After last week’s closure of the Icewatch and Akala European shards, the communities on both shards were left a little shaken as players scrambled to decide between new shards on very short notice. Trion made the announcement during last Friday’s live stream that they would be giving those players affected by the shaky EU closures a few tokens of appreciation for having the patience to see the transfer process through and keep the community going strong.

Elrar announced those tokens of appreciation yesterday in a forum thread as well as expressed the team’s gratitude:

Originally posted by Elrar (Source)

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Last week we faced the tough decision to turn Akala & Icewatch into trial shards, requiring their players to relocate to other, active shards. While done for the greater good of all our European players, and to ensure we can properly scale with our growing community, we know that these shards are more than just server hardware.

The memories & relationships you have are real, and we want to remember these communities with a few small tokens of our appreciation for all your contributions to RIFT’s success over the past two years.

To that end, all former players of the Icewatch & Akala communities will receive the following within the next few weeks on all of their characters:

• Title: “of Icewatch” or “of Akala”
• Icewatch or Akala Regalia Wardrobe Set
• +1000 Bonus Loyalty

Thank you to everyone for making this transition as quickly as possible. It’s great to see we now have queue times under control, individual server populations are looking very healthy, and more people than ever can now enjoy RIFT together!

Kervik posted a pretty huge list of changes that Trion has in store for Mages yesterday, including multiple changes for every soul. These changes are not finalized and still need to be tested, of course, which is why they’ll be debuting on the PTS before coming over to live shards. While the PTS was sporadically available yesterday, it seems to currently be offline again. Presumably it will be online sometime later today for players to check out the changes and provide valuable feedback.

Keep reading to check out the full list of changes.

Originally posted by Kervik (Source)

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Archon – Rising Vengeance now also increases all non-Archon damage by 2/4/6/8/10%.
Archon – Archon’s Bulwark now also increases Endurance by 100. It no longer stacks with Searing Vitality.
Archon – Increased the damage of Patron’s Rage.
Dominator – Fixed an issue preventing ranks 7 – 13 of Mass Charged Shield from dealing their correct damage.
Dominator – Lightning Wall now costs a flat 60 Charge instead of draining Charge while active.
Elementalist – Elemental Link now increases the Mage’s damage by 1/2/3/4/5% instead of reducing the damage they take. The rest of the talent is unchanged.
Elementalist – Cycle of Earth, Cycle of Fire, Cycle of Air, and Cycle of Water now provide a 7/15% increase to their appropriate damage types.
Harbinger – Luminous Weapon now causes melee attacks to deal additional Life damage to up to 5 enemies. Lasts 1h.
Harbinger – Blademark now reduces the Mage’s damage by 10%. Down from 30%.
Harbinger – Abilities granted by Empyrean Ascension now count as Slashing attacks.
Harbinger – Jagged Blades now increases damage from Lightning Blade and Reaper’s Blade by 20/40%. Up from 15/30%.
Harbinger – Lightning Blade and Reaper’s Blade now receive benefit from effects that increase damage. Previously they only received bonuses from effects specifically referencing them.
Necromancer – Symbiote now also causes Essence Link to increase the damage taken by the affected enemy, from you and your pet, by 2/4%.
Necromancer – Corpse Explosion can now stack up to 3 times.
Necromancer – Deathly Collusion now causes stacks of Deathly Calling to increase all of your damage on the affected enemy instead of only Death damage.
Necromancer – Fresh Graves now also increases your Spell Power by 1/2/3/4/5%.
Necromancer – Every 2nd Scourge Bolt from the Shadow Revenant pet now applies a stack of Deathly Calling.
Necromancer – Corpse Talon now receives a 15% damage bonus from each stack of your pets Deathly Calling on the enemy. Up from 10%.
Necromancer – Reduced the cooldown of Grave Rot to 6 seconds.
Pyromancer – Ignition now decreases the cast time of your Fire spells by 4/8/12/16/20% and all other spells by 1/2/3/4/5%. Reduces the mana cost of non-instant Fire spells by 4/8/12/16/20%. Increases the range of non-melee damaging abilities by 1/2/3/4/5 meters. Increased range does not stack with the range increase from the Dominator’s Mental Fortitude.
Pyromancer – Improved Fireball has been renamed Improved Bolt and now affects all Primary Bolt abilities instead of only Fireball.
Pyromancer – Combust now increases the Fire Storm damage by 10% per stack.
Pyromancer – Burning Fury now deals damage when the caster critically hits with single target damaging ability. This can occur up to once every 1.5 seconds.
Stormcaller – Cold Weather Training now also reduces the cast time of non-Water abilities by 1/2/3/4/5%, and reduces the mana cost of non-instant Water abilities by 4/8/12/16/20%.
Stormcaller – Static Flux now increases all damage.
Stormcaller – Arctic Chill now also causes the snare effect from Arctic Blast, Eye of the Storm, Hailstorm, Icy Vortex and Wind Chill to deal Water damage each second based on your Spell Power, while the enemy is moving.
Stormcaller – Increased damage of Lightning Arc.
Stormcaller – Pouring Rain now resets the cooldown on all Stormcaller abilities. Increased the cooldown to 2 minutes. Moved Pouring Rain to the 40 point root ability.
Stormcaller – Electric Charge has been moved into the soul tree into Pouring Rain’s previous location. It requires 35 points spent in Stormcaller to unlock.
Stormcaller – Perfect Conditions now also reduces the global cooldown of Air and Water spells to 1.33/1.17/1 seconds and reduces the mana cost of instant Air and Water spells by 11/22/33%.
Stormcaller – Tempest Armor no longer provides a global cooldown reduction to Water spells.
Warlock – Neddra’s Torture now has an 8 second duration and cooldown.
Warlock – Expanded Contagion now gives your Radiate Death a 33/66/100% chance to spread Life Leech, Atrophy, Necrosis, Combust, Electrified and Deathly Calling.
Warlock – Lingering Pain now gives Primary Bolt abilities a chance to refresh Life Leech instead of only Void Bolt.
Warlock – Conflux no longer consumes DoTs on cast. Increased the cooldown of Conflux to 45 seconds.

