Down to the wire: Trion announces exact time of RIFT's head start

@Joshua Przygocki Ive read that the official server list will be announced tomorrow :]

@Pook Huzzah!

@Joshua Przygocki

I know your meaning was to coordinate with your friends the server to play on. But ..
"Can we have the server names ahead of time so we can establish our friends"

Sounds like you need a server name to make friends. Which is lols. A little.

@Daverator More to make sure you and the friends you already have are going to make characters on the same server.

@Daverator Don't make fun of me because I'm Polish.

@Daverator
I think Dave was just laughing at the wording JP used. And I found it funny, too! :)

@xuiton Well, I think Trion may have made the leveling curve a bit easier for beta so that everything could be tested. And very few people I saw were leveling past 30 very quickly, the people who really worked at it, NOT playing casually, were leveling a lot faster than some of the slower, casual, players. Besides, it's better than WoW's week long leveling curve; and that is 35 more levels than this. MMOs are going to be a lot easier from now on due to the newer generation of gamers.

@Joshua Przygocki

I wouldn't really be insinuating that leveling has anything to do with difficulty.

@xuiton

I don't think the progression is too terribly off. Me and my friend played a good bit (but only together, so that did limit it). And we made it to 29 in the beta even after missing the first day or two. That said we were still getting constant spam about Shard First Killing "Bob the Hopeslayer" or looting "Vambraces of Roguish Lolling", so obviously we were ahead of the curve at least on our shard.

Basically, the later levels (we got to) involved going back and forth between quest hub and target area, and it got to the point where, when we were finished in an area, we were about tired of the area and the run between hub and missions. Much longer would start getting tedious.

@xuiton

Most players that hit 42 played more than one beta... I hit 42 after Much play in 3 beta's which involved days of play... levels did not reset with each beta.

@Apakal Difficulty is the wrong idea. How about the impatience of the new gamer generation. Though, I still think that difficulty will be æffected by the changing times. We definitely won't see new western games releasing with the difficulty of Everquest (ignoring the new shard).

@xuiton I promise you that they had it set up that way for beta. It's very common to have the leveling curve tuned down so people level faster so that they can have people testing higher level content. It will get adjusted over the next few days and probably during the head start as well.

People will be level 50 by Sunday the 28th. Possibly some Saturday late.

World first kill on raids will start on Monday or Tuesday.

@Joshua Przygocki

No, we probably won't. But I think that's okay. In turn, I think we're going to see a lot more games with the philosophy that Guild Wars 2 has been talking about., where difficulty gives way to flexibility and vast rewards for creativity, skill, and knowledge.

@xuiton
I hit L42 with my mage, L25 with my cleric, and L20 with both warrior and rogue (from beta 3 when L20 was the cap, then beta 5 didn't let us access the beta 3 servers, unlike later phases), so it may look like Rift has fast levelling - but I was in beta phases 3, 5, 6 and 7, which is around 16 days total (as beta 5 had a 1 day extension), and I played far more excessively during each phase than I will in release (i.e. I was getting only 3-4 hours sleep per day, playing Rift for at least 12-16 hours per day, as I did not have work during that period).

I think a casual player could happily spend 3-6 months getting to the level cap because there is a lot to explore and see if you're not just crunching through quests, rift events and dungeons as fast and as focused as you can be.

But I had a mission in beta - I know how poorly tested the mid to high level content has been in most of the MMO launches of the past 5 years - so myself and a handful of other like-minded testers hammered our way out of the well-tested newbie areas where all the playing-only-for-a-free-preview players were remaking characters constantly to try out all the souls in a bid to pick their launch character - and we got to the higher level zones where the crowds never reached - and then we tested - we tested the higher level dungeons for balance issues, we tested quests to see if they were broken, we tested rifts to see if they worked, we scoured the zones finding all the puzzles and secret loot stashes, we tested the top tier talents and root abilities that most players never got to try, and we tried to get stuck in hard to reach places (I think our exploits getting hopelessly stuck in dead end areas of various dungeons is why the racial powers are being disabled in instances for launch, i.e. the Bahmi/High Elf leaping/flying racials in particular). I.e. we did some "old-school" testing, like beta testers did back in the first half of the last decade before beta became a dirty word for a marketing exercise designed to boost PR hype by word of mouth - we tried to make sure that the mid/high levels of the game are just as polished as Rift's first 20 levels.

Now I just hope that Trion's QA department and the hand-picked beta testers who got into alpha have similarly done a good job at fully testing and bug-hunting the last 8 levels, because we can all name tons of MMOs that launched with their endgame content broken/flawed/incomplete.