Is it worth the long, long grind to own the Haunted Bell, just to see the bats fly?
The builders in Rift are revolting. No, no, they’re the nicest bunch of players you could find in any game, I mean, the players are up in arms about the free to play (F2P) model for Rift Dimensions. I don’t blame them.
I liken the dimension building experience in Rift to a hamster wheel, constantly running but always treading the same old, tired path. As the game currently stands, the dimension routine consists of farm for goods, sell on the auction house, make platinum to buy dimension items from the store or the auction house, build a little, farm again. This style of play left me cold after a few months, it’s hardly engaging or rewarding on the twentieth time around. The fun part, building the dimension itself, seems far too small a part of the dimension game play.
Why has Trion created such boring play for the dimensions part of the game? The answer lies in the psychology of and revenue raising in F2P games. Players must spend money in a F2P game to keep the company liquid and afloat. Without our cash, they may as well pack up and go home. In a F2P game, where content is readily available, how do they make us pay up? It’s a mix of enticement and frustration.
Enticement is generated by the new cosmetic items; it’s no accident that Rift has a shiny new mount every couple of weeks. Occasionally we buy a new mount because it’s exactly what we’ve always wanted, mostly we buy them because we’ve seen others riding them around and want what they have (the envy principle and boy, oh boy, do I wish I’d bought a squirrel mount when it was out). Whatever piece of cosmetic fluff we favour, we’re coaxed to spend our money on it.
Stop! I wanna get off!!
I’m sure we’re all familiar with the frustration generated by free to play games. It’s the long grind, the seemingly endless routine that we keep on repeating over and over. Like water torture, each drip wears us down till we’re ready to scream. Remember how we all felt on that day Rift went F2P and we discovered that the Lycini and Torvan reputations were increased by another tier? Did your heart fall to your boots at the thought of continuing that grind? Items that reduce that grind are popular items in cash stores.
Humans are lazy animals. We’re designed that way, we’ll almost always take the easiest route to a goal. When the world turns bad, it means we have a store of energy to overcome the difficulties in our way. Game designers use this part of human nature to good effect in games. If we have a choice to embark on a long grind or take the shorter route, most of us will shorten the journey where we can. It’s just human. The most obvious shortcut in Rift is the sale of rex for platinum. With platinum we fund the acquisition of dimension items from the auction house or cash shop. Trion have encouraged the rex/platinum conversion by quite a few methods.
For instance, unstable artifacts and bounty artifacts, are both designed to take months (or perhaps years) of grinding to complete the artifact sets. Some of the nicest dimension items are tucked behind these grinds. Thankfully, the artifacts for both these grinds can be bought from the auction house, if you have sufficient platinum. When the artifact sets are completed, further copies of the unstable artifact dimension items can be bought for 100 to 200 lucky coins. Lucky coins are a limited resource which keeps the cost of these items on the AH high and ties nicely into the Rex/Platinum grind.
Dungeon artifacts also unlock dimension items (trophy section of the dimension store). Once again, these artifacts are rare drops and can be sold on the auction house. Once unlocked, the dungeon trophy items can be placed on the auction house.
Dimension items slowly drop from the slaughter of mobs, less than a drop per hour, similar for fishing. The holiday dimension items are now sold only in boxes (if the Carnival of the Ascended is the norm) rather than piecemeal. We either grind the currency or pay credits for the boxes. If we want one item, we buy from from people selling single items on the auction house. Filling a 1000 to 2000 item dimension through slaughtering mobs, fishing, bounty and unstable artifacts is a long and tedious process, it’s so much quicker to place ourselves on the hamster wheel of Rift and buy what we need from the auction house.
Starry nights, grindy days, is this what dimensions have come to? Dreamscapes by Jaedor@Greybriar.
Even the new profession, Dreamweaving, as lovely as the items are, does not make blocks, decorations, furniture, plants or other items for building, just special effects. (Unless one is willing to make a dimension from red cushions alone and there’s a dimension challenge for us.)
On the other side of the equation, there are ways to reduce the grind, the artifact tracking buff, letting players track artifacts, the notoriety buff, to reduce the reputation grind, or the token buff, to increase the gain of holiday currency or planarite. These buffs can be gained via patron status or store bought potions. Players can buy good armour and weapons from the cash shop to make killing monsters an easier task. Pity there isn’t a platinum making buff – oh it’s called Rex, silly me. Though buffs may ease our way, the grind still seems unending in the dimension world.
All this is old news, weeks and months old, so why are the players revolting now? I blame it on the new Improved Dimension Mystery Box. Trion updated the old mystery box contents by adding 90 new items only available through the new box, around 110 old items currently available on the shop, removed the dragon floats, bumped up the price by 25% and called it a bargain. This thread calls it anything but a bargain. The chance of receiving the new items is very slim, especially the epic rarities. The chance of getting old items is very high making the improved dimensional mystery box a great purchase for the new player but a poor investment for the established dimensioneer. At least the epic rarity items in the old mystery box could be bought for credits.
Is the new mystery box a way to increase profits in a falling market? If so, it seems a bit of a failure, if the amount of snags, rocks, dead trees and other unwanted mystery box rubbish on the auction house is an indicator. It certainly seems to be the straw that broke the camel’s back, the established long term players seem quite disillusioned by the mystery box experience.
