http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqqT-redSJ0
Hello ladies. Look at your video, now look back. This is what your video could look like if you parodied Old Spice. This advertisement for Rift may not be the most unique, but at least worth a chuckle or two.
Trion is happy to celebrate Rift’s half-birthday. So happy, in fact that the developer is opening the game up to new and previous players alike, to enjoy the game free of charge for seven days. Starting when the servers come back up today (following a patch) and running through August 31st, you’ll be able to simply create an account or sign in with your existing account, and enjoy all that Rift has to offer. Current subscribers are not left in the dust, and will enjoy bonus experience including bonus guild experience.
Read more about the celebrations here, including information on some meta-game contests Trion has planned. The servers are expected to come back up around noon EST (GMT -5).
Trion is happy to celebrate Rift’s half-birthday. So happy, in fact that the developer is opening the game up to new and previous players alike, to enjoy the game free of charge for seven days. Starting when the servers come back up today (following a patch) and running through August 31st, you’ll be able to simply create an account or sign in with your existing account, and enjoy all that Rift has to offer. Current subscribers are not left in the dust, and will enjoy bonus experience including bonus guild experience.
Read more about the celebrations here, including information on some meta-game contests Trion has planned. The servers are expected to come back up around noon EST (GMT -5).
Alright everyone, pitchforks and torches are in the barrels to your right, lighter fluid and booze to be handed out liberally and excessively. In an article on Gamasutra, Trion’s own David Reid made a few statements on premium MMOs and the subscription model. He mentions how companies need to adapt and evolve in order to survive an increasing demanding market with more and more cheap alternatives sprouting every day. Trion is currently running Rift, with upcoming free to play RTS End of Nations and upcoming shooter Defiance that will run hand-in-hand with the Syfy show of the same name.
“It’s a lot harder to make your money back in the premium games space than it used to be,”
More importantly, David Reid mentioned that Rift carries over one million customers, and is the second most subscribed game in the west. Once again, pitchforks and torches to your left, booze on the right. Help yourselves.
Thanks to Trion, there are now two very happily married nerds in the lands of Telara. If you think that’s impressive, just wait until my marriage hits The Old Republic with a bang, and what says I love you more than massacring Jar Jar Binks’ ancestors before the annoying little cretin is born?
If you are a founder of Rift (bought the game very early or signed up for the founder’s multi-month package), you should be receiving a free copy of Rift to gift someone you know. Each copy comes with the standard edition plus five days of free game time.
RIFT is always more fun when friends can share in the glory of battle. To thank you for your continuing support as one of RIFT’s multi-month subscription founders, here is a free copy of RIFT you can gift to a friend. Spread the excitement and raise another ally in the fight against the dragons! Make sure your friend signs up through the Ascend-a-Friend program to enjoy linked accounts and bring you one step closer to your Ember Steed. Forward this email to your soon-to-be Ascended friend today, because this code is only good until July 31, 2011.
Regards,
The RIFT Team
The code is only good until July 31st, offering plenty of time to decide upon, or go hunting for, a friend to give the code to.
Former rift players, you’ve likely received an email from Trion regarding a welcome back week beginning today and lasting until July 19th. Excitedly (or with a simple motion of interest), you probably went to log in only to find yourself blocked by a “thank you for your interest, but you need to resubscribe” message. Trion is in the process of reactivating old accounts, and unfortunately the email was sent out earlier than expected to a lot of people. The following was posted by Trion’s Elrar on the forums:
Hey all,
We’re currently working to enable the 7 free days on all returning players accounts. The emails jumped the gun a bit as activating all accounts may take some time to complete, we’ll provide an announcement once all returning players can take advantage of the event.
Apologies for the confusion, but you do not need to setup a subscription, once your account is re-activated the only thing you’ll need to do is log in to the game – hang tight until the activations are complete.
Thanks!
I will update this once the process is complete, or you can just wait until later on to try and log in.
I skipped This Week in Review last week because I only had three days worth of posts for the previous week. This week, I want to continue the Week in Review articles by starting out with a question, and it pertains to Star Wars Galaxies. It’s always a downer to hear that an MMO you play is shutting down. If you currently play the game. do you continue playing until the game shuts down, or do you consider any more invested money a waste? If you were an ex-player, do you rejoin to savor some memories or to see the game off, or do you stay away? If there is free time, do you take advantage of it?
But enough of that, what happened this week?
This one is obvious: not much. It’s important to remember that Star Wars was canned because Sony and Lucas Arts decided it to be the best decision rather than renew the contract at the end of the year, likely partially because LA doesn’t want two full Star Wars MMOs on the market, even if they wouldn’t really compete (two completely different points in time).
Looking at Sony’s other lineup, it’s safe to say neither Everquest nor Everquest II are going anywhere, the two games just make too much money. Free Realms makes a lump of cash, as does Pirates of the Burning Sea and Clone Wars Adventures. DC Universe is still trucking along with the server meld bringing the community closer together.
