We’ve just had some mildly amazing information about the upcoming changes for Rift’s 5th Beta phase. They’ve obviously been extremely busy over the last couple of weeks since phase 4.
Public Grouping is the biggest change, but as a Rogue I’m also pretty excited about the changes to Rogue energy regeneration.
The changes detailed under “Invasion Improvements” sound like they may deal with many of the concerns I’ve had with invasions in my liveblog. Many times I found myself facing invasions many times more powerful than anyone in the vicinity had any hope of standing up to. Hopefully things will scale a little more sensibly from now on.
Current Beta players all received a 25 use key this week, so we can expect this next phase to be pretty packed. If anybody hasn’t already gotten their hands on one, drop me a comment and I’ll sort you out.
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Beta 5 Preview!
We’ve tried to take as much advantage of the relative calm between Beta 4 and Beta 5 as we possibly could. Here are some of the highlights to look forward to in Beta 5 tomorrow. We’d like to detail a number of them and also shed some light on a few things for Beta 6 and beyond.
New For Beta 5
We’re expecting Beta 5 to be at least twice as big as beta 4! By the end of Beta 4, we were running a total of 18 servers. 8 in our Europe datacenter and 10 in the US. This time we’re opening up with 16 in each region, for a total of 32 servers, all with higher population caps, more than doubling the number of people who can be online at once.
If you get caught in too long of a queue during the middle of beta, know that we’ll be keeping an eye out to see if we need to open even more.
Public Grouping. This was a big one for us — just about the single most requested item — and we’re really happy to have it in game for you to try out already.
First, as you’re wandering around the world and target people, if they’re solo or ingroups/raids that are willing to accept new public members, you’ll see a new button in the target frame that lets you join their group or merge your group into theirs if it fits.
Continue reading Rift Beta 5 Preview Information Released
Trion Developers Aaron Hooten and Gavin Irby, the designers behind the Scarlet Gorge zone, just got off RiftIRC where they shed light on some of the zone’s secrets. Scarlet Gorge is the first zone you encounter that is shared between the factions, so is likely to also be the first time many players encounter World PvP.
Below, I’ve done my best to organise the sometimes chaotic chat into individual questions and answers:
<Rifty> Motorboat asks: Can I ride on that cable-boat thing in the video?
<Gavin> Hell yeahz you can
<Aaron> Depending on your level of “scared of hieghtsyness,” yes.
<Gavin> I’m just going to ride and do knockbacks on other players all day
Continue reading Rift Scarlet Gorge Devchat Log – 21st January, 2011
This is a rather ancient post I made on my original website, long before the days of such useful things as blogs or WordPress. I’ve cleared out most of the posts from that time, and am in the process of tidying the rest away, but I thought this might provide a small amount of entertainment. It was the year 2000, and a pattern had already begun to emerge. Some monsters were ubiquitous. Today you might poke fun at the boars, but back then the little chap that was everywhere was the rat.
Continue reading Two by Two – The Rat
Today I received this handy bit of information regarding the upcoming merger of my EQ2 server:
Greetings from Norrath!
Hail, Adventurer!
On or around February 14th, 2011 at 12:00 AM (PST), EverQuest® II will begin the process of merging the Lucan D’Lere server to the Crushbone server, with the goal
of providing an even better gameplay experience for everyone. Please check EverQuest2.com periodically for any further updates on this scheduled server merge.
Preserve your Legacy!
As a result of the merge, some character names may be duplicated. Players who have logged in within the past sixty (60) days will be given priority in keeping their character’s name (see below for more details).
As you may have additional concerns related to this event, we are providing the following information (and have additionally posted an FAQ page on our Knowledge Base) in an effort to answer as many commonly asked questions as we can.
Server Merge Rules
Character Names
- In the event of duplicate character names as a result of this server merge, priority will be given to the character who has logged in to the game within the past sixty (60) days; if both characters have logged in within the past sixty (60) days, then the character which has accrued the most gameplay time overall will retain its name. Other characters will have an “x” added to their names until a unique name has been determined.
- Players with a character whose name has been affected by the server merge can type “/rename” in their in-game chat window and receive a one-time complimentary name change.
Guilds
- Guilds will be transferred intact.
- Priority for guild names will be given to the guild with the earliest guild creation date, with such guild keeping its name and the other guild having an “x” added to its name.
- Guilds whose names have been affected by the server merge that wish to change their guild’s name will need to use the in-game “/petition†command.
In Your Home
- All items in characters’ homes will be inherited by the home’s owner during the merge. If you have alts that own any items, have designated any trustees to your character’s home or if you are a trustee in another character’s home, please arrange for the appropriate owner to retrieve its items before the server merge begins.
