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Subject: The First Month |
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It has been about a month since Rift went live and I suppose it comes as no surprise that the first month has been incredibly busy - everything from leveling from 1 to 50, invasion events, warfronts, gearing up with expert dungeons and even some raiding.
So how did it all go? Read more to find out about our first month in Telara.
Rift: Planes of Telara went live on February 24th in form of a headstart period (official launch took place on March 4th), looking back at the very first day, if I would have had to describe it with one word "chaotic" would be the first to come in mind. From the Defiant perspective, you as a player, take the role of an ascended who is resurrected in a machine born body in a future scenario where Regulos, the dragon of extinction (the main villain of the game) has consumed everything else on Telara save for the small area where the last remnants of the Defiant faction are taking their last stand on the day the world ends.
Most of the folks wanted to rush through the introductory area as fast as possible in hopes of reaching the actual gameworld fast enough to make it there before the bulk of the horde of new players arrive there as well - but despite the mad rush to reach the failsafe device at Terminus, which lore wise sends the players back in time to prevent the destruction of Telara (and in to the actual non-instanced gameworld) it quickly became pretty apparent that a lot of other players had the same idea.
The sight was quite something to behold: Hundreds of players, all rushing to the quest mobs and npc's while hoping to get their quest updates - but not only that, with the rift invasions (planes invading Telara via rifts) also scaling with the amount of players in the area it resulted in massive mob raids at the player quest outposts. Early on the majority of the invasions focused on the outpost of Kelari Refuge, where at one point of the evening you could more or less fight 30 minutes in a row against a seemingly endless horde of planar invaders that clashed on the beach with equally large horde of players, resulting in a zerg fest of epic proportions where players and the mobs kept fighting over the control of the outpost. For most part the server handled things pretty well, although at some point of the evening - the inevitable happened and the occasional lagspikes started hitting in.
But in overall, the launch day itself was rather smooth.
After that, things went around in quite an usual manner, people leveling up, getting to know new guildies be they applicants or previously from other branches of Xanadu, forming dungeon groups and generally pushing towards the max level. Some enjoying the leveling aspect more and some simply hoping that it would go by faster - but in general, as a game, I think most of the guild agrees that Rift released in quite a polished state with a decent amount of content - even though no MMO is perfect and Rift is no exception there. The game has its flaws, bugs, balancing issues and especially during the first couple of weeks the game was plagued with quite a lenghty login queues on the more popular servers such as Blightweald which we play on.
As far as raid content goes, Rift provides a decent amount of raid content for a game that has just launched: 10 man content wise, there are 4 raid rifts and 2 overland mobs (quest/weekly repeatable) and 20 man content wise, there is one raid instance which has 5 bosses. Out of these raids, perhaps in a little unexpected manner the 10 man raid rifts (which are not encounter locked, so doing them with a full 20 man raid is viable) have proven to be an excellent source for gearing up due to their "on demand" type of triggering that uses components from the group dungeons.
Even though the raid rifts may not be the most exciting form of raiding due to being aimed for more of an entry level content, and especially when done with more players than intended they become rather trivial. But for now the fun factor is still there and being able to get some decent loots does help.
Obviously our primary focus is on the 20 man raid content, which in this case is the instance called Greenscale's Blight, which is named after Greenscale the Primeval, a dragon of life/growth that is bound inside the cavern by death magic. While a big underground area may not sound like the most exciting place for a raid dungeon, the developer team has come up with a nice little gimmick that spices up things a little.
Soon after entering the instance, players will encounter Prince Hylas and his 3 lieutenants who are attempting to free Lord Greenscale. In order to buy himself some more time, Hylas teleports the players back to the cave entrance and conjures a gigantic hedge maze inside the cavern with his life magic. The maze then gets filled with mobs, and the players need to navigate through it to reach one of the lieutenants - after killing one of the bosses, the maze shifts in to another form and more mobs will spawn inside it, as well as the next lieutenant appears. This continues until all of them are dead and you are left to face Prince Hylas himself.
Once we started raiding, we downed the first of the lieutenants: Duke Letareus relatively fast on March 15th. However, for some reason or another, our progress at the instance was gated for about a week more by the next boss, Infiltrator Johlen which proved to be a source of many frustrating wipes at 5 to 1% HP remaining. But on March 22nd we finally managed to bring Johlen down, which was quickly followed by the 3rd boss Oracle Aleria on the same day. While the kills didn't fare that highly on the world wide list of the boss kills, we did manage to get shard (server) first for all 3 of the bosses.
As far as what the future holds: Trion promises that Rift will have what they would call an aggressive update schedule and this will start up with the patch 1.1 - which is scheduled to go live on either tomorrow or Thursday (depending on the NA/EU patch schedule with major updates), 1.1 will contain a new raid zone called River of Souls, as well as a week long world event which will lead to unlocking the said raid instance.
It will be interesting to see how regular these content additions will become and if the developer team really manages to push out polished content at regular intervals, but regardless of that, a proper content update just 30 days after the official launch is an impressive feat especially when looking back at some of the MMO releases in the past few years and their content patching speed.
For now though, we will focus on gearing up our characters and bringing down the remaining two bosses at Greenscale's Blight. That being said, I think that about wraps up the first of hopefully many news posts for Rift, oh and what would a news post be without some quotes from the guildchat?
Oh, you would think so wouldn't you? Not being online... Merely an inconvenience.

Must be some new form of roleplaying...

Some of our members just cant help it. 

Guardians are bad, mmkay?

The dentist did... what!?

[ Last modified by Ayame 2011-03-30 00:32 (Full Log)]
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2011-03-28 11:27 |
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2011-04-05 18:11 |
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2011-04-02 06:10 |
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2011-03-30 17:20 |
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OBrian |
2011-03-29 21:14 |
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Ayame |
2011-03-30 00:33 |
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Champagne |
2011-03-29 17:14 |
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Imaziel |
2011-03-29 15:38 |
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2011-03-29 14:51 |
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Xtrim |
2011-03-29 14:14 |
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2011-03-29 14:08 |
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2011-03-29 13:15 |
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FunGuy |
2011-03-28 13:24 |
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Kalbuir |
2011-03-29 13:40 |
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