RIFT Executive Producer: ‘We Learned A Lot This Weekend’

Scott Hartsman, Rift’s Executive Producer, has written a post-event summary of last weekend’s beta event in which he notes that the team “learned a lot.”
Over 20,000 pieces of individual feedback were received during the beta weekend, forming the basis of “answers to some critical questions.” Hartsman reflects on how the game coped with so many players in just two zones, and the effect this had on the dynamic rifts.
During the first hour of the event, Trion had to double the number of servers. All of these remained “highly active” across the weekend and remained stable – even with the Freemarch zone population well above the numbers that will ultimately need to be supported.
Hartsman notes that from the first day “it was obvious that the quest targets in Freemarch weren’t nearly plentiful enough.” An update, increasing numbers and spawn rates, was pushed out and fixed “about 95%” of the issues with quest-queues.
The population was also causing problems for one of Rift’s main selling points – the dynamically occuring in-game rifts, invasions and footholds. Due to the numbers on the servers, rifts were having a very hard time surviving more than a few seconds as players swarmed over them.
Hartsman says Trion decided to experiment with some “even more insanely active tuning” of rifts in response to this, “to give the invaders a chance to come out and play too.” Feedback about this was, he says, “overwhelmingly positive.”
“We have dozens of other improvements in store, largely thanks to your comments.”
The next Rift beta event begins on 17 December.
For more on RIFT head to RIFT: IncGamers.