Rifts major problem is that you NEED a heavy populated server for rifts to be fun. even medium servers have rough time clearing off an invasion at non-prime time hours. hell my server was HIGH but i normally play late at night and i saw places over run with invasions with no hope of clearing them with the amount of people on at those hours.
Still? I thought they learned this lesson with WAR, as public quests had like 1-2 people in them... I was under the impression that rifts would scale to the population.
Actually it should be doing that .something is wrong here
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Rifts major problem is that you NEED a heavy populated server for rifts to be fun. even medium servers have rough time clearing off an invasion at non-prime time hours. hell my server was HIGH but i normally play late at night and i saw places over run with invasions with no hope of clearing them with the amount of people on at those hours.
Still? I thought they learned this lesson with WAR, as public quests had like 1-2 people in them... I was under the impression that rifts would scale to the population.
Actually it should be doing that .something is wrong here
I remember in beta that the University would be crawling with level 12-14 elites. Seeing as the University hub was for 7-8th levels, you either had to wait til' a raid party came by, or just give up getting or turning in those quests.
But that was during beta, where there were plenty of players. But now, with fewer low level players, how low might they be able to go? "I'm an invading horde from the natural plain!!!".
I hope you realise that xfire is only good at predicting trends and not absolute numbers, right?
Checking a game and noticing a 50% drop in played time is a valid way to predict subscription loss.
Having game A and game B and compare their numbers is not, since you don't know the exact percentage of people that both play the games and use xfire at the same time.
Let us see. Both are fantasy based mmorpg's, both used the internet and forum hypes to sell subs and copies, both use the PC as a gaming tool and both are in direct competition with each other (aka Wow clones).
After the offered free playing time in the launching period , there is hardly any difference between the number of playing values between a 1.5 year old game and a game in its 3 months launching period (while losing 70% compared to the launching days ...)
Try 40%, it's around 60% of its launch month population currently.
I can see one huge difference between Aion and Rift though:
Aion is played on 7 servers in the west while Rift has ... 99 servers, but hey they are all tagged as "medium".
So no problem for the fans, because we have "server transfers", going from one medium tagged server to another one.
Sounds like typical smalltown thinking to me.Worldwide Aion has something about 80-100 servers, and those are servers that can handle 30k players per server, and iirc Aion made NCSoft 200-300 million dollars in revenues for 2010.
If you want to use XFire for cross game population comparisons (which I think is wrong, too many errors in it), then you might as well use EVE since those sub numbers are known. Based on those Rift is hovering around 500k players. Not that I think such comparative calculations are valid, but just saying.
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums: Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
Rifts major problem is that you NEED a heavy populated server for rifts to be fun. even medium servers have rough time clearing off an invasion at non-prime time hours. hell my server was HIGH but i normally play late at night and i saw places over run with invasions with no hope of clearing them with the amount of people on at those hours.
Still? I thought they learned this lesson with WAR, as public quests had like 1-2 people in them... I was under the impression that rifts would scale to the population.
At some point, devs have to see that requiring high populations for their games to be good is a tough game design approach. WAR's lesson should have been learned but perhaps it was too late for them to change their mind.
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what
it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience
because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in
the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you
playing an MMORPG?"
11 weeks after launch: announcing a free server transfer every weekend (forget free to chose though as everyone will be picking the same 3 servers...)
Server merges will likely be coming. Scott Hartsman stated in a March interview he felt merges were both normal and expected. Cannot find the link right now.
12 weeks after launch: 50% price cuts.
Not price cuts. Sales. Rift is currently $49 at riftgame.com and 38.98 for the download at Amazon.
End resul after exactly 3 months: the game has the same number of players as Aion on Xfire (probably 150K in real life figures).
False. Rift has 19% more hours logged (11824 vs 9965) and 38% more players (2712 vs. 1966) on xfire as of May 31. Rift has the same numbers that it had at the beginning of May. And you forgot to mention that Rift is still the 10th most played game and 4th most played mmorpg behind WoW, the re-released APB, and (does this even count as an mmorpg?) League of Legends.
... Can we say the game doesn't have real staying power beyond the first free month playing time.
So... I guess less than 10 games have staying power by your definition?
I think we can.
Well, if you say so.
I was pleasantly surprised when I went from Apprentice to full 5 star Elite in under 2 months. I was pleasantly surprised again when I went from Elite to just barely Hardcore in 2 weeks. Apprentice, here I come!
11 weeks after launch: announcing a free server transfer every weekend (forget free to chose though as everyone will be picking the same 3 servers...)
Server merges will likely be coming. Scott Hartsman stated in a March interview he felt merges were both normal and expected. Cannot find the link right now.
