So as I begin the process of sifting through my google reader, I noticed that we have updated patch notes for the upcoming 1.2 update. The biggest change is the addition of a LFG system that they completely pulled out of thin air. You can see some screenshots on the Riftjunkies website, but overall it looks really similar to the WoW Dungeon Finder tool.
This is one of those things that could be awesome, or horribly bad for the server community. Basically as I have stated before, the Dungeon Finder was the single greatest contributor to the downfall of the WoW player base and community. The real question will be, how does this effect the Rift community. Overall Rift players seem to be more drawn from the “seasoned mmo veteran” category, rather than the “wow was my first game ever” column. As a result, I am seeing a better player ethic, because these folks have been through it all before.
The majority of my t1 and beyond dungeons, have been made up of a few guild members and a large number of pugs from the various social channels. As a rule, Rift players seem to have more patience, and more base skill than I experienced doing randoms in WoW. So here is hoping that the community in rift are responsible enough to take this system for what it is, and not a way to get dungeons without consequences.
PTS 1.2 Addition 1
full patch notes can be found here
PTS 1.2 ADDITION 1
As a part of the Looking for Group release, there have been a number of updates to instances and item rewards – See below for details!
LOOKING FOR GROUP
* You can now use the new Looking for Group tool to queue for Dungeons, Rifts, or group quests with other players on your server!
* The Looking for Group icon has been added to the main menu tray in the lower left corner of the screen, and can also be opened with the default shortcut key ‘I’.
* Select from the group roles available to you based on the roles you currently have saved on your character.
* Queue for specific dungeon or expert dungeon groups, or join the random dungeon queue. Once a group is formed, members will be teleported to the chosen dungeon zone.
* Rift and quest groups formed through the Looking for Group tool are not automatically teleported.
* Queue for group quests currently in your or your party members’ quest journals from anywhere in the world and find others also looking to complete these quests!
* Additional rewards are granted for completing a random dungeon through the Looking For Group tool – these can be gained up to seven times per week but are not restricted in number per day, so you can do as many or as few as you like each day of the week up to the weekly cap. Save them all up for one day or spread them out; your choice!
* Additional restrictions based on gear also apply to forming groups for tier 1 and 2 Expert Dungeons through this tool.
GENERAL – INSTANCES
* Expert Dungeon Plaque of Achievement items have all received a power upgrade. If you already have these items, they will be boosted as well!
* Expert Dungeon final bosses are now guaranteed to drop an Epic item. No more finishing the dungeon and getting nothing but Rare items for the whole run. Epic items still have a chance to drop from the rest of the bosses in the zone.
* Some items have been weeded out of the Expert Dungeon drop tables that were very similar to others so you are more likely to see a wide variety of drops. Additionally, some items now drop from different bosses in order to spread out the range of drops available per fight.
* Your instance and raid lockouts are now displayed on a new Instances tab in the Character window.
BOSSES – INSTANCES
* These updates were released in a previous update to the Test Shard. Here is a recap of what has been adjusted and released to Test already. Please let us know your feedback on the Tier1 and Tier2 Expert bosses! We’re continuing to make adjustments to these.
* The health of general population mobs in Expert Dungeons has been reduced.
ABYSSAL PRECIPICE
* Kaler Andrenos: Kaler’s Ice Geyser now deals Water damage.
* Expert: Calyx now resets if pulled off of his platform. A blocking wall is also activated at the start of the encounter.
* Expert: Renthar should be less likely to chain high damage abilities on a single target.
CHARMER’S CALDERA
* Gronik: Slightly reduced the amount of power Gronik gains over time.
* Cyclorax now uses mana.
* Expert: Adjusted the encounter space around Ryka Dharvos so the lasers can’t be so easily avoided.
DARKENING DEEPS
* Expert: Glubmuk’s Poison Bolt should not hit characters fewer than 6 meters from him.
* Expert: Scarn’s Wind Buffet no longer ignites smoldering bones.
* Scarn’s Smoldering Bones stay on fire longer.
* Incinerator Gerbik now uses mana.