During last Friday’s live stream, Daglar, Elrar, and Simon answered a whole bunch of questions from the RIFT community while we waited for our North American shards to come back online after a bit of necessary reshuffling. The trio gave away a few, fun hints:

• We might be seeing the arrival of RIFT 2.4‘s raids on the PTS in two weeks or so.
• Daglar mentioned that the team realizes how much the current souls favor 61-point specs and how much un-fun that can be. Both of our class devs are working on ensuring the souls can hybridize with other souls better.
• Remember those new souls we heard about a while ago that will be presumably coming in 3.0? Mage tanks sound like an almost certainty!
• And possibly… Warrior healers? Possibly (if you’ll remember, he also mentioned healing Rogues in a previous live stream).
• Trion is trying to add a little more interaction to dimensions and make them more than pretty places to look at.

PvP was also brought up a few times during the live stream. While the development team does seem to be working on a new Warfront, Daglar reiterated that arenas will not be added to RIFT. He summed up his feelings about 2-faction PvP in RIFT in a recent forum post. He also talked a bit about his own personal feelings regarding developing for PvP content in general.

Speaking of developing PvP content, in that very same thread, Daglar also took a bit of time on a Sunday to ask the PvP community about what type of new Warfront modes they’d like to see based off the ones already in-game. He then went and started personally working on making them a reality. These modes will be permanent and not just limited to a weekend or event. The two currently in progress are:

Black Garden 10 vs 10 – Domination 2 control points. (Codex Ruleset)
Karthan Ridge – Domination Edition (Codex Ruleset)

The PvP community has been hoping for something new for quite a while now. Luckily, Daglar does seem to be listening.

Following last week’s closing down of Icewatch and the initial reshuffling on RIFT‘s European (EU) shards, we did indeed see similar reshuffling on the North American (NA) shards on Friday and over the weekend. The NA cluster was split into two, and each cluster received one new shard (Hailol and Necropolis)– one of which was a PvP shard (Necropolis). Luckily, no shards were forced to be made into Trial shards.

The European community was also reshuffled again with the addition of two new shards– one French-speaking (Nomi – PvE), and one English-speaking (Volan – PvP). The EU shards also saw a separation of clusters. Now all English-speaking shards are in one cluster while the German and French-speaking shards are in another. For a longer summary of these changes, see this thread.

Announced during last Friday’s live stream, Trion will be giving the survivors of the EU Icewatch shard debacle a unique title and some Loyalty rewards. The specifics of either reward aren’t known yet, but this is definitely great to see after the community’s initial reaction last week. The way the team went about the reshuffles over the weekend was also much better, since there was plenty of notice ahead of time and no shards shifted into Trial shards.

Since these new cluster caps are an experiment of sorts, Daglar is still encouraging players to move away from the highest-populated shards and, if new, starting on the newer, less-populated shards. There are currently quite a few high-population shards that are also locked to shard transfers. The team will continue to monitor our shard populations and queues as the days continue.

There’s no doubt about it– RIFT is quite popular right now, which is awesome to see. The low-level maps are bustling, and folks both returning and completely new are journeying into Telara and checking out the game for themselves.

