I gotta say, it kinda rubs me the wrong way that the majority of the services which are supposedly to help you play with your friends are the ones that have a premium placed upon them.

Originally posted by David99

Medium or high tags mean nothing. I was on a medium server and there was nobody around... during peak times there was like 6 level 50's in total on my side, and 9 on the other. Medium pop? Hardly, more like dead.

But yeah, rift will survive... just like AOC, WAR and VG 'survived'.

Anecdotal evidence isn't a very good supporting argument.

I hate to burst your bubble, but thinking Rift won't "survive" is poor reasoning.

Considering the server populations are always at Medium or High during normal hours, the population seems to be staying pretty solid.

There are plenty of games which have fallen out of vogue a long time ago which are still surviving. Everquest One was a great game but it's population has eroded from what it once was by far, yet it still survives. Vanguard was considered by many the worst mmo launch in history, and it's still going.

I contend that if you don't think Rift will "survive", you don't know the genre as well as you think you do.

I should point out also that this person is from Mississauga, a suburb from the Toronto area. What this says to me is it's a 50% chance that this person is a "new Canadian", which is our polite way of saying 'immigrant'. (Yes, we really are that polite sometimes, lol) Quite often the "new Canadians" don't really understand how things work and some think they can scam people and get rich here.

Likely someone just out to try and make a quick buck.

Perhaps consider this:

When MMOs first came out, they were $9.95 a month (EQ and UO), in approx 1998.

In 2002 FFXI came out at 12.95.

In 2003, UO raised their rate to 14.95.

In 2005, EQ and DAoC followed suit and raised their fees to 14.95, which is also where WoW came in at about the same time.

Since then, MMO fees have remained largely unchanged. I think we should be pretty happy that the service fees for the games we love haven't changed in the last 6 years or so.

You probably get more use out of your MMO than you do your cellphone, which you probably have to pay for more per month than a game sub. 

I'm sorry but I don't think the person who wrote this has taken a second to look at the bigger picture. The stuff the writer is describing isn't something that's unique to "gamers", it's a symptom of our entire society. Look at reality TV, look at the way people treat eachother on the street, look at what makes the nightly news.

People are simply becoming more and more douche-y. The only reason you see it as much as you do on the internet is because people take the opportunity to say stuff that their anonymity will let them get away with. I refer you to John Gabriel's Internet Dickwad Theory. If you go onto any forum you'll find people being jerks to eachother, whether it's a forum for Miley Cyrus or Bodybuilding or Knitting. This is the Internet, a darker reflection of our society's worst sides laid bare. It's the writing on the bathroom stall of life.

Also, I find it a little ironic that following the link in the OP shows that the writer is currently banned on those forums for apparently flaming someone in another thread.

People still use xfire?

Gary Gannon, host of the Rift-themed Gamebreaker.tv show "Sanctum", estimated the player base somewhere around 750,000 players at launch.

The servers are almost always all at either 'Medium' or 'High' population, if not 'Full', as seen on the Rift shard status page.

That said, it's way too early to see any trending of players because the game's only been out a month. We know a good estimate of what the player base is, but we haven't seen any evidence as far as people leaving or joining.

Don't forget that the game portion is being developed by Trion, the company that made Rift. Love it or hate it, Rift has a lot of buzz right now and many people are quite impressed with the transparency and connectivity that Trion has with it's player base. 

If this Defiance TV show is any good, I can see the game being great as well. It's a very ambitious concept, which could be great if pulled off right. As far as I know, no MMO has yet managed to progress itself along with an actively progressing IP such as a TV show. This was what the Stargate MMO was supposed to have done before the developers started making bad decisions.

Fingers crossed!

These charts are actually only generalities. There are a few missing/gray areas here and there. Depending on how you spec each soul, they can be used for slightly different things, and having one doesn't necessarily mean you fill that role.

Ideally, just use these charts to give you a rough idea of what the classes do. 

Just because one soul sucks at one thing when these charts were made, doesn't mean it'll always be so. The most important thing you should base your decisions on is what seems most fun to you.

What I've gathered from the information in this thread as well as what I've read on the investor site itself (in relation to a launch date) are as follows:

• Beta will be expanding with more players over the next few months
• They're not prepared to give us a projected ship date until after FY11 ends (March 31)

I love it when people pre-judge a game they haven't played based on a different game by different developers, just because it shares the same tool set.

A masterpiece can be sculpted from the same clay that makes dinner plates. The difference lies in the artist.

Originally posted by skoupidi

"Rift is the complete next generation in online gaming" 

Says their official beta trailer.

Considering the phrase "next-gen" means it's iterated and builds on the generations of MMOs before it, that is an apt description.

I don't think most forum-goers know how to use that phrase properly, nor is it much more than a hype phrase, really.

I'm very interested in getting a buddy/trial key. I'll likely purchase the game but I wanna try it again in release to make sure.

The problem is with what you're expecting (or from what I can gather of what you appear to want).

You're essentially saying that you want info on systems as soon as possible so we can tell the developers where they're going wrong. The problem with that is for us to truly tell whether a feature is good or bad, it needs to be finished.

They already have people giving them feedback on features that aren't complete; those are called beta testers.

Also, there needs to be a certain level of corporate secrecy. They can't completely outline all their features from day one because there's always the possibility that someone will take one of their unique features and co-opt it for their own game. Possibly even getting it out earlier.

Originally posted by gt4980b

Quick thoughts...

The way I look at reviews is this...If  a reviewer really knew what they were talking about, they would have the title game designer or at least QA.  This poster doesn't even have the title of editor.  So the review is worth piss in a bottle.

Because only great game designers can write great reviews.. wait, what?

I hate to break it to you but game design is not the same as journalism. By your own rules, your comments about the game would be worthless as well.

A review is an opinion, nothing more. Sometimes it's an uninformed opinion, sometimes it's the opinion of someone who's studied the subject for years. Different people like different things, so take a look at what he's specifically saying he liked and disliked, and see if those are things you think you would like. A review is also not the final seal of approval on the success of a game, as much as some people might tell you it is.

The OP is simply trying to give us an honest look at the game through his eyes. If you don't agree, that's fine, but don't tell him his opinion is worthless, because your opinion is worth the same.

What I played of the beta, I see where he was coming with some of his comments. (The tutorial sucked any time after the first, and I feel the UI is pretty clunky). I agreed with some points, didn't agree with others. Frankly the OPs review is just as good as the launch preview from this site where they slap a "buy it" banner at the bottom (surprise).

For me it's a few reasons.

- I don't think Tera and Rift are quality games that will create a foothold in the community. I don't think there's anything exciting about them and I think they'll fall by the wayside like low-pop games, ie Vanguard/WAR

- Bioware has a proven track record when it comes to RPGs

- Star Wars is Sci-Fi, something that I enjoy more than Fantasy, which is frankly overdone in the genre. Sci-Fi represents only a smaller portion because people like to do what's safe, or they don't know how to do it right.

- the Old Republic setting was the best choice. It took a known good setting, with some rich history, but it also put the game in a timeframe where Bioware could do pretty much whatever they wanted with storylines. This is imo why SWG failed (and I said so before it launched); setting the game in the middle of the movies meant there was a very specific events that had to happen in order for it to remain proper. Having TOR be 300 (or whatever) years after KOTOR, they still get the known values of the sith and jedi as well as the ability to link back to the storylines people love from that era, while still having the freedom to make stuff up as they like (within reason).

I forget where else I was going (I've been drinking this evening) but there you go.

It's free because people weren't playing it enough for them to make money when it wasn't free.

Thank you thank you thank you. This needs to be posted in big bold letters on every single MMO discussion area.

That is all