Rift testing!

[Magykal 171]

On 5/18/2016 at 7:44 AM, Odynn said:

 

At the end of the event, only a 0.25 kg seryll lump... not balanced properly at all and not encouraging players to participate in a 3/4 hours event.

 

......... a 3 or 4 HOURS long event??? And if you must log out or get DC'd you get nothing??  I must not be understanding that correctly, let me try again after another large coffee.  3 or 4 hours???

[Odynn 2,248]

54 minutes ago, Magykal said:

let me try again after another large coffee.  3 or 4 hours???

 

 

few rifts we have done have been with 3 to 14 peeps. speed on those rifts may vary, but as you can see there are a lot of mobs in them. I took part in slaying 111 of them on that rift and i was not alone / hit all of them, so expect 150+ beasts of all kind and some more since the summoners... well, summon more.

 

You can only advance in the rifts event by killing mobs, butchering them, gathering their hearts and burning them at the rift altar... and that 3 time. The system as it is right now reward you more for killing the beasts than finishing the events (random drops are more powerful than the 0.25 seryll lump... fix it plox), so yes, it will take a lot of time. Either to clean access to the altar since those creatures will prevent you from burning their hearts... or killing all of them to gain some decent stuff.

 

I  strongly believe you can close a rift quite fast IF you have hearts stored / quickly butchered from easy mobs and a team kitting most of the mobs away from the altar. Doing that though will not give you a lot of reward according to our tests.

 

[Damascus 374]

Best is to take your time and kill the mobs , as Odynn points out.

Also it gives other players a chance to get something if they just arrived.

Not sure if there will be a timer on how long rifts stay up.

[Arvid 64]

3 hours ago, Magykal said:

......... a 3 or 4 HOURS long event??? And if you must log out or get DC'd you get nothing??  I must not be understanding that correctly, let me try again after another large coffee.  3 or 4 hours???

 

3/4 hours means 45 minutes, not 3 -4 hours.

[faty 423]

17 hours ago, Odynn said:

 

 

few rifts we have done have been with 3 to 14 peeps. speed on those rifts may vary, but as you can see there are a lot of mobs in them. I took part in slaying 111 of them on that rift and i was not alone / hit all of them, so expect 150+ beasts of all kind and some more since the summoners... well, summon more.

 

You can only advance in the rifts event by killing mobs, butchering them, gathering their hearts and burning them at the rift altar... and that 3 time. The system as it is right now reward you more for killing the beasts than finishing the events (random drops are more powerful than the 0.25 seryll lump... fix it plox), so yes, it will take a lot of time. Either to clean access to the altar since those creatures will prevent you from burning their hearts... or killing all of them to gain some decent stuff.

 

I  strongly believe you can close a rift quite fast IF you have hearts stored / quickly butchered from easy mobs and a team kitting most of the mobs away from the altar. Doing that though will not give you a lot of reward according to our tests.

 

Seems like a good reward system to me. It's just like being in local at unique hunts.. you get something... But the big rewards are when you actually kill the rift creatures, this way, the more you fight the more chances you have to get items. So even if you are not there for 3 hours from beginning to end you still get your chance with each kill you make. I feel that this way it encourages fighting over just hurrying to close the rift with 3 people.. 2 dragging creatures and one picking them off and sacrificing hearts..

Edited May 20, 2016 by faty

[Ecrir 887]

Sounds like they need to do something about losing rewards due to a DC or logout. It would be great if the game remembered how far you got and still awarded you accordingly even if you are offline when the rift is completed. Perhaps with a cooldown of an hour so you can't tag a rift and then get rewards days later when a group completes it?

[faty 423]

3 hours ago, Ecrir said:

Sounds like they need to do something about losing rewards due to a DC or logout. It would be great if the game remembered how far you got and still awarded you accordingly even if you are offline when the rift is completed. Perhaps with a cooldown of an hour so you can't tag a rift and then get rewards days later when a group completes it?

Why would you get something if you are not there ?

