Activision Blizzard: RIFT players will come back to WoW

@cliktea "another guy that just flat out gave up on MMOs for the time being after playing Rift"

That's pretty much where I'm at. I don't know that I'll ever play WoW again, but Rift put me off the genre for a while. Hoping GW2 will change my mind.

@cliktea I'm kinda in the same place. And to fight the craving of going back to WoW, i've deleted all my toons. Drastic, but it's working just fine :)

@Gene Quagmire

I've got to say I tried Rift and saw their gimmicks pretty quick. As soon as everyone saw the game was one giant kill/gather/deliver task with almost no actual quests they release their first patch and start their "live" event (how awfully done was that) right when subs will run out.

Then they hold off on much needed balance for the Rogue class (of which the most players rolled up their first characters over any other class) until the second month of subs was about to run out.

Their content was bland and the PvP was weak. The same happened with Warhammer. Both games had huge initial sales and then a few months in the vast majority of people had quit. Six months in and War was already dead, I will be shocked if Rift has over 150-200k subs in another month or two and expect it to be down under 100k quickly.

I have to agree that with major releases all following this format new MMOs have little excitement to me. People think SWtOR will be utterly amazing. Well people thought the same thing of AoC, WAR and Rift. It will be more of the same but it will have high initial sales because of the hype. MMOs make all of their money off of overselling their products and getting millions of people to buy a box and then they move on to creating the next MMO to hype up.

This is why I keep saying that companies need to get rid of the box sale. Keep the subscription and do a 2 week free trial right out the gate. This means in order for them to make a profit they have to have a solid game that can keep people interested for months instead of a hype fest that everyone is bored with in days.

@cliktea

Pretty much the same thing here. Left WoW last september for good. Tried Rift, had a blast the first month, sunk into 6 months subscriptions but 2 weeks later at the end game, bored to death.I am login here and there but decided to leave the MMO for a while. Even my 8 years old son doesn't play anymore. Rift is an awesome game for what it is but Rift problem is that it came out too late. Put that exact same game released instead of WAR/AoC and it is a huge hit.

Keeping an eye for The Secret World but that's it for now.
Not going to sink money into Star Wars since it look like the same old in Sci-Fi and Guild Wars 2, it will depend, the fantasy setting doesn't appeal me anymore.

Playing lot of single player games (FPS/TBS/RTS/Puzzles etc)that I haven't tried because I was stuck in MMOs and very surprise how some games are very good (Some not, of course).

Maybe us MMO gamers look like whiners/crybabies/haters etc but when the carrot on a stick is the same old carrot and you know exactly what a carrot taste, you tend to not run hard anymore to get that carrot. I am not blasting Rift or WoW or any MMO, but the whole genre is due for a change and I say this because i am loving the genre.

That's exactly why most MMOs DON'T have a trial period (and WoW does). They get most of their revenue from curious types, not long-term subscriptions. If people had 2 weeks to try Rift, they probably wouldn't cancel their WoW subscription (just put it on hold) and probably wouldn't pay to play Rift past the trial.

The same thing happened with DC Universe online. All hype, and a $50 box price tag. Terrible game. And let's not mention the SOE fiasco.

@cliktea Yeah, another "me too" post with this. There's nothing wrong with Rift itself, per se.

The problem is that the entire genre needs a reboot. About 5-10 levels in to pretty much every MMO I get that "I've played this game before" feeling.

I don't doubt most people go back to WoW from other games. They're all basically the same, so why not play the Blizzard MMO that's well polished and everyone else is playing?

From my own personal experience, I know 4 people who left WoW for Rift(including myself). I can name 4 people who left Rift for WoW(3 within the first month)

@KvanCetre

Yeah. Tried RIFT, found it to be a soulless, boring, generic but very polished game. Of course, I'm just trolling amirite? RIFT is amazing in every way.

Anyway: I resubbed to WoW. I even said there was nothing left for me there at one point, but the time gap was just so huge and nothing but the old dog could satisfy the requirement of making me actually want to login. I'm still not really back for good though, it's a time waster until TOR, TSW, ArcheAge, TERA and Blade&Soul; but, hey, I'm having my fun for the moment.

Also: to anyone who goes "bawww, poor Trion, Blizz should stop being dicks and leave the little guy alone," might I remind you of "We're Not in Azeroth Anymore." Well, some of us are. A much more accurate tagline, given RIFT's playerbase, would be "We're Not in Norrath Anymore," since RIFT's pop seems to be mainly EQ2 vets.

@Elranzer

Yeah. I've bought into five new MMOs in the last six months, including DCUO, which I wanted to love, but didn't.

I've been playing Rift for two months now pretty solidly and haven't run out of things to do at level 50. I scratch my head trying to figure out how other people have run out of content, as I have 300+ hours in and haven't come close.

