Basically, the world event has not gone all that according to plan, despite a very promising Phase 1 which lasted several weeks, allowing for hype to build up and people to steadily grind out their rewards. A delay in Phase 2 led to a bit more bribery with phase 1 extended another week, with additional rewards, which was very well done, in my opinion and left a majority of players with nothing much to complain about. Why would they? More rewards, more stuff to do, more to grind, and all at the player's own pace.
Phase 2 on the other hand was a scheduled event in which all the zones are attacked by lots of death invasions and rifts at the same time, and 3+ big bosses per zone. This boils down to a tank-and-spank for about an hour, presuming you got past the server queues in time, made it to a level appropriate zone and were lucky enough to pick up a shadetouched cache of the appropriate level as a reward.
Phase 3 meanwhile was a one location deal in the level 50 area of Stillmoor, buried amongst elite level 50 mobs, involving scripted NPCs confronting each other, and no real combat uber boss to speak of.
Phase 2 issues were mainly the extreme contrast of rapidly progressing to the next phase under an hour, as compared to the weeks of Phase 1. Basically simultaneous invasions going on in all zones, it also suffered from lag and server performance, to the point of me (and others) having 24k - 36k (yes, in the tens of thousands) of latency before the server puked us out. Fortunately, the server also reserves our positions for a while, so there was never a frustration issue tacked along where you would be spat out and have to queue again. However, all those who didn't get in at the beginning were left stuck in an 1-2 hour long queue - sure, this is specific to Wolfsbane and a few other servers who have both American/Aussie populations and are fanatically popular - but few queuers remain rational for long, especially when they are anticipating missing out on cool rewards.
Phase 3 was indeed somewhat sad. It compressed all the Phase 2 issues, by being only at one location, wherein all the server's population would try to congregate as a massive flashmob there, plus the added "fun" of excluding anyone who wasn't 50 (or say late 30s up for the masochistic) since the map is level appropriate and contains many many red aggressive mobs scattered all over who chase after you and unhorse you and tend to kill you with one hit (thanks WoW exponential system).
The scripted NPC event also managed to bug out on Wolfsbane, leading to furious chat spam worthy of Barrens chat, a neverending stream of griefer-wannabes and griefer-callouts who spent time fighting the bugged Alsbeth and yelling at the griefers to STOP attacking so that the event could start, along with a ferocious stream of friends and alts being directed via their guilds and optimistic hope to get to the mob so they could /kneel and get a funky one-off legacy title.
There were literally so many people packed in that you could only see a small circle of people around you at one time.
Eventually the GMs got the message and managed to restart Phase 3, and this time, the event worked satisfactorily... if you consider satisfactorily watching the equivalent of a scripted cutscene where Cyril of the Guardians and Asha from the Defiants traded insults with Alsbeth and each other... decide to work together to stop Alsbeth forming a mutual truce for a day, Alsbeth runs away into the portal leading to the River of Souls, wherein the truce breaks down because Cyril doesn't want Asha to have access to the holy soulstream, Asha retorts "who the hell's asking you" or something along those lines and runs in anyway, calling on the Defiants to join her, and Cyril goes "grrr, I gave my word for truce today, but watch out for a bloody tomorrow" and eggs on the Guardians to go "After them!"
(Nyah, nyah, Defiants rule, we get there first. Guardians are left in our wake.)
Actually I suspect there was supposed to be a bit of a scrum in Phase 3, because there was a point where we were called on to "Defend your heroes" and the conversation afterward leading to truce made reference to the numerous fallen this day. Presumably it got taken out due to performance issues - the mass of players gathered there would not have been able to see any mobs, let alone fight them - or concerns about the design - forced PvP on a PvE server would probably generate lots of bitching, or general anarchy and chaos, unsoweiter.
The amount of raging and QQ centred around the world event has been unprecedented in the history of Rift's forums (not that they've been on for that long). I admit I'm curious to see how Trion will handle this situation and fall on their sword gracefully and in a politically, non-game-sabotaging manner.
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Personally, I found the event rather enjoyable, even if it is obvious that it flopped with a whimper leaving Trion with lots of damage control to do.
Admittedly I was hardcore enough (and lucky enough) to fall asleep really early last night from being chronically tired and happened to jerk up just in time at 3am-ish without an alarm clock and go, shit, wasn't the event today? Else I might have slept through it like normal people.
I then attempted to log in, and faced a 2 hour queue on Wolfsbane, at which point I resigned myself to not seeing the event and surfing the forums to read the whining for a while, and started to gather that it hadn't started yet and they were going to stagger out the running of the event for different servers over 2 hours. (Probably because each server needs to be specially babied and monitored for the event, which brings it to its knees in the ultimate stress test ever.)
From good fortune, or maybe sneaky intentions, they brought the servers down to start up the event, conveniently fubaring the existing queue. I was able to hop right in once the servers came up and were unlocked.
Following that, a server announcement was made, covering the two major points from the forums. Phase 2 happens in ALL zones, level-appropriate, so PLEASE spread out and don't all glom into Stillmoor. And as long as you fight something, you'll get credit, went the plainative plea, rather reminiscient of the little boy's attempt to stop the sea from flooding Holland with his own fingers in the dam.
Being that I was level 38, I surmised I had two choices. Either remain in a level-appropriate zone, fighting off invasions and rifts like the everyday automated invasions, striving for a reward. Or I could attempt to make my way to the one location in Stillmoor to get once-in-a-game's-lifetime event pictures, assuming that I could somehow survive the gauntlet of mobs. Oh, and I'd never ever been to Stillmoor either.