You have two options, you either go for the small reward at the end, so you just swing once and wait till it's complete and you get the seryll lump, or you don't even care about the end (maybe you only have 1 hour of gameplay that day) so you fight as much as you can and you get rewarded a lot with items far better than that "present reward" you get at the end..

It's not about the destination.. it's about the journey..

 

Edit: you have a 5min lotime, so if you dc while the rift is closing you have enough time to relog, if in this time you don't receive the reward then i agree that it should be fixed.. ^{[you will probably be dead anyway if you dc'd in the combat area xD]}

Edited May 20, 2016 by faty

[Kianga 219]

What happens if no-one is interested in a rift or if it is in an unreachable place? Do they just disappear by themselves then, and after how long? Or are they there to stay until someone somehow finishes them?

[Odynn 2,248]

17 hours ago, Arvid said:

3/4 hours means 45 minutes, not 3 -4 hours.

 

Nah I said 3/4 hours, in the sense of 3-4 hours. Heck, on the official one, I managed to get 2 waves done - slept a few hours - and joined others to finish it.

 

3 hours ago, faty said:

Why would you get something if you are not there ?

 

Read above, they take time. And since we have a list of who did what, rewarding the involved accordingly to their participation is needed.

 

51 minutes ago, Kianga said:

What happens if no-one is interested in a rift or if it is in an unreachable place? Do they just disappear by themselves then, and after how long? Or are they there to stay until someone somehow finishes them?

 

This is one of my fears, you will always find a few persons interested in a rift, but we will have the unreachable place issue at a point or another, worse case scenarii, climbing without mounts to the altar to burn hearts if the rift appear on a cliff side. No idea if they have a timeout on them, doesn't look like that from our tests... or at least, not under 12+ hours.

 

---------------

 

Nota : And for those commenting here without even testing said rifts (seeing the kind of lines you are dropping), please go ahead and test them. Proper insight is needed for the highly needed balance those things need before they hit LIVE servers.

Edited May 20, 2016 by Odynn
Sending peeps to test the rifts

[faty 423]

34 minutes ago, Odynn said:

Read above, they take time. And since we have a list of who did what, rewarding the involved accordingly to their participation is needed.

I understand this part, indeed, if you participate more in the rift you should get better rewards, but isn't that the case already ? is the seryll lump ql based on the participation ? I've seen something like this but i can't confirm it, I'll test it more. Plus if you really were there killing the creatures you already got a lot of stuff from all the kills you did, you don't need a final reward, the reward was incremental as you progressed through the waves.. The final reward is merely for closing the rift.. i kinda like the balance in that..

I did only one wave yesterday and got a bracelet, two shoulder pads and two rings... so I'm happy with that reward.. What i got was based on my participation, only it was incremental it wasn't all at the end, so i don't have to be there at the end, i already got what i deserved..

What i wouldn't see fair is someone helping with all the waves but not being there at the end, he would have the highest participation but no gain at the end.. so why not just get the participation reward as you go through the rift so you won't have to allocate at least 4 hours of your time every time, you just get in, help as much as you can, collect your reward and get out. If you indeed stay to the end, why would you get a double reward over the items you already got ? you get a small token of participation, and maybe a title.. Am i missing something over here ?

[Odynn 2,248]

1 hour ago, faty said:

I've seen something like this but i can't confirm it, I'll test it more. Plus if you really were there killing the creatures you already got a lot of stuff from all the kills you did, you don't need a final reward, the reward was incremental as you progressed through the waves..

 

That's one of the current troubles, we don't know the mechanisms or the changes done to it at all, we are testing it without knowing what we are doing, what to expect and totally not in a LIVE server conditions.

 

1 hour ago, faty said:

Am i missing something over here ?

 

So yah, so far nothing in the 'participation' seems to be taken in account and if you are shafted by the RNG and get 0.25 kg of 90+ seryll at the end, it's still a slap in the face. you won't do a lot with that amount of seryll... which was one of the reasons of the rift implementation iirc.

 

1 hour ago, faty said:

I did only one wave yesterday and got a bracelet, two shoulder pads and two rings... so I'm happy with that reward.. What i got was based on my participation, only it was incremental it wasn't all at the end, so i don't have to be there at the end, i already got what i deserved..

