Will you pre-order Storm Legion?

[Requiemcliff]

You were done the moment you tried arguing Rift's population hasn't signifcantly declined, hence spend most of your time making baseless comments about other posters rather than addressing the facts.

---------- Post added 2012-11-04 at 02:33 PM ----------



I agree it is not the best time to poll the numbers, however Riftstatus effctively polled the numbers continuously and shows the same over a long period of time, they implemented mercs because of declinging numbers, same goes for the faction change.

The only argument full of wholes is those from those lackign the objectivity to admit Rift's population has signifcantly declined and try to make excuses.

Honestly, from launch, I could guarantee that the population has declined, and I honestly from the stuff they -do- do in the game (factions as friction, combining servers, et cetera) all point toward the devs working with a limited population. I mean, RIFT is a very niche MMO to many.

At the same time though, I kinda have the mindset of "Saying the game is dying is irrelevant as long as you have your group of friends and people to play with, and the content keeps flowing."


I still get a dungeon queue within a minute or two as a healer, (I know almost instant for a tank :P). I can find a raid group PuG pretty much any time during the day. I still have 10-12 guildies around most of the time to chat with, the game has a huge expansion on the way as well as updates every 5-6 weeks. I feel content with the game.

[Redblade]

I agree it is not the best time to poll the numbers, however Riftstatus effctively polled the numbers continuously and shows teh decline over a long period of time, they implemented mercs because of declining numbers, etc, these are not opinions, they are facts.

As for full of holes, I think not, anyone who is honest and objective would not deny the signifcant decrease in Rift's population that has been going on for a long time now, not merely with an expansion coming up, indeed anyone that simply kept an eye on Riftstatus.

I'm sorry but Low, Medium, High says absolutely fuck all, without having factual numbers on what is Low, Mid, High any and all assumptions based on them are just pure guesswork, for all we know Trion could change what considered Medium once a month just as an example.

As for faction changes, I really don't know why most games didn't get rid of them already, two faction games rarely work and I'm guessing the only once really concerned about opposite factions would be role players, it's a natural evolution to the genre, in short, the faction design is dated and needs to evolve.

Perhaps the population dropped, perhaps it didn't and the players just play less, I would know as I just returned, I do however know that without actual numbers your theories are just that, theories with no factual support.

[Antipathy]

And I wouldn't use a companies PR (after all this is the company that denies shards get closed, because they go to "trial" for the "massive" influx of new players)

Use the PR of a company that hasn't over-promised and under-delivered? A Developer who has remained committed to providing bucketloads of content even when the game's population took a downtrun? who has kept their promises? when they give anyone reason to, I will be more than happy to start doubting them and playing the "PR" spin game. their messaging has always been straightforward and to the point, even with the "OOPPPS, we messed up" factor in place.

or pluck numbers out of the air that clearly don't match up with the actual numbers for anyone who followed the login stats on Riftstatus (and yes I am talking about in between server upgrades), or indeed their own eyes.

What numbers? other than napkin math examples, no one has any access to any information whatsoever on population data and trends. the only thing we do know is shard size, which we all acknowledge HAS changed. I'm sorry, but Low/Medium/High shard status means absolutely nothing to me or anyone else, considering that server architecture has changed, and that those figures can no longer be bench marked with past data .

And has I said in a previous post I don't merely use the number of shards to measure population, along with Riftstatus, I saw how the queues for warfronts got longer and longer, to the point they had to introduce mercs, how queues for dungeons got longer, how zones became deserted, that the number of people in sanctum / meridian dropped, how the number of people in World Events dropped, how some of the leading guilds quit, how they have bascially got rid of factions due to the lack of population, etc.

Yes, we both agree to this, essentially we are in agreement that populations have declined. Do you really have an issue that the developer introduced 2 unique and differentiated long term solutions to an address population trends everyone universally understands is a problem, not just in Rift but in every MMO? would you have preferred they kept all shards as is, charged you X for server transfers, or did absolutely nothing while they lost (say) 25% of their playerbase? I don't see what the issue here is whatsoever.

As for the official forums, you have to be joking, there have been numerous posts over the 14 months or so I played, about servers being dead, guilds collapsing, difficulty in recruiting, etc, you just have to look at the lack of actitivty on the server forums compared to a year ago, it is a joke.