The long login queues on most RIFT shards continued last night during peak hours. Many players had to wait hours if not longer in order to log in. Trion had been keeping a close eye on the situation previously but after last night’s queues, there was little choice but to finally take action and make a few changes. The first huge change that was made last night was the conversion of Icewatch into a Trial Shard.

What this means is that players on Icewatch will be forced to transfer their character for free at their earliest convenience to one of the other shards in the European cluster. Until they do so, their characters will be only be able to access Meridian/Sanctum. The good news is that there are two new EU English PvE shards to choose between: Gelidra and Zaviel. Both of these shards will also be a part of the same cluster along with the other European shards. The 7-day transfer limit will also be removed to help folks make the switch.

This conversion surprised and upset quite a few players overnight as guilds needed to be transferred and longtime Icewatch fans had to pack their bags and choose new names and shards with not much notice beforehand. Elrar explained the reasoning behind the short notice last night and reassured players that this was ultimately the best decision since opening up a new server cluster would cause players to be unable to easily join cross-shard groups and dungeon/warfront teams.

Daglar and the Trion team were also keeping an extremely close eye on our North American shards overnight. Late last night, Daglar said, “The odds of opening more servers tomorrow are getting higher and higher. I’ll be reviewing the data again in the morning. Sorry for the queues folks, but opening shards isn’t something we will do lightly.” He followed up with this:

Originally posted by Daglar (Source)

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I just got off the phone with our engineering director. The proposed plan that we are going to be reviewing and finalizing in the morning for North America is to split the existing shards into two clusters and add an additional shard to each of those clusters.

To give you guys a little background, our current population limits are more related to the total number of users in a cluster as opposed to on an individual shard. By splitting it into two healthy clusters we may be able to greatly increase the number of users on a per shard basis.

We will also be reviewing Europe and determining how to further address the issues there.

From the looks of it, today may be a busy day.

Hey, remember the above promotion image Trion used to advertise last year’s Summerfest? That Bahmi dude is pretty, um, unforgettable. A few players requested cosmetic swimsuits after its release and were a little disappointed that the vendors for the event didn’t offer any type of beachwear. If only RIFT had a convenient place for all sorts of optional cosmetic items… Oh, wait– silly me. Now we do, thanks to the Item Store!

Daglar mentioned a subtle hint regarding beachwear (of all things) yesterday:

Originally posted by Daglar (Source)

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There is a magical time and place for swimsuits. It is called Summerfest.

I have seen the promised land.

You heard it here, folks. The promised land is the magical land full of bikinis.

Unsurprisingly, a few of our highest-populated shards (Icewatch, especially) experienced heavy login queues yesterday during peak hours. There are a lot of folks checking out RIFT right now. The Trion team had extra shards on standby for the arrival of Empyreal Assault, but decided to take a “wait and see” approach to the rising queues as the day continued. Daglar commented on the queue situation on the forums last night with the following comments:

Originally posted by Daglar (Source)

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I did raise server caps ever so slightly this evening which completely removed the queue on a number of servers. They may be able to go up further this weekend – our engineers were able to find a number of optimizations based on today’s load on the servers.

We hope to have those optimizations up potentially on Friday. The % impact of the optimization is not yet known.

If you are a new player, I highly suggest not starting on Deepwood in NA, nor Icewatch in EU. Icewatch is the most over populated shard in RIFT – and short of forcibly moving people off the server there is little I can do right now. I have no desire to mark Icewatch as a trial shard and force folks to break up their guilds and absolutely force them to move.

We are also looking at getting our character create locks into a state where they can be used on the fly.

He also mentioned earlier in the thread that the team’s hesitance on adding additional shards was due to the fact that the current cluster setup probably couldn’t support additional shards, which would leave players on new shards with limited options for cross-server dungeon and warfront experiences.

With any luck, the queues will settle down as the week progresses.

There will be plenty of awesome things to do later today when RIFT 2.3: Empyreal Assault goes live, but one thing we’ll have to wait a little bit on is taking advantage of the new race and gender change options that will be added to Barber Shops thanks to the free-to-play system. Daglar made an announcement on the forums yesterday evening stating that the feature has been delayed due to a recently-discovered issue. The good news is that we should see the issue fixed by Thursday if all goes well.

Originally posted by Daglar (Source)

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We have been going through our final screening process for 2.3 and unfortunately we’ve found an issue with race/gender changes on the barber shop. We’ve made the decision to disable barbers when 2.3 hits tomorrow until we can get the fix up to live.

I expect the fix to be deployed on Thursday – though other circumstances could always intervene.

I’m extremely sorry to everyone that is excited to try out this feature, and we’ll get it up to live as soon as we can.

Faction change scrolls that can be purchased through the store interface weren’t affected by this issue.