What is your favorite place to relax in Rift?

What are you planning to do on this beautiful holiday? Are you going to hike or do you prefer relaxing at a quiet place – like we do in Rift?
Where is your favorite place to relax in Rift?

Take a screenshot of your favorite place to relax in Rift, together with your character and your name and post the screenshot in this thread.
The screenshot must show your favorite place to relax in Rift, your character and your character’s name!

Post your screenshot until May 24th, 2020 at 14:59 PT/21:59 UTC/23:59 CEST in this thread and you have the chance to win nice prizes!

Conditions of Participation:

• The general rules apply to this event.
• You can only participate once per forum account and player.
• You must indicate your character name and server and post your answer, including the screenshot showing your character, your character name and your favorite place to relax in Rift in the post of participation.
• Your screenshot may not be modified/edited.
• The deadline for general participation in the event is May 24, 2020 at 14:59 PT/21:59 UTC/23:59 CEST.
• The decisions of the team members are final.

We wish you all a wonderful holiday in Rift!

Have fun!
Your Rift Team

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Am I too late to get into this game?

It all depends on what you expect to get out of the game. There hasn't been an expansion in a very long time--there isn't likely to be any more expansions. But the game is not as "dead" as naysayers would have you believe--there are, indeed, people still playing it, and enjoying it; if there weren't, they wouldn't bother with keeping the servers up. Is population low? Compared to FF, WOW, ESO and the like, definitely. Is there no reason to bother? Not at all, depending on why you chose to play.

Even though the addition of new content has ground to a halt, and there is unlikely to be anymore, there is still a ton of content--a ton. Literally hundreds of hours of gameplay for free, hundred of hours of unique content, not the same content on a treadmill.

People are going to bring up the flaws--those flaws exist. No new content, no new raids, which is the source of most of the complaints. Also, class balancing at endgame is whack, that's true. Both of those complaints are at endgame; until the point you get to endgame, however, the game is fine.

Because of the age of the game, most of the playerbase is sitting at max level. They don't run low level content, so unless you join a guild that likes to run low level content, you will wait in a queue forever for a low level dungeon or PvP; it's effectively non-existent. Open world events go a long way to filling that void, however--many players, myself included, spend their playing time shard hopping, going from server to server whenever a zone event pops up. It's spontaneous and varied enough to be fun; it's rare to not find people participating (I should point out that that's the case for 3 of the 4 world maps; it's been my experience that people just don't participate in events on the Brevane/Duskin map, for whatever reason). Is it the same as dungeons? No, I'm not claiming it is. But it is group content, and it is still fun; that's not just my opinion, it's the opinion of others that participate.

If you're an "endgame is all that matters" player, then don't play. If you're a player that likes questing and exploring, then give it a shot--it doesn't cost you anything (oh, and don't bother spending any real money, for Prime or anything else, really, unless you just really want to; you'll get the gear that you need for open world content easily enough through questing). Questing, for the most part, isn't too bad and there's a ton of it. The quests are laid out pretty well, with most of the questing being story driven quests that encourage map exploration, with a minimal amount of boring fetch/escort quests (except for Planetouched Wilds, that zone can get bent). Mechanics are what you would expect from a game a decade old--this isn't action combat, it's old school tab-targeting/global cooldown; if that's not your thing, don't bother with the game. Graphics are still pretty good, for a game a decade old. If you don't enjoy games that don't threaten to melt your brand new video card, then don't play, it's not for you. There are some bugs, bugs that haven't been fixed for years, but I personally haven't come across many "game breaking" bugs; that's just my experience.

The short answer is, how do you play? Are you an intensive, late game, raid centric player? This game isn't for you. Are you a "I want a game to pass the time, that has a lot of content, and I can play for the low low cost of free" player? Then give it a go--you haven't lost anything.

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Why gaming is good for kids

As parents, you often hear terror-tales about how gaming and spending time online can be damaging to your child’s physical and mental health. This kind of fearmongering can lead to parents limiting screen time, or banning gaming altogether, but by excessively limiting the amount of technology children are exposed to, are you doing more harm than good? Read on to discover how gaming and modern technology can be beneficial for children. 

Gaming promotes teamwork

Modern technology really is a marvel, allowing children to play multiplayer games with other children all around the world. Kids can hop on their consoles, or log in to their game on their PC and join their friends on missions, without them having to be in the same room. This social interaction is more than just fun, and children are learning to play as a member of a team, speaking to one another using headsets, issuing commands and suggestions as they play. It is during these team games that children learn that cooperation is key to success and that squabbles and lack of cooperation can lead to a game ending abruptly.


Learning to multitask
Modern gaming involves being able to do multiple things at once, from moving characters from one destination to the next, and watching out for the approach of enemies, to picking up and using weapons, and searching for clues and objects. All this may be done at the same time as speaking with a fellow player via a headset, which adds to the complexity of the game.

Building confidence

In the real world, your child may be shy and you may see that when they retreat to their room to play computer games they are stepping away from the real world. However, video games can boost a child’s confidence by allowing them to express themselves via different characters, often those with a high status in the gaming world. It also gives them a common interest with other gaming enthusiasts so that when they interact with their classmates with the same interest in gaming, they have something to add to the conversation. Many children have a natural propensity for voicing opinions that adults may shy away from, as is shown on sites like Fabweb.Org, but other children that may lack the confidence to do so initially, could discover and unleash that confidence through the help of gaming.