A quick search for "Population" on the Rift Forums will show 3,000 threads on the subject of population (some of which are about US and EU server restructuring and server merges, players inquiring about sub numbers, etc) just to give you an idea, there are 84,000 threads in general discussion alone. I'm sorry, what? This is a game that offers FREE transfers to a shard of your choice on a weekly basis. Population isn't really the number one issue for most players. If Its a joke, I don't see anyone laughing sarcastically or comically.

I just logged into Rift, do you know how many lvl 50s there were on Bloodiron - 24, I also logged into Blightweald, when I searched for 50s and narrowed by class, the only class that maxed out the number of search results was mage, that is pathetic, I used to max out the class specific search results like that at 1am (and that was when only one faction showed up)., oh yes Argent - currently 44 level 50s, this is all at one of the peak play times late Sunday morning.

As others have pointed out, we are on Open Beta. My Rift Mobile App shows me 94 players are logged onto their RIfT Accounts via the APP (not necessarily in game) and this is just from my guild on Blightweald. Many players are stress testing, trying to get beta incentive title rewards for participating or PvP, and many others still are taking a break till SL hits.

We can all cope with criticism of Rift, but it really has to be grounded. "game is dying" because shards have decreased, features have been introduced into the game, and population "watch" site indices are really not grounds to make such claims. I think the measures developers have taken have radically improved the population situation and they are to be praised for being proactive.

Essentially, you are claiming that a game with track record of releasing 11 patches in 18 months and in the process of releasing an expansion adding a plethora of features and tripling world size is rapidly declining. To use your own lingo: "you have to be joking".

[theWocky]

yeah, I must admit I will pick up Rift again, but not WoW. I am currently subbed, but been busy catching up on some single player games.

Not trying to game-bash anyone, but the content that Rift pumps out is just so damn much to ignore.

They've tripled the game world in the new Expansion. I am really looking forward to November the 12th with absolute glee.

The game has undergone so many changes since release, so much content 18 months ago, it barely looks like the same game.

It is going to be absolutely amazing.

[willowe]

I don't pre-order. I pre-dominate.

So yes, I have pre-dominated Storm Legion. Oh, and I'm only subbed until April 5th, 2014.

2014.

[Valeron]

Debating whether to get the expansion or not. The game is well made but I think I'm pretty burnt out on traditional style mmos.

I'm having a decent time in the beta though so we shall see.

[Deleted]

I am on bloodiron have two lvl 50's I have been on today on my lvl 26 cleric my 50 is in beta that is where all the 50's are checking the number of one level out of 50 and using that figure is cherry picking, if sub numbers is what attracts you to a game go play something else, I play cos I have fun and Trion are giving me more fun things and that's on all my characters of various levels

[Deleted]

I am not currently doing pretty much anything, but ill be back for the expansion.
I will buy it, but not pre order it, since i am lev 42 since september.
My sub is running, as i said in the past, efford should be rewarded.
And trion puts the efford in thats for sure.
I am planning to log after a month and a half this week, can't wait to creat my own little dimension so i can invite my friends from the other side to cross over!

Saw many videos from beta regarding player housing, it is awesome!

[Deleted]

I think the poll says what I envisioned it would:

• About a third of the people that voted, will or have already preordered.
• About 10% will order but later due to RL reasons or because they don't generally preorder things.
• Another 10% said they won't preorder but didn't allude to whether they play. These may be RIFT Lite people that get out of the game what they want, people that are
• leaving soon or no longer playing or people who have played and follow the community but don't play any more.
• About a third that voted don't play RIFT. Expected but I wanted to have the option there so that some of the bogus "I vote on every poll, regardless" votes went into that basket.
• And obviously WARGLBRLEHEK! Obviously.

I think that's all folks. There are now two (and a half) pages of people debating arbitrary population numbers and their impact on the play experience. My thoughts:

1. Do we even know what the "population" label even means? Here's some things it could mean to show diversity:

- Number of characters actually situated on the realm
- Number of accounts with characters on the realm
- Number of characters played in the last 30 days on the realm
- Number of accounts with characters playing in the last 30 days on the realm
- Number of normalized log ons over the last 48 hours
- Number of average log ons over the last 30 days

EDIT: And that doesn't include permutations that take virtualized infrastructure into account where a login server, world server and storage are separated but presented as a single value.

