Impressions of RIFT from a returning player

Cross post from reddit:

Just a summary of my own observations of returning to RIFT after a long hiatus. Long story short, played RIFT in open beta up to River of Souls in vanilla, had to quit due to RL(2011). Came back during Storm Legion stayed through F2P till Tier 3 raids, had to quit due to RL (2013). Decided to come back and play the game again last week.

Upon my return I bought primalist souls, ascended souls pack and earing unlock slots with $ to get me back into the game. Also spent money on dye pack since I've always had a passion for wardrobe on my characters and had many different sets of costumes. Regretting every purchase I made last night after I hit 65 a few days ago and realized how much Trion has butchered this game since 3 years ago and the F2P system is not what it used to be.

Leveling-

Dead world, mostly alone, now and then some other players

Dead dungeons, queuing as tank/healer still up to an hour wait

Instant Adventure is populated and efficient at leveling, killing the reason to do World Quests/Dungeons- fun to do first couple times, mind numbingly boring once you realize your just doing the same crap over and over again just to get your exp bar to tick because its the same zone 10-65.

Max level-

P2P starts here. fresh 65s are useless in contributing to any kind of group content because of several reasons.
Grinding reputation for each Nightmare faction is REQUIRED for necessary runes/essences/focus/synergy crystals.

F2P players can expect to grind daily quests and weekly quests for a month before having notoriety status for purchase these items. Unless... you pay for reputation boosts that (only last for 2 hours then you have to buy more) to get you there faster.

Void stone grind is REQUIRED for you to purchase your notoriety items. Can no longer transfer these between characters on the same account like in Storm Legion and has a weekly HARD CAP. To put this into perspective, a raid tier focus costs 100,000 stones, the weekly cap is 47000. So, it will take you 3 weeks to buy this one item- oh yea and you have other items you need to purchase too, so more weeks of grinding these out. Doing 500 stages of Nightmare Rifts will only net you 500-1000 stones. 3 weeks just for one single item. Unless... you buy It with real money, then you forego that wait.

Group content- The community in RIFT, on cross-events, are only interested in completing grinds. The content that are advertised such as Experts and Raids- they only want people who are already over geared and have all the achievement for FAST runs. Therefore discouraging newer players from becoming invested into the game being turned away at the gate. Sure you can join guilds that are "helpful" to bring you along- but this doesn't mean your not being carried or a burden to the team.

The pay walls I am talking about isn't $15-30 to "accelerate" this grind, I'm talking about hundreds of $ to speed up months worth of grinding just so you can step into raiding.

At the core, since its inception through SL, Rift is a good game. It has challenging group content, great class system, good cosmetics. But these contents is now gated behind grind walls/pay walls, I am red tier loyalty mind you. You can't do this content because your character is not viable in doing this content unless you do these grind/pay walls. You do not have the option of playing this game and doing content that you want and progress at the same time- YOU are forced to doing these grinds and dailies to get what is needed to do end game content. in Storm Legion, we had this grind too- but we had flexibility (can go into this into detail if needed). Now we have no flexibility, its do these things this way for weeks/months before you can enjoy our content or pay hundreds to skip this artificial wall.

It's sad to say, but all the systems setup in this game and the way progression works is to "encourage" you to open your wallet again and again. Not about playing the game and progressing naturally in the world.

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Impressions of RIFT from a returning player