Originally posted by Hartsman (Source)

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Hello, Ascended!

What an amazing year it’s been. As we approach RIFT’s first full birthday, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on some of the things that have happened since launch and discuss the thinking that will shape the year to come.

If you’re reading this, chances are you already know that we think about MMOs differently than everyone else. To us, everything is about the quality of the service, the speed of meaningful updates, and the relationship that combination creates with you. We never forget that you are the reason we do everything we do.

In our last big Producer’s Letter, we talked about the kinds of themes we were aiming for. We talked about making more story-based adventure available to more people (which surfaced in the form of Chronicles and Slivers), unique and better ways to play with others as easily as possible (which took the form of Instant Adventures, Onslaughts that added new build-and-defend gameplay to Ember Isle, and the largest zone events we’ve ever created), and ongoing advancement that occurs even after you hit level 50 (which then arrived in the form of Planar Attunement).

Scott Hartsman recently spoke with Eurogamer where he discussed the business of subscribers and money.

“Let me think,” Rift executive producer Scott Hartsman told Eurogamer. “Rift has been holding – yeah, it’s definitely been growing since launch, for sure.”

“Subscribers?” he asked, when asked.

“One of the great things about our business is that we really don’t need to worry so much about making noise about overall subscriber numbers. We are pretty damn happy that we have a healthy business and a successful game. And players, thousands of people who pick up the game, continue to.”

When pressed if he could share a specific subscriber number, Hartsman answered, “Not at this time.”

Which is in keeping with Trion’s behaviour since Rift launched. Never have we been told subscriber numbers and, with Trion being a private company, we can’t rely on financial reports to dish the dirt.

As the article mentions, we’ve never heard of subscriber numbers from Trion, only that we had 1 million account registered some time ago. Scott goes on to discuss the pros and cons of free-to-play models that seem to be popular these days and how that would effect Rift. He also discusses how to measure the metrics of free to play users and month to month subscribers.

Make sure to read the whole interview.

In my last article, I focused on the continued enjoyment of the artifact system and what types of updates would need to occur for it to stay fun and fresh. But RIFT’s many pastimes need more than one article to fully discuss future possibilities; especially those hinted at by Scott Hartsman in his July 14th RIFT Into the Future! post. There he presents short and long-term goals Trion has for bringing changes to how players can spend their time.

Lets take a look at his comments on uses for experience at level 50 and the idea of Instant Adventures. Both seem to be logical progressions of how game content works currently within Telara and it will be great to see how Trion implements these ideas.

Scott Hartsman discusses the future of RIFT. (source).

Hey, everyone. Following the release of 1.3 last month, we realized that we’ve spent so much time working on the game that we haven’t taken the time to do a big, public update with some of the things that are coming up for RIFT.

After looking at all of the things currently happening in the studio, the piece you’re about to read took on a life of its own. Why did that happen? Between the sheer volume of great things going on and the staggering number of people working on them, one point kept getting hammered home:

YOUR SUPPORT MAKES EVERYTHING POSSIBLE!

When you buy the game, when you subscribe, when you Ascend a Friend, that directly translates into more effort that we get to put into making RIFT even better.

The fact that so many of you are playing (and have continued to play!) has let us keep growing both our plans and the development team more than we had hoped possible.

Over the weekend, Gamefront.com posted an interview with Scott Hartsman discussing server transfers, world events and more, read this snippet and follow the link below for the whole interview.

GF: The LFG tool seems to be working really well so far since you added it in 1.2. Are there more changes coming to it, and if so, what changes can players look forward to?

SH: We actually have the ability to look at all of the dungeon queues across all of the servers in real-time through an interface, which is sweet. You probably noticed that we launched it and immediately made some tweaks to it. There are also a couple of tweaks coded that haven’t rolled out yet. One of them is changing how we calculate if you are eligible for a given tier of dungeons. We’re redoing a lot of the logic around that to make it a lot more clear to players. The interface around it is going to be about a million times more clear than it is right now. Also, we’re working on another fix that lets players reconfirm the role they want to play when their group joins the queue. There’s still a little confusion around that unless you’ve been using the toll for a while.

It’s basically smaller tweaks targeted at usability at this point. The other thing we’re keeping an eye on right now is this: Experts and higher level dungeons are zipping along great on most worlds, but the experience for those leveling up isn’t as good. Because of our free trial and Ascend-a-Friend, there are a ton of people leveling up. But even though there are a ton of people out there using the LFG tool to register for dungeons as they level up, the timing isn’t lining up for those folks to have a good experience. So, we’re trying to find the best solution to get those people together to use the system.

