1. #1
    Herald of the Titans Slipmat's Avatar
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    Rift Update 4.4 - PTS Datamining



    With all the talk focused around Rift Prime, a sneaky 1.12GB update hit the PTS yesterday in anticipation of Rift Update 4.4 and Carnival Event starting soon.

    Intrepid dataminer Clowd has dived right in and managed to grab some new assets and sneakie peeks or what 'should' be coming, you can read it all here :

    https://www.thegharstation.com/2018/...-and-carnival/

    Seems we are getting all the Blood Dragons as mounts, except Akylios?



    So far what's datamined suggest a new Warfront, Instant Adventures added to Droughtlands and Moonshade Highlands, which didn't have them previously, no doubt more will be revealed as Clowd digs deeper into the PTS datmining.

    Some interesting finds about Rift Prime as well, seems Greenscale's Blight at level 50 will have a hard mode as well as LFR changed for 20-man raids and a normal version.

  2. #2
    Maybe it'll have more than 2 pieces of content this time? Y'know rather than trying to advertise 2 pieces of content as a "major patch" like 4.3 did.

    Not that it matters since it'll be of subpar quality as usual.

  3. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by Eleccybubb View Post
    Maybe it'll have more than 2 pieces of content this time? Y'know rather than trying to advertise 2 pieces of content as a "major patch" like 4.3 did.
    4.4 looks to be more than a raid and a new soul.

    4.4 list includes:
    - New carnival of the Ascended items
    - Instant Adventures for Moonshade highlands and Droughtlands
    - Tenebran Prison warfront
    - All of Rift prime's features (a nice chunk of UI assets were updated with this PTS patch)

    So, new PvE content, and PvP content, which basically covers everything from the Rift On announcement except for the new Intrepid: Greenscale's Blight raid. Whether this is what you want or like or not is up to you to decide.

    LFR/Normal/Hard mode Greenscale's Blight for Prime surprised me. I believe it is a contributing reason to postponing it's opening at the launch of Prime.

  4. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by clowd View Post
    4.4 looks to be more than a raid and a new soul.

    4.4 list includes:
    - New carnival of the Ascended items
    - Instant Adventures for Moonshade highlands and Droughtlands
    - Tenebran Prison warfront
    - All of Rift prime's features (a nice chunk of UI assets were updated with this PTS patch)

    So, new PvE content, and PvP content, which basically covers everything from the Rift On announcement except for the new Intrepid: Greenscale's Blight raid. Whether this is what you want or like or not is up to you to decide.

    LFR/Normal/Hard mode Greenscale's Blight for Prime surprised me. I believe it is a contributing reason to postponing it's opening at the launch of Prime.
    New Warfront is fair enough. IA are always welcome. Upscale of yet another raid? This is the 2nd time they've just upped the difficulty of a raid this expansion and called it new.

    So it doesn't seem like much at all. 3 pieces of content at most.

    Now the issue is with LFR. Considering it's lack of popularity in the live client and how it can break sometimes they better bloody fix it for prime. The whole point of a matchmaking system is to be able to queue for it yourself with things such as LFD/LFR. And right now on live solo queuing is well... dead.

    Maybe it'll have participation in Prime but well I don't expect that to last in popularity due to the way they are handling it personally.

    I will thank you for the datamining though. I know it does eat up time for you. But it just seems business as usual with the live client from my 2 cents.
    Last edited by Eleccybubb; 2018-02-25 at 03:37 PM.

  5. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by Eleccybubb View Post
    Maybe it'll have participation in Prime but well I don't expect that to last in popularity due to the way they are handling it personally.

    I will thank you for the datamining though. I know it does eat up time for you. But it just seems business as usual with the live client from my 2 cents.
    Business as usual for live, I agree. It seems most dev time has been focused on Rift prime since 4.3 (and most likely earlier than 4.3 when they got this all started).

  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by clowd View Post
    Business as usual for live, I agree. It seems most dev time has been focused on Rift prime since 4.3 (and most likely earlier than 4.3 when they got this all started).
    I just don't think that much dev time cost 1/3 of the patch content personally.