@Song7

This, right here. I even gave WoW another shot a week ago with the come-back trial thing. No dice. The game was fun for a long time, but Rift is the apple of my eye now.

1.2 dropped and I am happier than ever I went with a 6 month sub.

@Song7

I agree completely. People can like RIFT, dislike RIFT, in the end it doesn't really matter. They say "Oh it is gimmicky, it's too much like other MMOs, it stole a bunch of features from X game, it's got X bugs". It's got less bugs than I've ever seen in an MMO at this stage in development, and much more content than other MMOs at this stage, much more depth of character development than other MMOs at this stage, much better balance than other MMOs at this stage (even with its issues) - I think the people asking/expecting more of Trion are unrealistic and only kidding themselves that what they are actually asking is even possible with all the factors and facets to consider when developing an MMO.

Of course they're all industry professionals, because this is the internet where everyone is knowledgeable about everything - but seriously, these kids have no idea what they're on about. Honestly, these people who think that WoW was so damned original - over half of the features (well over, maybe 3/4) that have made WoW such a huge success have come from other games, but Blizzard simply did a better job implementing them. The same is true of RIFT, is it brand new? No, it's familiar in many respects - but some of us didn't want a reinvention of the genre. We wanted the next step in the genre, and by incorporating so many features as a new "standard", RIFT has taken the base experience of what to expect in a new MMO, and raised that bar where previously nobody had been able to, since World of Warcraft.

Then there's my personal opinion, which is that WoW is old hat, and the developers don't give a damn about their original playerbase, and haven't since mid-BC when they started making the game so FUCKING easy that I could ace its content in a coma. They just want everything to be as easy as possible, to pander to all of the children who want that. I'm from a generation of gamers that had to memorize dozens and dozens of 2,4,6 and 8 button combinations for fighting games, that had to memorize where every ammo drop in a map was and learn to use ballistics to effectively kill people with thrown or lobbed grenades, who had to figure out all the puzzles to fix the fucking Triforce and rescue Zelda several times over, and we don't want to be coddled. We play games for a challenge, and while MMOs might not be the most challenging manifestation of gameplay mechanics which present a challenge, they can be made to do so, and RIFT right now is much more difficult to master than WoW - and it just came out.

I, like many I know, gave Cataclysm one last chance to prove that the WoW devs knew what the fuck they were doing, that they weren't making Wizard101 or Lego Online to appeal to a bunch of children, and while not surprised, I was somewhat saddened to see them choose the path of least restraint, rake in the dough from people who like recycled content (Seriously not only entire instances but even item sets - talk about a dev team not earning their freaking income) and screw the player that wants a challenge, we don't have the time or concern to present them with one. Well they sure have the resources and the manpower, so I took that as a middle finger, and won't be returning ever again. Ever.

@NeverDeath. All true. However, their priority as a business is not keeping a minority happy but is making money, and making money is what they are doing - majority rules but its a shame that a small percentage of people like us want something more mature and challenging. Heres hoping that Blizzard have realised this and Titan will be developed for the adults and WoW can be left for the kids (not holding my breath though as the heavy "social" aspect of the game screams facebook/twatter to me which is not good!)

@NeverDeath
Pretty entertaining response, if you go look at the WoW forums. There are all sorts of people over there complaining that the game is too hard!

Which is it, actually? I don't know, but it's a good difficulty for me, so I'm pretty happy with it. I AM from the ol' NES generation too...if that matters at all. Which it probably doesn't.

I definitely think you're overreacting and taking a game way too personally, but if it's that important to you, you're probably happier moving on as you already have.

@NeverDeath I take it then that you have beaten all the hard modes and the time run through Zul. Grats on that. I haven't been able to get all those down yet.

@Song7 how does it compare in game balance, bugs character development to wow tho? because rift is not competing with vanilla.

nope, neither game is original, most of it can be traced to Tolkien.

you say wow is easy and rift has a good difficulty, did you went to elitist jerks and thinktank videos for wow and their equivalent for rift? have the theorycrafters gone through rift?

about the button combination, is it a lie that you can make a one button macro?

@Dunraven Exactly. WoW is it's own worst enemy at this point. I seriously doubt the drop in subs is because of Rift. (No offense Rift players but Rift didn't break any molds)

@Dunraven
Agree. The arrogance is just amazing. I don't actually play either game myself, and don't really expect to. If I actually did have any interest in WoW this kind of attitude would change that. I hate big companies in general, and this kind of attitude is part of the reason. The almost "entitledness". These kinds of people just disgust me. WoW's well past it's prime, seriously doubt it's going to do anything but slowly decline. Wait till the next generation games come out and it'll really be in decline. GW2, and ArcheAge for instance.