* Non-boss NPCs in Darkening Deeps no longer count toward quests requiring dungeon boss kills.
DEEPSTRIKE MINES
* Kaleida: Reduced the radius of her crystals’ AoEs substantially.
THE FALL OF LANTERN HOOK
* Oludare: Fixed the targeting method used by Oludare so he won’t turn to face a new target while cleaving or rear-kicking (in the face).
FOUL CASCADE
* Expert: Sparkwing learns to use his ranged abilities. It’s super-effective.
GREENSCALE’S BLIGHT [Raid]
* A number of new Relic quality weapons have been added to Greenscale.
* Prince Hylas: Slightly reduced the absorption amount of Spiritual Barrier.
* Prince Hylas: Modified the amount of damage increased by Avenging Wrath.
IRON TOMBS
* Expert: Players immune to knockback will no longer be immune to Totek’s Ancient Fury.
* Expert: Bonelord Fetlorn’s Boiling Marrow no longer affects pets.
* Guardians now respawn next to the Messenger of the Vigil.
KING’S BREACH
* Expert: General mob populations have been reduced by a few pulls.
* Expert: Immunity to knockback no longer prevents damage from Konstantin’s spikes.
* Expert: Konstantin’s Cleaving Strike now has a proper effect radius.
* Expert: Konstantin’s Mathosian Fury displays an on-screen warning before use.
* Expert: Players within 3.5 meters of Konstantin receive a 20% damage bonus.
REALM OF THE FAE
* Expert: General mob populations have been reduced by a few pulls.
* Chillblains: Fixed the targeting on the Elemental spawn, which was not working reliably.
* Luddoghan: Made some adjustments to prevent his ground goo from targeting the tank.
RUNIC DESCENT
* Rictus: Adjusted how Rictus uses his abilities and reduced some of the associated stuns and stun durations.
* Expert: There is now a text warning when Eliam gains Dark Fury.
WARDROBE SLOTS
* A wardrobe set’s icon can be dragged onto ability bars to create a shortcut for quickly changing your character’s outfit (similar to Role icons on ability bars).
RIFTS AND INVASIONS
* Zone and Colossus Events are now easier to find. Zones that have active zone events now have a special icon next to the zone name on the main map. Mousing over the icon will display a tooltip showing the current progress of the event.
* Expert and Raid Rifts now have Achievements!
COMBAT
* Fixed pets losing effects that were on them when teleporting or entering/leaving an instance.
* Toggling auto-attack no longer triggers certain cases of reactive abilities.
CLERIC
DRUID
* Crag Hammer: Increased the damage of Rank 6.
PURIFIER
* PTS BUG FIX: Ward of the Ancestors: The blocker preventing recasting on the same target can no longer be removed by removing the buff.
SENTINEL
* Word of Hope: Fixed tooltip to match the new functionality.
* PTS BUG FIX: Healer’s Covenant: The blocker preventing recasting on the same target can no longer be removed by removing the buff.
MAGE
ARCHMAGE [PvP]
* Steelweave: Now correctly reduces only Physical damage received from players instead of all damage.
CHLOROMANCER
* Nature’s Touch: Updated ability description to clarify how this works with Lifegiving Veil.
* Lifegiving Veil: Fixed an issue with heals from Livegiving Veil receiving a bonus from Spell Power twice.
* Fixed an issue preventing Corrosion from triggering healing from Livegiving Veil.
PYROMANCER
* Ground of Strength: Now increases all magical resistances by 125, armor by 70%, makes the mage immune to crowd control abilities, and reduces damage dealt by the mage by 10%. This ability no longer has a chance to proc a stun.
STORMCALLER
* Static Discharge: Fixed an issue causing the damage portion to retain the effect of buffs that were active when the ability was cast but no longer active when the damage portion triggered. Damage is now attributed to the person triggering the damage instead of the caster of the buff. Static Discharge now triggers off of damaging spells and abilities and no longer triggers off of auto-attacks.
ROGUE
ASSASSIN
* Slip Away: Should now work more consistently against NPCs.
BARD
* Anthem of Fervor: Will no longer be overwritten by lesser buffs.
