and a lot of times players who don't PvP don't understand why their classes are changing. I don't think we ever foresaw how much tuning and tweaking we'd have to do to balance it in that direction.

Pardo indicates that most of the changes to the game since launch have been a success -- the shrinking of raid sizes, the addition of Heroic dungeons, etc -- but that Arena has been a huge headache for Blizzard and players alike. He goes on to say that if he had the choice, he'd either go back to WoW's beginnings and change the fundamentals of class balance, or, barring that, would nix the decision to add Arenas during the development of the Burning Crusade expansion.

A pretty candid statement about a pretty controversial topic. It's good to see that Blizzard understands that the implementation of Arenas was a mistake for a game like WoW. Of course, Pardo also says that they can't just axe Arenas completely, at least not yet, so we may be stuck with them for a while. Sorry about your PvE burst damage, guys.

[Primalthirst]

Loot from each phase of the Maelforge and possibly Laethys fights, interesting.
Maybe they drop 2 Epics for Finishing the first half of the fight and a Relic + Charred Chest/Legs for finishing them entirely.