First item on the agenda, pre-event (since they were spacing it out) was to GET to Stillmoor and lock in a porticulum bind point. This led to a regular adventure in itself since the road to Stillmoor is not a clear straight one - it meanders through Guardian territory, there are a couple of dead ends and tall cliffs and underground tunnels, there are rifts that sidetrack you (cos I was still hoping to earn enough Otherworldly Sourcestones for the Guise of Death), unsoweiter.
Got there eventually. Came back to the nearest level appropriate zone in time to see Phase 2 start. As mentioned, this was a whole bunch of death rifts and invasions and big colossi bosses going across all 11 zones. As you cannot be in 11 places at once, you settle for being in one as part of a big impersonal mob, doing your teensy part while you watch the other zones fight off their invaders via your quest update screen. All in all, not too bad. One or two lag disconnects. My fight participation mostly consisted of my melee tank/druid cycling a grand total of 3 ranged attacks (ie. social loafing in order not to get disconnected or maimed by some unanticipated AoE), but hey, I got to see them dead and I got the quest credit for it.
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| First big bad. Note the three bosses in the World Event Quest list. We killed them all really quickly. |
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| Then this big bad popped when the first three died. Lookit the hp on that thing. |
Over in an hour or less. Probably less. This is Wolfsbane, after all. The crowd is phenomenal.
Phase 3 triggers. All the 30s-40s mill about uncertainly. Guild chat has been forming raid groups of 50s for an eternity and now all the rally banners are coming out to teleport people to them. Me being shy, I didn't want to take up space as a level 38 in a level 50 raid group. Nor am I content to mill abount waiting to be led, truth to tell. I'm a savvy soloist, and I jettison my PUG group and ride for the porticuluum and my prior bound point in Stillmoor.
My map is, naturally, covered in fog of war. Fortunately, there is a never-ending stream of level 50s (and ambitious level 40s+) coming out of the porticuluum and riding towards the area of Alsbeth's showdown. So I kinda follow the zerg, trying not to get hit by the 1001 red mobs getting mount-kited on my slooow 60% speed mount (the rest are on 90% and 110% speed mounts), and every so often getting one shot killed.
Also fortunately, it isn't very far from the porticuluum point, so with every death, I try and resurrect at the very edge closest to the zerg's direction, and basically corpse-walk my way to the location with a happy 10-20% soul vitality left. At which point, I am safely lost in the big crowd of 50s, and get to witness the event, anticlimatical as it was. But hey, I was there!
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| My first look at the area. Cyril's there, bigger than life. Alsbeth is stuck in the ground. Asha's nowhere to be seen. |
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| Bored lost people being bored and lost, we abandoned those having too much fun yelling chat insults at each other, and went to kill this strange Baron in the hope that it would spawn Asha. Alas, it didn't. |
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| Eventually, Asha arrived, fashionably late, after Phase 3 was reset by the powers-that-be. Lots of people managed to get the title before that. I think that can only be a good thing, in order to stave off all the future whining. |
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| I like this. This picture encapsulates why it's so hard to give MMO players nice things. The NPCs are trading slightly corny insults with each other, we are ostensibly in the presence of history in the making, but alas, nothing in the design allowed us to contribute to it in terms of combat or whatever, so players make their own... decidely lore-inappropriate... fun. :) |
15 minutes later, I log back in to see everyone level 50 heading into the portal for the River of Souls raid and getting an achievement, and I think, what the heck, one more death and fly into my own instanced version of the River of Souls - meant for 20 level 50s.
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| Ironically, the server is so lagged from opening up all these instances and awarding achievements that I actually manage about 20-30 seconds of running through an unpopulated zone, before all the big uglies showed up with way too much hp and damage for me to dream of aggro'ing. |
So yeah, the portal to the River of Souls has officially opened. The 50s now have another raid content to chew on, I'm still in no hurry to get there.
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http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?167307-River-of-Souls-World-Event-Wrapup
I might be biased, but I think he had a pretty good run of falling on his sword in a conciliatory manner there. They probably drafted this after their "learning experience" (the less forgiving might term it "debacle") on the European servers (poor guinea pigs) and spent time crafting and polishing it while anticipating all kinds of hell being unleashed on the NA servers.
To me, people make mistakes. It's how they pick themselves up, and respond in a timely manner, and learn from them so that they aren't repeated again, that is important.
Other pundits are a lot less understanding, and some have an agenda and vested interest in seeing Rift fail, or at least, fall flat on its face every now and again, and are now having a field day crowing about it from the blogosphere mountaintops. Shrugs, no such thing as universal acceptance. Not even everybody likes Minecraft or Portal. :)
With 250 more sourcestone in the mail, this will help me buy the Guise of Death, the last thing I really wanted from that lineup of rewards. (Screw the blue and purple rings and trinkets. Many like them, but I bet there will be more of these stat-based rewards down the road and these will only get thrown away later.)
The treasure cache is a really good bonus, considering that all active subscribers (and presumably characters) will get a lottery chance at this. I never even took some alts for a spin this event.
And most importantly, all the legacy achievements and titles will be retroactively awarded, and the sourcestone drops will continue until morale improves, which lets us wrap it up with a little more closure than Phase 3 gave us.
Presumably Trion now has hung big LESSONS LEARNED signs on their cubicles and will attempt to formulate slightly less ambitious and slightly better designed events that take into account server population sizes. No doubt, all the other MMO devs are watching and taking notes as well.
Ultimately, I can only think it a good thing. Far better to try and log a note in history (infamous as it might be), than to never try at all out of fear. WoW had their runaway plague and other stories. Rift has this one. They just need to not make the same mistakes again or the loyalty of their audience (never patient to begin with, and fickle and whimsical) will steadily erode away.
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