MARKSMAN
* ALPHA BUG FIX: Marksman’s Pedestal, Sniper’s Pedestal: Fixed a tooltip bug where the increased damage with ranged weapons was not displayed correctly.
RIFTSTALKER
* Flashback: Can no longer be used when carrying the Fang of Regulos in Black Garden.
SABOTEUR
* Spike Charge: The Bleed effect from Spike Charge should now trigger Blood Rage on your pet if you have soul points spent in Ranger’s Blood Rage.
WARRIOR
PALADIN
* Tip the Balance: Slightly reduced the internal cooldown on Tip the Balance.
REAVER
* Shroud of Entropy: Now shares a stacking group with other damage reduction abilities to keep them from being stacked to unintended levels. It now stacks with Power from the Masses and Imbued Armor.
RIFTBLADE
* Avatar of the Rift: Fixed a bug causing this to increase the damage of Avatar of the Rift’s damage shield, Burning Blood, and Elemental Touch by more than was intended.
* Fiery Burst: The damage-over-time component from Fiery Burst will no longer overwrite the same components applied by other Riftblades.
* Burst abilities in general: The debuff component on Burst abilities no longer overwrites debuff components applied by other Riftblades.
VINDICATOR [PvP]
* Stand Off: Now properly roots the Warrior in place.
* Phalanx: Duration reduced to 10 seconds, max range reduced to 10 meters. Now applies a debuff that prevents the target from being affected by Phalanx for 60 seconds.
* Forced Recon, Furious Blades: Now only trigger against players.
VOID KNIGHT
* Fusion of Flesh: Fixed a bug causing this to trigger off of the Void Knight’s own abilities.
* Fixed a bug with Reckless Strike, Rift Tap, and Furious Rage, where they were not generating enough threat.
WARLORD
* Fixed a confusing error in the tooltip for Call to Entrench.
ZONES
DROUGHTLANDS
* Ancient Wardstone quests in Droughtlands now with 100% more actual rewards!
IRON PINE PEAKS
* Dabbling in the Forbidden: Fixed an issue that would sometimes cause the Ritual Altar to not be usable.
MERIDIAN
* Expert Dailies have been moved to Epoch Plaza and are now given out by Lord Olangdon.
SHIMMERSAND
* Whispering to the Winds: Fixed the second objective for this quest so it can be completed.
STILLMOOR
* Past is Prologue: Simplified how this quest is available – now offered by Donal Sumptor immediately after completing ‘Rise and Fall’.
PVP/WARFRONTS
* Black Garden: Riftstalkers’ Flashback can no longer be used while carrying the Fang of Regulos.
* The Battle for Port Scion: The stacking buff Sourcestone Empowerment, granted from turning in Sourcestone, no longer reduces damage taken.
* Reduced the favor cost of Cultist’s Focus to 8550 Favor. It was previously priced as a 2-handed item.
CRAFTING
* A number of new recipes have been added to the Artisan Stores.
* Blazing Resistance Runes are now Epic quality. Sharp Runes and Accurate Runes are now Rare quality. These recipes have had their ingredient cost adjusted to reflect the updated rarities.
* Minor Catalysts now only drop from Elite or dungeon mobs.
* You can now click on the Loom in Lantern Hook to open the crafting window.
UI/SETTINGS
* The Artifact pane of the Character window now has a built-in search – search for the artifacts you’re missing, or search for the collections themselves!
* You can now click on an artifact or empty artifact slot in the Artifact pane while viewing the Auction House to search for that item.
CLIENT/SERVER
* Bandwidth optimizations.
That’s actually what I would prefer. And it sounds a whole lot like WoW LFG tool / channel pre-finder :). But sometimes consumer demand for easy leaves a better solution behind, and I’m afraid that an LFG tool that requires actual thought would be as underused as the old WoW one was. (All of the EverQuest/EQ2 attempts at /lfg have failed for the same reason.)