    Just twice they've upscaled a raid now which is kind of lazy in the raiding department.

    But as I said new IA/Warfronts are always welcome.

    Clowd as someone such as yourself who is very embedded within Rift externally I'd like to ask you a fair question.

    Yes the resources have dropped in the years over in the Rift department but can you honestly say the quality of the game remained the same after F2P?

    And considering what Prime is imo I don't think that much dev time was spent on downgrading a patch. From what I read on that matter more people wanted Classic than this so they could play the old hybrids.

    It's like they looked at that stupid Pristine Server idea Blizzard had and thought "yep that's gonna make us good again". Which was abandoned because even Blizzard knew the players didn't want that. But alas that's for another thread.
    Last edited by Eleccybubb; 2018-02-25 at 03:57 PM.

  7. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by Eleccybubb View Post
    Clowd as someone such as yourself who is very embedded within Rift externally I'd like to ask you a fair question.

    Yes the resources have dropped in the years over in the Rift department but can you honestly say the quality of the game remained the same after F2P?
    I do believe that the overall quality of Rift's content was better through Storm Legion. I do feel that there was a dip as they changed directions on a few things in Nightmare Tide, but I acknowledge that the team was starting to shrink even then, and continued to do so though Nightmare Tide and into Prophecy of Ahnket. Manpower significantly impacts the quality potential, and that has been slowly decreasing over the years.

    From my interactions with the devs, I do believe that the team is doing the best they can with the current size they have.

    Quote Originally Posted by Eleccybubb View Post
    And considering what Prime is imo I don't think that much dev time was spent on downgrading a patch. From what I read on that matter more people wanted Classic than this so they could play the old hybrids.

    It's like they looked at that stupid Pristine Server idea Blizzard had and thought "yep that's gonna make us good again". Which was abandoned because even Blizzard knew the players didn't want that. But alas that's for another thread.
    Rift Prime came out of the Rift challenge server ideas, which existed as far back as the start of 4.0, and maybe even earlier than that. The idea was proposed before Blizzard even announced that they were going to do a "WoW Classic/Pristine" server, which was November 2017. Rift challenge servers were talked about on Discord as far back as January 2017, I think I did a dev chatter on this, I'd have to double check.

    As best as I can tell, this idea is born moreso out of similar ideas in Everquest 1 and 2, where a subscription gives you access to a special Progression server, with maybe a few new gameplay rules, a heavily reduced cash shop, and a system of unlocking content over time. I do not think it is not fair to compare Rift Prime to WoW Classic servers, or even to say that Prime was born of that idea. All of this has roots in the MMO emulation community that originally built servers to lock a game to a specific time period (see: EQ1's project 1999, or the level 75 locked FF11 servers for examples).

    As for Prime going back to classic and opening the old hybrids. I've talked to devs, they all say that due to the way the game was back then, and how even Trion's account systems work now, reverting to that would actually be an extreme amount of work that they couldn't justify for this iteration of Prime.

    To address "dev time for downgrading a patch" - there is a lot more going into prime than just a simple downgrade. There is the implementation of content locking mechanism, an expansion of the LFR to 20-man instances (the live version only supports 10-man), per-zone level scaling, adjusting balance, flagging lots of gear to no longer be soulbound, changing rules for drops. The list is actually fairly extensive with what Prime provides that is different, it it not a simple downgrade to an older patch that some people think it is.

    Now, I do believe that some of the language that Trion is/has used for Prime has lead many players to believe that the server will bring back the launch souls, when that clearly isn't the case. I've personally been trying to clear that up whenever and wherever I can. I know that some players will abandon Prime as soon as they realize they won't have launch souls, and I do fear for the level 50 balance of Prime.

    It could succeed, it could fail. If they have taken the time to properly balance things for the current souls at 50, I think things could be alright. Time will tell, I'll be watching and playing (eh, I like progression servers, call it a weakness).

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