 

Randomness, you got that in one wave, i did in 3 rifts. Not balanced at all, which will as usual throw us back in the usual greedy loop we have with uniques. Events are supposed to be fun, when one player get more rewards while doing less than the others, it's not, when said player will sell the rewards for a good bunch of money and the others have nothing but a stupid lump, you will get the same jealousy, envy and overall bad feeling we are having.

 

Proper balance in rewards and involvement is needed. If we do not, they will not be rifts but a shitstorm when they will hit the live servers.

[Wulfmaer 413]

4 hours ago, faty said:

I did only one wave yesterday and got a bracelet, two shoulder pads and two rings... so I'm happy with that reward..

 

Others will fight all three waves, and be there at the end, and get just a 0.25kg lump of seryll and nothing else. In doing 4 rifts I have only managed 3 shoulders, a bracelet and necklace.  You're only happy cause the randoming worked in your favour. We have also seen somebody down the contribution list reported getting a rare adamantine lump at the end, when everybody else got seryll.

 

3 hours ago, Odynn said:

Proper balance in rewards and involvement is needed. If we do not, they will not be rifts but a shitstorm when they will hit the live servers

 

I would hope to see things getting more balanced as we near release, not sure I have noticed that yet.

 

5 hours ago, Kianga said:

What happens if no-one is interested in a rift or if it is in an unreachable place? Do they just disappear by themselves then, and after how long? Or are they there to stay until someone somehow finishes them?

 

This could be a very real problem. There are plenty of places on Xanadu that are all but inaccessible, and probably not worth the effort to make accessible. If they stay until finished, that could make rifts on a server effectively a 'dead' event. As well as the deed proximity check that has been mentioned, it would be nice if there was some terrain check, and probably a check for proximity to a previous rift - on the test server the rifts have been on top of old ones, and it becomes difficult to know which marker stones apply to the current rift.

[Damascus 374]

ok tryed to equip wrist bracelet but wont do anything keeps spamming you add blue drake sleeve.

Also in special moves using left attack using large axe = back breaker , says you engrave large ogre in lower back..   engrave?

The rift stones seem to be randomly placed , not sure if there supposed to make a perimiter of sorts to show mob limits.

Before going live please make it summer to see if the tree foliage increases lag for people or not.

As is, its winter so its ok..lag wise.

 

 

[Araninke 490]

I logged in last night to test and only found a rift field littered with all manner of corpses. The mission said I was on 2 of 3 waves but there weren't any active monsters or other players in local. Wandered around a bit, but nothing changed. Am I missing something?

[Damascus 374]

Look for a red sparkly light beam . 

That would meen it moved , not sure why there were no mobs if it was only 2 of 3 .

Must be a timer or they rebooted server.

 

 

[Wulfmaer 413]

25 minutes ago, Damascus said:

The rift stones seem to be randomly placed , not sure if there supposed to make a perimiter of sorts to show mob limits.

My understanding is that they mark the perimeter of the rift. However, on test the rifts seem to be cycling through a few places so we are seeing the rift stones, crystals and plants from previous rifts.

24 minutes ago, Araninke said:

I logged in last night to test and only found a rift field littered with all manner of corpses.

The corpses don't disappear when the rift completes. I also found the portal to the rift took me to a previous rift last night - as Damascus says, look for the beacon to find the current rift.

[Araninke 490]

OK, didn't realize it could move like that. I did head off towards a red sparkly light but there were too many spiders, rats and bears in the way to make it worth it unless I knew for sure I need to go there.  Now I know.

[Damascus 374]

you should have noob protection , so dont worry , plus you can set stats to 90.

[Keenan 5,539]

The portal has to be updated manually when the rift changes.

• Changes were pushed to adjust the way loot drops and make it more based on participation than just tagging a creature.
• Rifts will now automatically progress to the next stage when you defeat all the creatures in the rift zone, or you can sacrifice 20 hearts to advance it sooner.
• Fixes for deeding over a rift, dropping tents inside the rift zone, and the rate at which the rift decorations decay also pushed to test.