My only title of note is Vanguard. Although Sony has expressed interest in taking Vanguard free to play, doing so would require a good investment of capital, one that the company could deem not worth it ultimately. If I had to choose one game from the list, Vanguard would be high on the list, although likely not #1 as the game has barely any overhead left. Most likely, I would say Planetside, although I believe Sony will time Planetside shutting down with the release of Planetside Next.
Trion reminds me of Blake from Glengarry Glen Ross with his ability to tie “good news” and “you’re fired” in the same sentence. If you haven’t been paying attention, Trion recently announced that a few servers would be transferred over to “trial” status, where free trial players would be segregated off to. Of course players have the option, and you will be suggested to do so upon logging in, to transfer off of the server, free of charge.
Who says Trion doesn’t know innovation? This is probably one of the most subtle ways to merge servers I’ve seen in the history of MMO Fallout, nay, the history of the genre. Character creation has been disabled for non-trial users on those servers, and the restrictions for under level 15 characters are being removed in the near future so all of your currently made characters can leave the server. There are a lot of trial-tagged servers, too. Around twenty, from my understanding.
Perpetuum Online! That game I talked about that one time with the place and the thing. With all the talk of people leaving Eve (Over four thousand committed to unsubscribing so far, according to the Eve forums), their natural destination should be Perpetuum Online, right? The game is essentially Eve on the ground, and with mechs instead of space ships. If you said yes, you would be correct.
Over in the forums, Perpetuum has been hit with some good, healthy (for the wallet) overpopulation, resulting in queue lines to log in. I don’t normally laugh at MMO drama, but this is pretty funny. It’s like a picture of a concert, where the band is giving the middle finger to the audience who are, in turn, giving it back.
Thinking back, perhaps CCP is in the same situation as Cryptic Studios. Sure, the game they run is raking in the cash, but that profit may be dwarfed by the development costs of their other games. CCP has DUST 514 in development for the PS3, and we all know how expensive PS3 development is, as well as World of Darkness. The cash shop may be a way to supplement their income and get the games out faster, but it’s a prescription that is not fitting well with the community.
But as many Eve players have noted, the price of the cash shop items barely factors in. Where the players are getting angry isn’t in CCP’s initial action, but in the response given to the controversy. You can read the events in the Eve Online category on this blog but for a quicker image, just go back to my concert analogy.
Down to brass tacks, if as many players are leaving as committed (over four thousand and growing) and stay gone, this could put a serious damper in CCP’s development of DUST 514 and World of Darkness.
So much for the forum users claiming Rift had sold over a million copies since launch. According to Trion in an interview with Gamasutra, Rift is nearing its 1 millionth sale. Interestingly enough, VP of publishing David Reid also revealed that the 1 millionth customer, and whoever they refer, will get something special from Trion.
“We are on the verge of selling our 1 millionth unit of Rift,”
For some members of the community, Rift’s health has been in question since Trion announced the introduction of weekly allowed server transfers for no fee. With this announcement, Trion hopes to alleviate those concerns, while planting the idea that the free transfers are simply intended to be a convenience for players.
“The subscription market is not dying, we’re clearly seeing that. The MMORPG market is not declining. We believe a quality product is going to continue to be something that gamers are willing to pay for as long as we continue to run the service as we should,”
In an interview with Gamefront, Scott Hartsman made a great point on the evolution of the community:
Back in the day, WAY back in the day, in the Everquest, Ultima Online days, nobody had real life friends that played online games, so you made all your friends online. These days, you have friends all over the place, and you probably do have real life friends playing the game. The world has changed a little bit. For us, we want to make sure that when you suddenly discover that your buddy from college or from the old job is playing on another server, you can click a button and go play with him. Chances are, you’re going to be happy, you’re going to stick around longer, and then everybody wins.
More on Rift as it appears.
[Update]
I apparently picked the worst time to write this. The news is in, and server transfers will be allowed once a week, for free, and will allow even entire guilds to transfer including all of their items, titles, and achievements. Guild Leaders can move their guild and levels and perks.
Hey, Rifters. It’s been a couple months since Rift launched, and your server may be feeling the effects of what doctors refer to as “a lack of population.” Currently (11:59am EST on a Monday) all of the servers are on medium, with two servers at high load. That being said, Trion is still listening, and is working on allowing players to transfer servers. In a post on the forums, Elrar stated:
We’ve seen renewed discussion lately asking about character transfers and how we plan to allow more of you to play together and enjoy RIFT with friends. While it has been mentioned in interviews we wanted to clearly state that a character transfer feature is currently under development. We’re still ironing out the details which we will share as we get closer to its release, however, we wanted to let you know today that it is something we’re actively working on.
Server transfers. No doubt Rift has a lot of servers, and hopefully the transfers will keep the community active and interacting.
MMO Fallout 