I’m cautiously optimistic. I would prefer that the LFG tool stays with server-only. If done right it can be a great way to meet more people on the server and foster more friends and allies. I liked the Aion LFG tool, where you could post your availability and what you wanted to do and then people needing group members could either auto-invite or send you a whisper to talk about grouping. There was no “magic button” for joining a random group, and I liked that a lot. I see the Rift LFG does have a magic button, but the fact that they also include quests and rifts gives me hope that it will be useful for everyone.
Oh, and I wanted to add: I wish the old forums were still accessible, because I could demonstrate this degeneration with a couple of links 🙂
Here’s why I think it’s fairly safe to say that Scott’s at best misguided on this:
Back before Blizzard introduced the dungeon finder, I was one of a minority of players who predicted doom and gloom. I posted on the old Blizzard forums: we’re on a RP server, you know the crap we take when we open our mouths in a warfront. It will be like that, but in instances. Everyone will roll greed, and there’ll be no reason for anyone not to behave badly, so they will.
Most people’s comments were more like Scott’s, that if they were going to behave badly they would do so anyway, and giving them the tool isn’t going to change anything.
Well, a week or so after the finder went live, I posted another message, saying I was wrong, and glad about it. Other than a few bad experiences (mostly with people from the same PvP server) we’d had fun, chatted, gained tokens, and I had my first purple.
A week or two after that, I started another thread titled “Go! Go! Go!” about what was becoming the norm, steamrollering dungeons and skipping as much optional quest content as possible.
A couple of weeks after that, the whines from the rest of the population began, about how instances had drained all the fun, everyone from other servers were asshats, etc.
If Scott was correct, one of two things would have happened: either the first case, where I was wrong and dungeons were mostly enjoyable would have remained true, or the third, where everyone was an asshat would have been true from day one.
As it was, it took a while for asshattery to come into ascendence. When players realized how far they could push, and the ones who weren’t jerks learned to keep their mouths shut to avoid ridicule. It took time for the lack of social consequences to have its full effect. And to me, that demonstrates that the consequences of having to deal on a regular with the people you group with does have a mitigation factor.
I was going to put up a blog post today outlining my full thoughts on the dungeon finder… but in truth there is no real need. Khaer aka my guild leader, just pretty much outlined everything I would have said in the first place.
There was a heated debate on twitter between myself and @ithato and @rilgon about whether or not this was a bad idea. So after that I had this overwhelming urge to solidify my ideas into a single post, since they are spread between multiple currently. But Khaer just outlined my current stance… I too am cautiously optimistic.
At the root of the optimism is that Trion is not Blizzard. So far most of the decisions that have been made in rift have been the right call. I am taking a leap of faith and trusting that both the company and the player community can use this tool responsibly. We might have to start a “shop local first” campaign on the Shadefallen forums if this thing really does turn out to be Cross-Server.
@Rilgon posted a statement that does kinda scare me.
“There is definitely some amount of viewing people from other servers almost as disposable people. “I’m never going to see him again. Whatever!” But I think the people who truly act that way are just as likely to act that way around people from their own server. Some people play these games just to play and not to be social at all, and that’s OK. It takes different kinds of folks.” – Scott Hartsman
No offense meant to Scott, but that comment just seems grossly naive, having lived through the launch of a similar tool in WoW and watching the massive fallout from it. Prior to the dungeon tool, Argent Dawn had a fairly efficient network of social channels, and getting groups was fairly easy once you had a certain amount of connection to the social network of the server.
The problem is, you can never underestimate the power of lazy. Forming a group via social channels requires effort, it requires typing what you are looking for, usually multiple times. Why go to all that work when you can just push a shiny “idiot button” and have a group delivered to you on a platter. So in a few short weeks, forming up via social channels or guilds simply stopped happening.
Pushing the shiny button, not only was easy, but it awarded players who did so a nice food pellet in the process. So anyone trying to form the “outdated” way were missing out on potential rewards. When the social channels got quiet, folks started to leave them, and by the time cataclysm rolled around they were mostly barren.
Sure there is a group of players who do not care about the server environment. But for many players, namely the multiple game veterans, this is a refuge and resource to be relied on. As we saw in WoW, much like a delicate coral reef, it can be easily destroyed with a few careless actions.