The list goes on. Seriously, unless Trion comes out with what they define the "population" label for the High / Medium / Low value to be, the actual value is useless for this kind of debate / discussion. The only thing you can derive from it is whether you will have queues and if that's a concern then you have not to fear. RIFT no longer sports queues on the EU side afaik. Not sure for US.

2. If there are 3,000 active players on a realm you have enough people to befriend / guild / raid with to last you a good 1 or 2 years. I think RIFT has plenty of people on it for you to find someone to play with.

3. You decide what your criteria are for playing an MMO, it's all up to you. If a game having a perceived "high" population is important to you, then so be it. Obviously RIFT doesn't fill the amount of football stadiums you could with current WoW subscribers or the amount of people that bought Modern Warfare 3. I don't think it matters all that much. Whether you have access to dozens of thousands or 'mere' thousands - you still have a pretty big pool of people to befriend and do things with. Warhammer Online is 'dead' by gamers' standards but it took me all of 10 minutes to find a guild to do things with last I played (about a year ago).

4. PvP is a subgame that's all about "do whatever it takes". If you're not willing to play the spec necessary to win, you're gonna have a bad time. It's been like this in every MMO and it will continue to be. When exposed to other people you're supposed to rise to the occasion and become more flexible, not more entrenched. At least, that's how I see PvP and the way it's meant to be played. Have a 50/60/90 of every class that can fill your chosen role and roll with whatever works best for the competition you're in. Change your attitude to fit the work or change the work to fit your attitude. Don't like class balancing getting in the way? Good look playing any PvP at all, even 'stable' places like DotA 2 or Guild Wars have their constant hotfixes coming in that might throw your build off. I'm not saying RIFT PvP is in a great place, it's not. I haven't played much of it and I don't intend to. But just citing class balance as a main gripe isn't enough to convince imo.

5. I think I will get my money's worth in entertainment value from Storm Legion. I spend about 30+ hours a week playing games, and RIFT is currently my main time draw. If I spend even 3 months playing Storm Legion I will have the following entertainment/hour value:

Expansion + 3 months (1 month plan) = £61.96

Over 3 months I play 30 hours / week, release on 13/11/12, so end of polled time will be 13/2/13.
That comes to 13 weeks, 12 weekends total of 91 days - that's 390 hours of entertainment.
Say, reasonably, that I miss 3 weekends because of other engagements and miss 7 days because of other stuff like watching movies etc (my girlfriend plays RIFT as well so no worries there).
Weekends make up about half my time played in the week so I'm missing 45 hours plus another 15 or so. Total of 330 hours of entertainment.

£61.96 over 330 hours = £0.1875, so say £0.19 / hour of play. And that's with conservative values. I usually play closer to 4 hours a day during the week and a total of 20 on the weekend.

By contrast:
Going out to dinner - £50 if we're doing a normal restaurant. £50 over 4 hours = £12.50 / hour.
Movies + cheap burger place: £20 + £12. £22 over 4 hours = £5.50 / hour.
Hanging around reddit/9gag/imgur etc: nothing, but you pay in brain cells.
LOVEFiLM subscription: £9.99 for unlimited streaming and unlimited dvds/blu-rays (max 2 at a time). £9.99 for say 6 movies = 15 hours a week (that's a lot though): £9.99 / 15 hours = £0.67.
Spending the evening killing dragons and their minions: priceless.

Obviously it's not a like for like thing but at the end of the day, it's about how entertained you are. I am already very entertained and I haven't even played beta

TY for voting!

[Fencers]

Debating whether to get the expansion or not. The game is well made but I think I'm pretty burnt out on traditional style mmos.

I'm having a decent time in the beta though so we shall see.

It's still pretty much a bread & butter traditional MMO. :P

[lanerios]

I might, don't need it yet though. Started this morning with the game, level 21, and don't see any need to get it now

[Deleted]

Honestly, from launch, I could guarantee that the population has declined, and I honestly from the stuff they -do- do in the game (factions as friction, combining servers, et cetera) all point toward the devs working with a limited population. I mean, RIFT is a very niche MMO to many.

At the same time though, I kinda have the mindset of "Saying the game is dying is irrelevant as long as you have your group of friends and people to play with, and the content keeps flowing."

I still get a dungeon queue within a minute or two as a healer, (I know almost instant for a tank :P). I can find a raid group PuG pretty much any time during the day. I still have 10-12 guildies around most of the time to chat with, the game has a huge expansion on the way as well as updates every 5-6 weeks. I feel content with the game.

