Massively’s Justin Olivetti spoke with Hal Hanlin regarding many of the changes in today’s patch, including Hammerknell, Character Transfers and most interesting: Population Counts.
Speaking of population, I couldn’t help but relay the accusation that RIFT’s population is not growing but dwindling (or “dying,” depending on your proximity to a cyberprophet of doom). Hanlin laughed and said, “I can assure you — no, we’re not. Uh-uh. We are continuing to uptrend our number of subscribers.”
In fact, he revealed that one of the most-cited sources of this accusation — the population indicators on the server list — has changed simply because the company has severely beefed up the capacity of its server hardware to accommodate more players. So what rated as a “high” population before might be downgraded to “medium” today. He said that this upgrade was done in preparation for even more player trials coming in the future.
So perhaps some of the naysayers are wrong here. Population levels are always tough to gauge, especially if all you have to go by is queues and “High”, “Medium”, and “Low” tags. Now when you actually change what those numbers mean… well you get some bad guesses.
Make sure you read the rest of the article over at Massively.
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