Trion, unlike many MMO developers, is willing to take risks at times for the betterment of RIFT. We received an announcement regarding one such risk yesterday, when Elrar invited Public Test Shard (PTS) players to join the team on Tuesday, August 14th at 4 PM PST to test out a completely new style of PvP gameplay– Normalized PvP. Yep– normalized stats across the board, including baseline reductions to damage done and healing done, as well as a reduction to healing debuffs. This will mean that gear won’t matter, but PA, consumables, temporary abilities, and class abilities will.

Sounds pretty risky, right? Trion fully understands that, which is why both Elrar and Daglar repeated the fact that this is merely a test– an experiment. In fact, the test that will be conducted on the PTS today is merely a precursor for the real test, which will be taking place on live servers at a later date and will last one week. After the week, the change will be completely reverted. The team will then take the metrics and data recorded during the live test, and see if it’s even worthwhile to take the idea further.

For a game that’s been out for only a little over a year, RIFT has a solid assortment of quality-of-life features. These are the little things that often go unnoticed, but really make a difference when to comes to our enjoyment within the game: smooth, built-in UI features, and the ability to customize those UIs further. A polished AH, the guild perk system, being able to flip between souls on the fly, the dungeon finder, achievement system, and the wardrobe system. Oh, yeah, and AoE looting. Other games have since added it, but RIFT was among the first big MMOs that added the feature.

Among the latest added 1.8 features, we’ve seen even more great quality-of-life features. The guild finder, the fishing and survival additions, and the new fishing dailies. The NPCs for which that are in actual convenient spots. Convenience? Come on– how often does that appear in an MMO? And last but not least, we can’t forget about leaderboards. They’re convenient in the sense that they display information that’s normally quite difficult to obtain, and what’s more– leaderboards are fun, and profit all kinds of players.

Originally posted by Elrar (Source)

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Hi All,

With Update 1.7 RIFT is undergoing some serious changes to the way prestige works and how you earn rewards through PvP.

We outlined these changes in an earlier post – but now that you’ve had a chance to check them out on PTS for yourself we wanted to post more expansive details and get your feedback directly.

In a nutshell here’s what PvP Progression looks like in Update 1.7:

- Prestige Ranks: Increased prestige ranks from 8 to 40! The time to hit max rank is still roughly the same but we’ve changed benefits from earning prestige rank. Existing ranks will be converted to the appropriate rank on the updated scale – on top of that each rank also grants a large amount of Planar Attunement experience.

Here’s how it breaks down into the new ranks:

Rank 1 = Ranks 1-3
Rank 2 = Ranks 3-7
Rank 3 = Ranks 7-12
Rank 4 = Ranks 12-20
Rank 5 = Ranks 20-25
Rank 6 = Ranks 25-31
Rank 7 = Ranks 31-38
Rank 8 = Rank 38

Everyone will need to earn Ranks 39 & 40.