It seems players logging into RIFT today are receiving a server wide announcement about an upcoming server merge. Unoffcially there’s about 17 servers involved so far as posted by RIFTJunkies which you can view below.
The merger is planed for Jan 18th and is meant to turn old servers into trial shards, however no official announcement has yet been made by Trion on their website or forums.
We all know that server mergers normally mean a decline in players and due to the amount of servers being merged, I’d say that’s probably the case with RIFT as well. It’ll be interesting to see what sort of free trial Trion will now offer as they currently offer a 7 day trial. My guess is they’ll start offering an unlimited free trial with a level cap around 20, maybe 30 and if that doesn’t bolster subscriptions, they’ll go Free-to-play by the end of 2012.
You can view the list of servers affected after the jump.
[Update] We received a response from Trion about this and they stated,
Bottom line is that we’re not merging any servers. The 11 shards in question are being turned into trial servers for a future large-scale trial promotion. We think the confusion is due to server wide notifications that recommended players transfer their characters before the 1/18, which is when the reconfiguration will happen.
Transferring Shard: –> Receiving Shard:
PVE
- Belmont –> Millrush
- Galena –> Millrush
- Atrophinius –> Greenscale
- Crucia –> Greenscale
- Alsbeth –> Shatterbone
PVE – RP
- Estrael –> Faeblight
- Shadefallen –> Faeblight
PVP
- Sunrest(PVP-RP) –> Deepstrike
- Freeholme –> Deepstrike
- Dayblind –> Deepstrike
- Faemist –> Briarcliff
The game has poor crafting.The devs have shunned pleas from early beta for 24/7 realm vs realm(a la DAOC) warfare….and most of whats there has been seen many times before.Now Trion reaps what they have sewn.
January 12th, 2012 at 6:42 pmQuote
Too bad they had some great ideas before he influence of end gamer types. When they announced that future game development would be primarily end game I knew a shift in focus had been made. Then they began to input more and more WoW like features and the artistic beauty of the game went more and more toward ugly scary looking. With more and more class adjustments the so called freedom of choice they advertised went away as very specific choices became functional and the rest would just not work well at all. Then they brought in spider mounts and the gross factor fell in the hands of uncontrollable players free to impose them selves on others … which of course they did.
IMO when they brought in new devs late in development and especially a particular individual things just went down hill. You cant make an MMO that caters to every game style, you have to pick a target audience and stick with it from the start. Just IMO of course
January 13th, 2012 at 12:02 amQuote
Funny, I thought Rogues were always over-nerfed from the start… and they were something like 1/3 of players… and I was in the start and quit when they nerfed all the the dungeons after only like 3 months.
Let’s thank the Gersh, Destroyer of WAR for wrecking the balance of another game. Bright Wizards=Pyromancers
Oh, and crafting was stupidly broken to in a number of ways. The primary “token”(can’t remember game name) used to buy the high quality recipes was RANDOM DROPPED from the daily crafting quests. And the chance of getting it was LOW. So some lucky people favored by the RNG gods were happy with lots of “tokens”. Other people got not one after burning stupid amounts of crafting supplies doing the quests every day for a month.
And many other broken things.
January 13th, 2012 at 7:02 pmQuote