So here is hoping that however this tool ends up as, it was the right decision for the game. On a slight note of hope, I will say that the average player seems to be more responsible and community minded than the average wow player at this point. So not only do I have more faith in Trion than I did Blizzard, I also have more faith in the quality of the average Rift player.
I’m “cautiously optimistic” about the LFG tool. I think WoW’s had failure built in from the start because it went with “cool technology” rather than considering the game: “Hey, we already do cross-server PvP, let’s make the dungeon finder cross-server.”
Cross-server works in PvP because, bluntly, everyone expects you to act like an ass. It’s PvP. So cross-server makes for better balance and shorter queue times. It’s disappointing not to see your “honored enemy” on the field of battle, but outside of Argent Dawn and the other RP servers, who really cares?
Cross-server dungeons is a different matter entirely. When you’re unlikely to run into the rest of the group, other than a once-in-a-blue-moon random instance, there’s no accountability. So roll need on everything, whine if the dungeon isn’t going fast enough or the rest of the group is using unfamiliar tactics. You’re not going to see these people again, no-one’s going to badmouth you in general chat, so feel free to be a jerk. And they were.
The first couple of weeks of the dungeon finder were pretty cool. After that it was “go go go,” cuss out the other group members and never, ever hit an optional boss.
You’ve commented about how the “Call to Arms” isn’t really going to encourage burned out tanks, and Kadomi had a similar complaint, in that she’s not allowed to group even with a favored healer to gain the “Call to Arms” rewards. But I’d lay even that at the feet of the cross-server finder. Because with no accountability, the DPS are just going to blast away with no thought to agro to get through as soon as possible, because yelling at the tank when things go wrong is easy. And healers who can’t keep up with the loser tank in greens running off to pull half the instance also get blamed – and again, a Bad Tank would get a bad reputation in server-only groups, so he’d mend his ways or avoid tanking.
And the worst is that I don’t see that it was necessary. Groups formed, just not efficiently. A same-server finder would have solved the problems Blizzard was trying to address, without encouraging asshattery. The finder was introduced in the days of queues on pretty much any server, so there was no need to expand the player base beyond any particular server.
There were many reasons I left WoW before Cata, but the unpleasantness of cross-server groups was a significant part of it.
When one of the Rift fansites posted news of the LFG tool, they claimed that it *would* be cross-server. Later, Scott Hartsmann sent email clarifying that the LFG tool *might* be cross-server, if needed to address population issues. I didn’t have a warm fuzzy feeling about the correction, but “You can now use the new Looking for Group tool to queue for Dungeons, Rifts, or group quests with other players on your server!” seems to be designed to reassure us that we don’t have to worry about cross-server instances.
My take of all the messages on the forums is this: those WoW players from PvP servers, who are used to asshattery in regular gameplay, are strongly in favor of cross-server instances. (There were several “if it isn’t cross-server I’m quitting” messages – before the tool is even released.) Those who are from PvE servers, and see how bad cross-server instances have become are more in the “same server at all costs” camp.
That’s the prime reason that I’m optimistic. But the class mechanisms also give me hope. Queue times for DPS – and even healers, to a point – in WoW is horrible. But I can cover multiple roles, I’m not locked into DPS as a mage as I was in WoW.
The “cautiously” part comes from the fact that I don’t know what most of the server is like, and there are certainly some jerks around. And if the LFG tool is successful, it will also be necessary. Saying (quote): “But here’s the beauty of any tool that’s added to a game to make things a little more accessible for players: they’re not mandatory. If you’d rather still form your groups the old fashioned way, and if you have a guild to do so with that makes it so you don’t need the dungeon tool, then you’re golden.” is a bit disingenous. Once the tool’s in place, assuming it works at all, far too few people will be advertising for groups the old-fashioned way to have any chance of forming anything but a guild group.
In WoW, prior to the dungeon finder, finding a group using chat channels was a chore, and slow. Post-dungeon finder it’s impossible.
But the idea that we can get three guildies together and queue for two pickups – that should be all kinds of awesome.