Sunday, February 28, 2016

My thoughts on Rift's Health





Trion has been doing its best to hide Rift’s health for quite a bit of time. Nightmare Tide was a disaster for them: they came off an amazing expansion in Storm Legion, and simply failed to live up to what players and consumers had come to expect of them. Since then, the game has been plagued with buggy and unfinished content, and rampant moneygrabs in an attempt to quickly milk people for money.

Part of this is because Trion refuses to put more money into Rift’s development. The truth is, Rift is the only title making them money, and they’re trying to make too many other games without having the funds to do so. They don’t have the capital to do so, and aside from Rift they don’t have a good history of setting up other IPs. It is much like how CCP Games tried to put little money into EVE Online and funneled more into DUST 541 and World of Darkness, which led to the rebellion in 2011. WoD never happened, and DUST is being cancelled in…May, I think.

But beyond this is the attempt to silence the players who are not happy about the changes they have made. I’m in the middle of another suspension from the forums. A suspension I can’t see the reason for, because they’ve made any attempt to look at private messages or to look at the forums redirect to this screen detailing their excuse for banning you, and when it ends. Players who have spoken out vehemently against the decisions in third-party channels find themselves banned or suspended in-game, when they broke no rules (of course, Trion will always fall back on the “we don’t have to have a reason to ban you, and we don’t have to give you warning” excuse). What’s more, we’re not getting the classic e-mail from Trion, but Trion has no problems spamming inboxes of players who don’t log in for an extended amount of time, asking—nay, begging—people to come back and spend money. It’s shady is what it is.

No one expects perfection, but we expect maturity from PR people and game developers. Over the past year, that has been in short supply on Trion’s side.

I have never hidden who I am. In fact, when I began actively streaming and recording, I took on my callsign from my time in the Marine Corps: Spectre. Because I did hold a command, I made myself Spectre Six (Spectre_06), and I requested it be changed on the Rift forums to reflect this. So I’m not hiding my account or anything.

I have sunk $1,364.97 into the game, beyond my monthly subscription I paid for over two years time, from March 2013 to today. I am in red loyalty at this point. I am not some mooch or leech, and I have been active in the community. I would not have spent that much money—almost half of one BAH check with the post-9/11 GI Bill—if I did not think Rift had been worth it during Vanilla and Storm Legion. But I think it’s time I made my voice heard, since my writing seems to be a problem. I have made it clear my problems with the game in the past, so now I take to YouTube. I removed my previous videos decrying Trion’s incompetence in many areas (my blog posts remain, though), so this may be the beginning of a series on Trion, if they can’t start listening to the playerbase and taking what we say to heart.

Feel free to watch the video here:



Chime in with your comments, if you think I’m right or wrong, and the like.

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