12 weeks after launch: 50% price cuts.
Not price cuts. Sales. Rift is currently $49 at riftgame.com and 38.98 for the download at Amazon.
End resul after exactly 3 months: the game has the same number of players as Aion on Xfire (probably 150K in real life figures).
False. Rift has 19% more hours logged (11824 vs 9965) and 38% more players (2712 vs. 1966) on xfire as of May 31. Rift has the same numbers that it had at the beginning of May. And you forgot to mention that Rift is still the 10th most played game and 4th most played mmorpg behind WoW, the re-released APB, and (does this even count as an mmorpg?) League of Legends.
... Can we say the game doesn't have real staying power beyond the first free month playing time.
So... I guess less than 10 games have staying power by your definition?
I think we can.
Well, if you say so.
I think one is way too pessimistic and the other a little optimistic. Rift with find its groove. Not everything has to be a douch-filled "WoW Killer" to be a success and make money. As long as the game genereates a growing and steady profit, they will continue to invest money in it. "Box Prices" of games are continually dropping and rapidly at that since develpers have discovered taht they will get most of their box money off of the initial players anyway- they might as well give the damn game away for the first month's price with maybe a little premium to add value (EVE Online?) 3-6 months out- the real money's in a healthy subscriber base anyway.
Someone told me the developers were looking into server merges already. Has it even been 3 months yet?
Even if they did merge a few they had no choice but to open a bunch in the beginning because they were SWAMPED with players. Rift is an excellent example of current generation mmos, but with the same tired MMO formula getting stale, it will gradually lose popularity the same way WoW currently is past it's peak - but that's a story for another thread.
Originally posted by jpnole Originally posted by -Zeno- Someone told me the developers were looking into server merges already. Has it even been 3 months yet?
Even if they did merge a few they had no choice but to open a bunch in the beginning because they were SWAMPED with players. Rift is an excellent example of current generation mmos, but with the same tired MMO formula getting stale, it will gradually lose popularity the same way WoW currently is past it's peak - but that's a story for another thread.
Only because of the terrible design choice to only have 1 set of zones for lvl 1-20 characters per side.
Comments
Actually it should be doing that .something is wrong here
You happen to be playing on the one or two servers where players are gravitating towards, other peoples results are varying.
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I remember in beta that the University would be crawling with level 12-14 elites. Seeing as the University hub was for 7-8th levels, you either had to wait til' a raid party came by, or just give up getting or turning in those quests.
But that was during beta, where there were plenty of players. But now, with fewer low level players, how low might they be able to go? "I'm an invading horde from the natural plain!!!".
Sounds like typical smalltown thinking to me.Worldwide Aion has something about 80-100 servers, and those are servers that can handle 30k players per server, and iirc Aion made NCSoft 200-300 million dollars in revenues for 2010.
If you want to use XFire for cross game population comparisons (which I think is wrong, too many errors in it), then you might as well use EVE since those sub numbers are known. Based on those Rift is hovering around 500k players. Not that I think such comparative calculations are valid, but just saying.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
At some point, devs have to see that requiring high populations for their games to be good is a tough game design approach. WAR's lesson should have been learned but perhaps it was too late for them to change their mind.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
I was pleasantly surprised when I went from Apprentice to full 5 star Elite in under 2 months. I was pleasantly surprised again when I went from Elite to just barely Hardcore in 2 weeks. Apprentice, here I come!
New event is on the PTR by the way. I have no idea about its quality, but they keep pumping content.
I think one is way too pessimistic and the other a little optimistic. Rift with find its groove. Not everything has to be a douch-filled "WoW Killer" to be a success and make money. As long as the game genereates a growing and steady profit, they will continue to invest money in it. "Box Prices" of games are continually dropping and rapidly at that since develpers have discovered taht they will get most of their box money off of the initial players anyway- they might as well give the damn game away for the first month's price with maybe a little premium to add value (EVE Online?) 3-6 months out- the real money's in a healthy subscriber base anyway.
A witty saying proves nothing.
-Voltaire
Rift started with way too many servers at the beginning anyways, if they started with half of what they did then all servers would be full.
I currently play on wolfsbane and not enjoying the 3 hour queues on weekends just to get on.
Even if they did merge a few they had no choice but to open a bunch in the beginning because they were SWAMPED with players. Rift is an excellent example of current generation mmos, but with the same tired MMO formula getting stale, it will gradually lose popularity the same way WoW currently is past it's peak - but that's a story for another thread.
Only because of the terrible design choice to only have 1 set of zones for lvl 1-20 characters per side.