Over the weekend, an interesting phenomenon happened across our shards. Thanks to the new tier 3 Planar Attunement ability rift group summons added in RIFT 2.2, players are now able to temporarily teleport to new shards in order to take part in Great Hunts, raid rifts, zone events, world PvP, and more. All that’s required is a group invite from someone on the new shard and someone in that group to use their group summon PA ability.
As more players realized this, we began to see call outs in level 60 chat for events happening on different shards. Volan was one popular attraction, of course, which did cause some lag issues during peak hours. Cross-shard Volan participants can fight him, it turns out, but not enter Biofoundry afterwards. Still, it’s a nice chunk of extra Infinity Stones.
Many players initially questioned the phenomenon since it wasn’t announced in 2.2′s Patch Notes, but Daglar reassured players that yes, this feature was unannounced and unintended, but is something the team is allowing to take place since it’s a direction where they plan to move RIFT in anyway. Here was what he said on Friday:
Originally posted by Daglar (Source)
Unintended but not an exploit.We are actually going to be leaving these abilities on over the weekend until we see something horrifically breaks.
One of our longer term goals was to be able to fully support something like this, via UI, allow trading, etc – but 2.2 wasn’t the intended time.
Most players have loved the ability to switch shards and take place in extra zone events in order to farm PA or Infinity Stones, and fans of world PvP are getting to see a little more action now. Guild Wars 2 allows players to temporarily “guest” on other servers through the user interface. This definitely feels similar.
If Trion plans on setting up a UI option to provide further functionality (and possibly look at lag issues a little more), it could most likely be a great feature for RIFT overall. What do you think? Were you using the feature over the weekend and enjoying it?
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