Love is in the air in RIFT… or is it? Most MMOs have an in-game event to coincide with Valentine’s Day, and this year was no different for Trion. February 13′s hotfix introduced the Festival of Mariel-Taun and the contagious “Love Bug”. The Bug has somewhat surprisingly proven to be a hot topic on the official forum, both for and against the effect.

The Love Bug looks pretty mild in the patch notes. Characters are “smitten” by the Bug, which poses no immediate danger. Players can remove the Bug by right-clicking on the effect’s symbol in your status bar, which leaves you vulnerable to contracting it again immediately, or they can infect three other people, which guarantees immunity for one hour.

Addons are still in their infantcy in RIFT, but they are growing quickly. By far, the most dev posts on the forums are coming from the the Addon Feedback forums. In the first few weeks since Patch 1.5 went live, I test plenty of different mods, but ultimately never used many of them because they were exactly right. However that has changed recently and today I want to share with you all Wire’s Raid Killer.

The addon has a few different components that are really amazing. The first might be familiar to MMOG veterans that have seen encounter targets before. This addons gives you a display of all the NPCs that your group or raid has targeted and shows a cast bar for each. This is amazingly useful in raid encounters like King Molinar and also gives you a quick view of the status of all the mobs in either a trash pull or other encounters.

The only con to this feature is that you can’t target through this UI element.

The main feature to this addon, however, is that it acts like a Deadly Boss Mod. This portion is very raw, but the most useful part is just the screen perimeter flashing. For example, if I need to interrupt the Prince during King Molinar, I can adjust the addon to flash yellow for me. You toggle all of the triggers in the config window if.

One other thing to point out is that this addon supports all group content in the game, not just raid content. I’d recommend checking out this addon today, even just for the encounter list that becomes useful in some rift encounters and especially PVP.

Originally posted by ZorbaTHut (Source)

---

A few bits of information.

First off, addons will not be included in 1.3. We want to make sure the addon system is completely ready for launch before launching it.

Second, in preparation for 1.3, addons will be disabled on PTS from June 15 through June 22. And possibly a day or two later, but we’ll get them back up as soon as we can. We know you’re excited to keep working on addons, but this is necessary for a smooth 1.3 launch.

Finally, it’s our intention to keep PTS up as much as possible until the Addon system is released. We’d like to give you plenty of time to work on addon code.

We realize this will be an inconvenience, but we’ll keep your development environment available whenever we can.

Here is a string of posts from ZorbaTHut on the Addon Development forum that go over some of the new functions for RIFT’s addone API. If you’re interested keep reading.

Originally posted by ZorbaTHut (Source)

---

Hey everyone!

My name’s Ben and I’m a member of the UI team. I’ve developed a lot of smaller features (like the Public Group system) but now my main job is lead developer of the addon system. I’m going to be paying close attention to the Addon forum and giving out technical support occasionally.

I’ve been working in the game industry on and off for around a decade, taking a break to go back to school and put in a few years at Google. I was also heavily involved in the MMO addon scene for about two years. I’m going to be using my addon experience to make Rift’s addon system as good as I possibly can.

You have no idea how excited I am to see what people make with it.

UPDATE: We don’t know what the limiting factor will be with addons with RIFT. We almost can guess that they won’t be as extensive as WOW right of the bat. RIFT can limit what data is given up with their API so we’ll have to wait on the imaginations of the addon-makers.

UPDATE2: A new forum has been created for Addon Developement, with the first Dev Post found here.

What is RIFT missing right now? Player based UI additions. One of the major complaints most people have is primarily with the UI. Buff and debuff displays, hotbar management, raid warning display, combat text positioning are all some of the largest topics. Not only that, but just plain old styling. Warcraft has shown us that people love to customize their display from a minimalist, just give me boxes with numbers to creating their very own Hello Kitty UI.

Currently we don’t know much about this addition except for what you see in the screenshot above from the PTR character select screen. We can only speculate that they are pretty close to releasing the API for addons shortly if the UI interface is already on the PTR. If you recall the Twitter button appeared in testing before it was released to live.

So we think Addons are right around the corner in 1.3.