Latest Update Letter Details Plans for the Summer for Live & Prime

The Rift site has been updated with a lengthy post to lay out developers' plans for Rift through the summer of 2018. The post reveals plans for both Live and Prime servers. The letter begins with updates that have been deployed since the spring update including balance changes and other content patches. 

Moving forward, the team is working on some "really great summer events and laying groundwork for some of our longer term content goals for Live as the Prophecy of Ahnket storyline continues". The idea is to provide more frequent bonus events similar to the recent bonus XP event. In addition, "there are beans to spill" but the team is not quite ready to speak about what's in the future.

Summerfest will also be coming along with new art and dimension items and some "clean up work being done to improve the event experience this year".

The prelude event for River of Souls for Prime is a work in progress and should provide players with fun and challenging content to complete. The idea is to bring this event (and others) to Live as well. In addition, "we've uncovered other events from Rift's past that were not tied to specific holidays or raids, and the team is working on bringing these back for an encore on both the Live and Prime servers".

We have more than balance updates and events planned for Live servers this summer. The team is committed to improving the overall experience on Live servers, and some of the short- and mid-term focuses are:

• Bring more exciting rewards to the Daily Reward Calendar on Live, more in line with the Prime rewards.
• Add rare mount drops to Expert Dungeons and Raids on Live.  These extra rewards for play have been great on Prime, and this one is an idea that’s definitely worth taking to all servers.
• Revamp and reduce the credit store on Live. We’re looking keenly at player feedback, especially some recent well-presented player discussions, to improve this area. While we view the store as a place for cosmetics, convenience, and some amount of ability for newer players to catch up with their friends, we don’t want it to be perceived as gameplay replacement, so we’ll be making upcoming changes with that in mind.
• Some may have noticed the recent trend on the Rift store to offer the latest mounts without releasing them inside of a lockbox, and you should expect more of that.
• As an advanced Soul Balance topic, revisiting the Eternal Weapons and their impact on builds.
• Planar Fragments, addressing their level of RNG and costs to upgrade.
• Warfront queue level banding is going to be getting a look in an upcoming test.  The more level bands and warfronts there are, the longer queueing takes.  Our goal here is to speed up the queues while keeping gameplay fun.

Read more on the Rift site.