Thursday, January 12, 2017

RIFT Livestream Jan 13: The Balancing Act







What is balance, anyway? Who decides what abilities get buffed, nerfed and tweaked? How do they make the call?

This week, we explore the philosophy, methodology and processes employed by the RIFT Systems Team when addressing the ever-moving goals of class balance. RIFT is unique among games in having am almost limitless combination of soul builds to work with, and this complexity often leads to heated discussions between passionate gamers on forums, Reddit and in-game.

Chris “Keyens” Meyer will be on hand to talk about how the team views and evaluates balance, and the challenges of trying to accommodate the widely varied opinions and desires of RIFT players when it comes to specific classes, skills and builds. Balance in this game is definitely not one size fits all, and Keyens will describe the internal process of evolving class skills, including when and how the Systems team decides to tweak them.

Keyens will delve into the challenges of working with player feedback, parsers, opinions, synergies and perspectives in a world of widely varying playstyles and approaches. We will take a number of questions from the Livestream forum question thread.

Caveat: Keyens is here to address class balance philosophy, evaluation and process, not the highly detailed raid parse of a specific build or what happened with a single ability or soul.

Finding new ways to take on content with RIFT’s complex Soul system is part of the meta game in Telara.

Please post your Balance questions for the livestream to this thread.

We look forward to hearing from you!

~Brasse

RIFT Livestream

Twitch Channel: http://www.twitch.tv/trionworlds

Start Time: Friday, January 13 at 3:30 PM PST (GMT-8)

Duration: 45 minutes

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