 

[Arize 14]

Made few rifts personally and here is my opinion.

-As others said loot system needs balancing atm. We spend few hours on each rift where some people got few items while others got only seryll lump in the end. My idea is to let players have high chance to get smaller rewards during killing mobs (for example low ql gems, source crystals or even iron/copper coins) so they wont have to come back with nothing. Unique loot and seryll would be given in the end to everyone according on their Participation level ( the more you have the heavier seryll lump will be + you get guaranted unique loot if you hit minimum set participation level). In case some people log out because of real life or something else, they just get their rewards via mailbox.

 

-Participation points are given to player when creature dies while in combat. Every mob gives only one point, so that makes players focus on beasts first to farm PP (participation points) so they can get more rewards. I would be a good idea to get more PP from harder mobs for example: 1 for beast, 2 for jackal/summoner, 3 for ogre/ogre summoner. You cant just hit every mob around only once and let others do all the work while you watch PP flowing (tested it with friend today after fixes, but correct me if im wrong).Whole participation point system could be changed to get points depenting on how much damage you deal, but that could divide players with high skills/good gear and weaker ones.

 

On 18.05.2016 at 5:02 PM, Odynn said:

Rifts crystals. Once the rifts event end, allow us to mine those things off for source salt or random gems.

Weird trees and plants can give some extra wood - new color / perks - or alchemy properties, those things are out of this world right, lets make a use out of them.

[Random Thoughts over ... for now]

^This. Since you put some efforts making these thing, let us use them somehow.

Crystals could be mined for source crystals and low ql gems. Instead of taking them from rift sites let us make them ourselves.Requires source crystals to make (+maybe special starting ingredient from rift?) and they emit light like lamps. Also let them be dyed however we want (awesome colorfull glowing crystals between buildings in caves! yay!).

Burned trees could give new type of wood with even better damage reduction than oak. Drops with very low weight.

Plants could be turned into some alchemical powder. When used on fruit tree it doubles its harvest.

These decorations have to be destroyed to get stuff.To avoid greefing and stealing all these materials are given to players that participated in rift.

 

-Rifts should spawn frequently. More fun and people will move outside of their deeds to hunt a bit if they feel like it. Just scale down rewards. Dont turn it into another drake hunt please

 

-Warmaster as the finall boss gives nothing also he is so big but when he dies his corpse is smaller than normal jackal, while dead champion ogres are few tiles long

-Noticed champions like ogres arent rendered when they are far away. Maybe its only because of my settings but other creatures are rendered correctly.

 

[Mith 318]

I did some solo-running-around-the-rift-killing-and-testserver-healing-and-then-killing-some-more.

 

I killed some 35ish random monsters, here is what I considered so far.

 

Champs should have a slightly higher chance of dropping loot, as they are slightly harder to kill.

I was able to archer from the outside of the rift, im not sure if thats an intended way to kill / controll the critters.

we cant build in the rift, but we can drop dirt to modify the terain to our advantage

Its posible to have one player make a train of monsters, and have one other player burning hearts to advance in waves. 3rd we didnt compleate 2 players.

 

[SmeJack 5,799]

Finally got to steal some downloads to update test, didnt have a lot of time to muck about but some things that seem off to me would be that the altar really needs a slope check of some kind. It obviously wouldn't be flawless and could still end up on a cliff balcony but would help to some degree maybe to prevent this:

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

 

 

The pink circle is the altar which was not reachable by horse.

 

Next was that there was no consistency at the end of a rift, the first one I ended resulted in everything save 5 mobs turning to ash, those 5 mobs auto butchered when I killed them and no hearts just meat. The second rift that ended it seemed only the mobs within a 5x5 of the altar turned to ash and literally every other one was left alive, these ones didn't auto butcher and hearts were available.

 

Last thing I can think worth mentioning was that only 5 hearts were required on both and not 20.

 

*Edit: It is actually possible to solo close the rift if your aim was to grief and not get anything out of it unless a .25 lump of moon metal is your idea of a win.