For the full interview visit Gamefront.com.

Originally posted by Hartsman (Source)

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When we set out to get this unveil event in front of you, it was all about some serious ambitions.

Great new types of content to unveil a brand new raid zone. Events that really push the edge of what’s possible not just in Rift, but in any MMO of its kind. All within an incredibly rapid amount of time following launch.

In this case, while we did get to “what’s possible” we didn’t get to “solid gameplay for the entire game universe.” The later phases of the event were too concentrated and time-compressed, which caused issues on a number of worlds.

RIFT gets some notoriety and breaking through the gaming press barriers and appears on CNN.com.

(CNN) — In the world of massive multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPG), “World of Warcraft” is the gold standard with more than 12 million subscribers as of October 2010.

With their most recent expansion release, it seems Blizzard’s hold on the market would grow even tighter.

However, another game company is armoring up and entering the MMORPG arena.

And it comes with a dig at the online gaming giant, calling out its fictional home planet in ads: “We’re not in Azeroth anymore.”

“Rift” (Trion) is set on Telera, a world that apparently is a nexus of sorts for different planes of existence. These other worlds invade Telera through physical rifts and allow monsters to attack important cities and people. As a player, your job is to stop it from happening.

You can read the full article here where they also have time to talk with Scott Hartsman.

Posted by Hartsman (Source)

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Hi, everyone — I wanted to get an update out for the weekend after the last day of excitement around here.

On last night’s fix — I’m very happy to confirm that we did fix a login vulnerability, with significant assistance from an extremely clever user.

The root cause was a very subtle bug in error checking of our login validations deep in the server code. No personal information or any such was leaked out, and no outside attacker penetrated our servers, networks, or databases.

We’d definitely like to thank Mr. ManWitDaPlan for the well-timed assist. Sir, we salute you and offer our most heartfelt thanks.

The rest of what I’d like to add isn’t to detract from the above well-deserved compliment, but it’s important to include in the comprehensive picture.

The sobering fact is that account security remains a multifaceted issue, as attacks from other sources continue.

It’s important to remember is that while a hole was identified and fixed as rapidly as we possibly could, there are still hackers and botnets trying account/password combinations from compromised web sites and past MMOs.

They are doing this right now. Those attacks have been coming constantly since we launched the game. The only thing that changes are how many hundreds of computers are trying to get into your account at any given moment, where they’re coming from, and how many are succeeding.

We do block them as they are detected, but the fact that they are using distributed botnets (compromised computers from across the globe) means that this will remain something that we will continue keeping an eye on, forever.

For users getting hacked this way, Coin Lock is currently doing its job protecting people’s belongings, provided that your RIFT password and EMail password are both complex and entirely different.

Both the login fix and the Coin Lock addition have been doing their part in signficantly reducing overall incidents over the last 18 hours.

Neither one is a silver bullet, but so far it is looking to be a solid one-two punch for the weekend.

Then, with two-factor authentication coming very soon, we expect security to be improved even further.

All totalled up, under 1% of accounts with characters have had characters impacted. However, 1% of a surprisingly large number is still very noticeable.

Our staff has been, and will continue to be, working around the clock to get those impacted back in shape. We’ll continue hiring on even more people to help people with issues of all kinds, as quickly as we can. (Another round of hires begin on Monday, and there will be even more to follow.)

As always, thanks very much for your time, your attention, your assistance, and your patience!

- Scott Hartsman
Exec Producer, RIFT

Another interview with Scott Hartsman surfaces and today it’s from Games On Net. It’s a nice roundup of all the questions people have been asking for the last few weeks. Here’s our favorite:

games.on.net: Denzil would like to know if there’s “any possibility of buffing up character stats for Warfronts? When you reach level 10 it’s quite hard to be useful for your team, and it’s a bit pointless PVP’ing against level 19′s.”

Scott: How about this – are you ready? You ready for this answer?

games.on.net: Sure am.

Scott: Done.

Make sure you read the rest.

From the Official Forums Scott Hartsman talks to us today about Beta 6 and beyond.

Hi, everyone – We’ve dropped a little below our own bar for keeping you up to date on the state of the game, and for that I definitely apologize.

It’s not out of any desire to not keep you informed, but purely out of how many hours a week that everyone is putting into the builds, features, and updates for Open Beta, Head Start, Launch, and what comes beyond. Not an excuse, just letting you know that’s where every waking moment has been going.

With that said, we did want to get updates out on a few hot topics that have come up since Beta 6.