Leadership skills

Gaming allows children to play roles they wouldn’t normally in real life, and it is in this environment that they can safely make mistakes while learning to lead characters and guide scenarios without any real -life repercussions. As they become more confident in their virtual roles, they may then become more confident making decisions in their everyday lives.

As with any hobby, gaming should be enjoyed in moderation, and games should always be age-appropriate, so do always check the games that your child is playing. With the right guidance, children can benefit immensely from online gaming and parents should not be unduly worried by their child’s interest in the gaming world.

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My thoughts on Rift's Health

Trion has been doing its best to hide Rift’s health for quite a bit of time. Nightmare Tide was a disaster for them: they came off an amazing expansion in Storm Legion, and simply failed to live up to what players and consumers had come to expect of them. Since then, the game has been plagued with buggy and unfinished content, and rampant moneygrabs in an attempt to quickly milk people for money.

Part of this is because Trion refuses to put more money into Rift’s development. The truth is, Rift is the only title making them money, and they’re trying to make too many other games without having the funds to do so. They don’t have the capital to do so, and aside from Rift they don’t have a good history of setting up other IPs. It is much like how CCP Games tried to put little money into EVE Online and funneled more into DUST 541 and World of Darkness, which led to the rebellion in 2011. WoD never happened, and DUST is being cancelled in…May, I think.

But beyond this is the attempt to silence the players who are not happy about the changes they have made. I’m in the middle of another suspension from the forums. A suspension I can’t see the reason for, because they’ve made any attempt to look at private messages or to look at the forums redirect to this screen detailing their excuse for banning you, and when it ends. Players who have spoken out vehemently against the decisions in third-party channels find themselves banned or suspended in-game, when they broke no rules (of course, Trion will always fall back on the “we don’t have to have a reason to ban you, and we don’t have to give you warning” excuse). What’s more, we’re not getting the classic e-mail from Trion, but Trion has no problems spamming inboxes of players who don’t log in for an extended amount of time, asking—nay, begging—people to come back and spend money. It’s shady is what it is.

No one expects perfection, but we expect maturity from PR people and game developers. Over the past year, that has been in short supply on Trion’s side.

I have never hidden who I am. In fact, when I began actively streaming and recording, I took on my callsign from my time in the Marine Corps: Spectre. Because I did hold a command, I made myself Spectre Six (Spectre_06), and I requested it be changed on the Rift forums to reflect this. So I’m not hiding my account or anything.

I have sunk $1,364.97 into the game, beyond my monthly subscription I paid for over two years time, from March 2013 to today. I am in red loyalty at this point. I am not some mooch or leech, and I have been active in the community. I would not have spent that much money—almost half of one BAH check with the post-9/11 GI Bill—if I did not think Rift had been worth it during Vanilla and Storm Legion. But I think it’s time I made my voice heard, since my writing seems to be a problem. I have made it clear my problems with the game in the past, so now I take to YouTube. I removed my previous videos decrying Trion’s incompetence in many areas (my blog posts remain, though), so this may be the beginning of a series on Trion, if they can’t start listening to the playerbase and taking what we say to heart.

Feel free to watch the video here:



Chime in with your comments, if you think I’m right or wrong, and the like.

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Paying credits for minion missions, more locked caches, and more account bound items.

A few things I've noticed over the last week-

Locked Hammernknell Nightmare Caches: The kind you get from the Hammerknell instants. They're locked now. You need some kind of key to open them. I'm not even sure where to get them. So they're taking some of the best IAs, and making their rewards even less accessible? IAs are one of the things that makes Rift Rift.

Minion missions that cost credits: I send six minions out at a time on 8 hour missions. I can usually rotate two shifts of 8 hour missions a day. Now, at least one mission per shift pops up that costs like 150 credits. So you can pay the credits (the loot for them is better), pay the adventurine to shuffle, just not go on the mission, or pay adventurine and go out on 10 hours.

I guess Trion doesn't want players who have already paid for extra minion slots to actually use them? At least without not having to pay even more credits to use something they already paid credits for? If you pay for the missions, you could end up paying an extra 300 credits a day easy just for minion missions. Maybe the AH is full of all the stuff people are farming off the minions and Trion doesn't like it? Double taxation much, Trion?

Even More Account Bound items: A good while back one of my fellow wardrobe aficionado friends was complaining they didn't have Weeding Garb, so I ran down to the wedding shop in Tempest Bay, bought one and mailed it out. So now we have the flipped wedding garb, which is great. I run down and buy two. I go to mail one out to my friend, and low and behold, it's account bound.

Come on Trion. With all the crap they've pulled down on themselves, you think you'd want to burrow out of it. But that can't happen when you reach into every aspect of the game and make it progressively worse.

I guess on one hand, this is the "ripping of the bandaid" technique. Let's pile all the hurt on at once so we can get it over with now. Let's just kill the F2P model dead, deal with one massive killing off of accounts instead of trying to survive a death of a thousand cuts.

I will say though, on the player end, that this is feeling more and more like a death of a dozen cuts.

I really hope that all this nickle and diming is to prepare for something truly better, something truly worth sacrificing for and not just the death throes of a game that resents the lofty goals of it's youth. If you're really done being F2P, just own it and come out about it. You would feel better, your playes would feel better.

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