Congrats on being able to give a mature answer that some seem incapable of, I agree if you are in a settled guild then yes that can be fun even if the overall population is not that high.

However just to clarify why the population is important to me, is that I often play off-peak (it is past midnight as I type this), so am much more affected by a low pop at these off peak times when it comes to WF / Dungeons queues, being able to complete WE (if they even start, etc).

Anyway thanks for a sensible answer.

---------- Post added 2012-11-06 at 02:09 AM ----------

I'm sorry but Low, Medium, High says absolutely fuck all, without having factual numbers on what is Low, Mid, High any and all assumptions based on them are just pure guesswork, for all we know Trion could change what considered Medium once a month just as an example.

As for faction changes, I really don't know why most games didn't get rid of them already, two faction games rarely work and I'm guessing the only once really concerned about opposite factions would be role players, it's a natural evolution to the genre, in short, the faction design is dated and needs to evolve.

Perhaps the population dropped, perhaps it didn't and the players just play less, I would know as I just returned, I do however know that without actual numbers your theories are just that, theories with no factual support.

It says "fuck all" as you so nicely put it, to anyone who can't grasp the phrase "anyone who followed the login stats on Riftstatus" and doesn't have even a basic grasp of statistics and doesn't know what a trend is, it polls the login stats every 5 mins, and when they used to actively maintain the site they stated when the servers were upgraded (which happens months apart) and therefore to note the stats were not directly comaparable to the last lot. It has shown an overall downward trend for a year, with the odd plateau (which yes very occasionally is effected by server capacity increasing).

Or you can look at how queues got longer and they added mercs / larger wargroups, or how dungeon queues got longer, guilds complained about difficulty recruiting, etc and they effectively got rid of factions to combat that, or the trends on xfire, steam, etc, or the pathetic level of activity on the EU shard sub-forums, or simply by using your eyes and a bit of objectivity and seeing how many people are in cities, doing WE, the ghost towns that are many zones (especially on the shards other than Icewatch) etc.

Newsflash - games don't close servers unless they have to, because firstly it looks bad and secondly it upsets people who like / are settled into the community on their particular server.

Quite why you (and a coulpe of others) take it as some sort of personal insult, to have what is the bleedin obvious mentioned, that Rift has lost a lot of players, is a mystery, perhaps you would of preferred this poll to just have one option "yes, Rift is wonderful, everything is perfect - I have already ordered SL"?

---------- Post added 2012-11-06 at 02:16 AM ----------

Essentially, you are claiming that a game with track record of releasing 11 patches in 18 months and in the process of releasing an expansion adding a plethora of features and tripling world size is rapidly declining. To use your own lingo: "you have to be joking".

For some of what you wrote I refer you to the section above, and yes the game has rapidly declined especially on the PvP side, (new content doesn't change that, many games have trundled on with small populations), Bloodiron (the only PvP server left) whether you care to accept it or not, is a ghost town (and has been for some time), for much of its life it was one of the most heavily popualted servers in the EU, often higher than Icewatch.

And no I don't have an issue with Trion putting in things like mercs or removing factions to handle a decreasing population, I mentioned it because some people seem to be suffering from the delusion that the population has not signifcantly decreased, despite the fact features have been introduced specifically due to a decreasing population. So yes Trion do plenty of things right, they also do some things wrong or react too late, but then that makes them no different from any other game company.

And to repeat the clarification in my above post, why population is important to me, is I play off-peak much of the time, so a lower population has more pronounced effect on me.

[Edge-]

Alright, this is not a thread about "how many players does rift have" ect. ect.

Get back on topic please.

[Redblade]

Quite why you (and a coulpe of others) take it as some sort of personal insult, to have what is the bleedin obvious mentioned, that Rift has lost a lot of players, is a mystery, perhaps you would of preferred this poll to just have one option "yes, Rift is wonderful, everything is perfect - I have already ordered SL"?

I don't care about player count, just take issue with drawing conclusions based on arbitrary low/medium/high and queue times that can be attributed to a multitude of reasons. Just wanted to clarify that before dropping the discussion.

[Viantha]

Well just bit the bullet and bought the year + free xpac. Now to decide which archetype to level first...

[Jaronicity]

Initially, I voted "WARGLBRLEHEK", because I wanted to pre-order but hadn't yet due to laziness. You can now count me in as having done so .