- After the merge any vendor items in your transferred character’s house will need to be re-placed in your character’s new home.
- You can use the house vault of the character which is being transferred for storage. The items in your transferred character’s house vault will remain associated with that character during the server merge.
Vendors
- Vendor Events (i.e. the logs of what was sold, to whom, when, etc.) will not transfer as part of the server merge.
- Until your transferred character concludes a sale on the newly merged server, that character’s Total Coin Gain will display 0. After that character makes a sale, it will display the sum of the total amount of coin that such character has gained on both servers.
Please keep this information in mind as you prepare for the upcoming merge.
Affected Servers
Lucan D’Lere merged to Crushbone
I’m generally fairly irritated with EQ2 at the moment, for a fairly wide range of reasons, most of which involve the ever-diminishing portion of the game that paying a subscription will gain you access to. Still, I’ll be logging Maltheas and his pals in over the the next few weeks to give them a fighting chance of keeping their names.
The problem with Lucan d’Lere merging with Crushbone is that one is a Roleplaying Server, and one is not. How that’s going to work out in the long run is impossible to know, but I doubt it’s going to make spontaneous RP any easier. The only other Roleplaying server is Antonia Bayle, which is packed to the gills, and unsuitable for Lucan to merge with. Lucan is certainly seriously underpopulated, and has been for a very long time.
The thing is, players from both Antonia and Lucan have been crying out for Antonia players to be able to move to Lucan for years. Had that been allowed, Lucan would be in a much healthier state, and Antonia would not be so horribly overcrowded.
To add insult to injury, Lucan players who want to remain on an RP server can move to Antonia, but only if they are willing to pay for the privilege. That doesn’t seem right to me. Either the server is too full or it isn’t. If it isn’t then players should be given the choice of going to Antonia or Crushbone, at no cost. Server merges should not be a source of income, where players have to pay extra to end up on a server of the same ruleset as the one they signed up for.
Update: The merger has been rescheduled for the 16th of February.
Continuing on from Part 7!
2:45 pm GMT, 8th of January
I’ve picked Outfitting, as it’ll allow Osgard to make armour for himself. He gave up the foraging skill to make room for it, as I’m hoping that herbs and wood won’t play too much of a part in it.
Right away, the trainer has three recipes to sell me. Cloth shoes, leather shoes, and the ability to turn burlap cloth, which I’ve been looting from fallen enemies, into “Bolts of Burlap” which will be a crafting ingredient.
Osgard also got a skill for salvaging cloth and leather armour, and the outfitting button itself, which brings up this window:
 Rift's Outfitting Window The Outfitting trainer offers a couple of quests. One requires me to bring him 4 bolts of burlap and 4 soft leather. The leather flumoxes me briefly, as there is no tailor recipe for that, but I discover that it is a butchery recipe that I can bring up using my til now neglected butchery button.
Continue reading The Rift Beta Bonanza – Part 8
We’re back! Since the end of part 6 we’ve had out first look at Rift’s pricing scheme.
Beta 4 has come with a fairly beefy set of patch notes. I’ll try to mention any important changes I see as I play through in this phase.
The big changes for this round are an increase in the levelcap to 27, and the turning on of the PvP Warfronts. While I doubt I’ll be getting to 27 this weekend, I will try to check Warfronts out to cut through the chatter and get the skinny from the horse’s mouth, ideally before it tramples me into the ground!
9:12 am GMT, 8th of January
Off we go, somewhat later than intended. I managed to lose all desire to play any MMO at all last night, in between some bad news coming from EQ2, and reading some Rift posts which are so gushing with hyperbole that they are indistinguishable from a press-release. Watching the Rift-specific websites compete to see which of them is going to be Trion’s very special favourite is getting to be a bit embarrassing to watch. This always happens before any new MMO release, but it always leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth about MMO-blogging.
A good snooze fixed me right up though, and we’ve had a hotfix while I napped!:
GENERAL GAMEPLAY
- Soul Acquisition quests that were not progressing have been fixed.
- Fixed a bug with Soul Points when changing roles while an ability is queued.
WARFRONTS
- Warfront experience is ‘more better’.
Continue reading The Rift Beta Bonanza – Part 7
Mr Breki and Mr Petter were kind enough to invite me on as the special guest for the relaunch of their Claims of the Normal Podcast.
It was the first time I’d done anything quite like it, and there’s probably several minutes of me just going “Ummm”. I also say “Basically”, “actually”, and “pretty much” vastly too often. Valuable lessons were learned, and I had a whole lot of fun. My thanks to my fine hosts for making me feel so welcome and at ease.
We discussed Rift, EQ2, WoW’s Cataclysm expansion, DCUO, and a whole lot more. If you fancy checking the show out, you can find it here!
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