Ocho: RIFT Mobile will be discontinued with 3.4

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Originally Posted by Ocho

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Originally Posted by Sargonnas_KoA

You left out the part where Trion did nothing with the mobile app since hell last froze over which created the perfect reason for you to be able to shut it down and say its due to lack of use.

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If it didn't require frequent work, we wouldn't be shutting it down. What isn't obvious outside the RIFT team is just how much time and work on our part was dedicated to keeping the app working. RIFT Mobile maintenance ate up a lot of time that the public never saw, and that was part of the problem.

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Originally Posted by Keah

Could you just leave it in, and not support it anymore?

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Unfortunately, without regular maintenance work on the back end, this app would quickly stop working on its own.

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Originally Posted by Doubledge

Why would you just remove the app completely when there is no alternative to some of its functionality?

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Here is how we approached the decision: We have x number of engineering hours a month to work on RIFT. We want to use those hours in a way that benefits players the most. Maintaining current functionality of the RIFT Mobile app requires y hours. That doesn't include improving the app itself, that's just keeping current functionality working. This means that each month we lose those y hours that we could have applied to RIFT features or optimization, because RIFT mobile will stop working if we do. A big part of making this decision was looking at how much other game development work ended up getting cut to keep supporting RIFT Mobile. It just wasn’t worth it.

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Originally Posted by Riane

Is there any plan to just retain those APIs so people can still utilize them in their web apps?

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Unfortunately this is not as simple as it sounds. We love the creative stuff that players have done to make use of those APIs and ad functionality that benefits their fellow players – it’s terrific. But maintaining those APIs also represents a cost in hours which affects what else we can bring you in RIFT. Making this decision was very difficult, but ultimately we have to look at how we can provide the best game for all of our players, not just the small segment that used the app.We can explore ways that we may be able to deliver some of the same functionality in other ways which have less long term maintenance work associated. Please let us know what functionality you miss. That said, even if we love the ideas they still need to go onto a list and compete with other development proposals that we love (many of which are also player requests), so we can’t make any promises on timing or feasibility.

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Ocho: RIFT Mobile will be discontinued with 3.4