Rift is (by all accounts) a good version of F2P, it does focus on cosmetic, non-game changing goodies for the cash shop. It’s just a pity that Trion have labelled Dimensions as cosmetic and a legitimate source of revenue raising. In all fairness, to Trion, dimensions are cosmetic. Rift is a PvE game with raiding or PvP as it’s traditional endgame. Dimensions are just a bit of fluff to keep some players occupied when they can’t do the former. Still, even cosmetic fluff needs to be balanced so as to keep a bit of fun in the grind.
How could Trion put more fun back into the dimension game play? Let’s think back to the pre-F2P Storm Legion days. My own personal favourite was the Nug quest lines. The quests were a few hours of good play, gave an achievement or two along the way and, on completion, opened up the Nug vendors with relatively cheap items. I’d love to see more of these types of quests added into the game.
Enchanting home, disenchanting price. I wonder how much this cost Emerald to make? Hob’s Hollow by Emerald@Greybriar
The Storm Legion puzzles were both fun and frustrating. They took a major investment of time and included interesting rewards including dimension items. The best of these, Little Black Book, gave a coloured orb each time we solved the repeatable puzzle. With practice, this meant an orb every 90 seconds, a quite acceptable investment of time. Sure, the puzzles took a long time to finish but they weren’t grindy. We could do with more of these types of game play.
New recipies for items could be added to the professions (white and red marble building blocks could do well here). Trion could add the occasional cheap item to the cash shop or include dimension items as quest rewards along with armour. It’s OK to add the occasional easily obtained item to the game without tying it in to the hamster wheel of platinum farming.
Sadly, we’re unlikely to see such additions to the game until the next expansion. Perhaps this last year was all about balancing the demands of making money by adding incentives to spend cash and next expansion we’ll see a better balance between fun and grind. I sure hope so, it would be a shame to lose so many of our fine dimensions community. Please Trion, put the fun back into the game.
Have you got a suggestion on how Trion might re-spark the fun of dimensions? What would you like to see added to the game to make it more fun. Leave a comment here or head off to this thread to make a suggestion.
Like to learn more about the psychology of free to play?
The Psychology Of: free-to-play games
Chasing the Whale: Examining the ethics of free-to-play games
Benign Envy and The Psychology of Tiny Tower
Developers and the psychology behind “free to play” games
The Top F2P Monetization Tricks
A few thoughts on Rift and free to play.
Tripping the Rift: Examining the F2P Updates
The Cash Shop Critic: There’s Danger In World “Event” Cash Grabs
Better Homes and Dimensions 
Hello Radish 😀 How are you? 😀 I hope you arehaving fun in landmark ^_^, i was wondering how you feel about EQNext landmark since it’s also a free to play game? 🙂
Hello Yeuo, nice to hear from you.
It’s too soon to tell about Landmark. The game doesn’t have an economy and the real money transactions don’t impact the game.
It’s fun right now, I love manipulating voxels, and the fun will only increase as more props and textures are added to the game.
I sure do hope Landmark does not end up as grindy as Rift. I’d like to think their monetization strategies are more carefully thought out but only time will tell.
Amazing read as always. My wheel got sticky when extra unstable dim items cost 100 lucky coins to 200.Which is 80% more then other dim items. Very limited resource. Or 8 to 16 freaking dollars for a item that I want 10 to 20 for in each build. And the box rate for items is horrendous.
I dont mind spending real money on building $20 is a nice number 2 rex per build, but at the rate of $50 to $100 a build is just getting to high. These are not wardrobe items or mounts where you buy one item its housing where you buy 5 to 100 per build. I feel bad for anyone wanting blue pillars for a build. I have yet to see anyone get one let alone 4 to 20 for a build and WHOA the cost to try to get them is crazy.
I am a lover of all things Rift. I was more then happy to tell people how wonderful Rift is. It still has great points so very many great points. However now I give the warning that the cash shop is getting crazy expensive so use your credits carefully .
Gone are the days where I would ask people for Birthday gifts of cash instead of presents . So I could add it into credits. Right before the boxes came out my fiancee bought into the Archage alpha. So in turn he told me I could get $100 for credits to build with . I told him dont bother since i would be tempted to buy boxes and it was just to big of a gamble. Even if the stuff in the boxes could be bought with credits it would be more then likely priced to high for me to buy them any way.
I did finish that chart and added it to your forum post
I am still getting used to WordPress, so I only just found this post even though I am following you (I think).
I left Rift some time ago, after Storm Legion, and after they turned Free to Play. I adored Rift, and had been there since the beta of the game. I invested a lot of my own cash into the game in the form of subscriptions and in-game purchases because I wanted to support the game I so adored. There was so much about Rift that I loved.
But that changed when their business model changed. I found that Rift’s marketing strategies left a lot to be desired. The cash shop became really invasive to gameplay, not only because you could buy the second highest tier of raid gear from it, but also because the core world events in the game, such as festivals, became so much less about the fun, and more about trying to suck every last coin from player’s rl pockets. Not only items became locked behind the cash store, but also achievements. Festival achievements where, to complete it, you had to have all the items, and the only way of getting many was through a chance box. You got one box from the event (not enough to complete the achievement even if you were lucky) but you could buy other boxes from the store. Not only that, but the world event/festival events notifications in game became advertising podiums for their cash store.
It was at this point, where normal gameplay was impacted by the cash store in such invasive ways that, despite having clung on to my support of the game, I simply could not stand it any more. To see what Rift had been, and what it had become was too much, because I adored that game. I loved Dimensions, I loved the soul system, I loved the world they had created, but it was all cash store really. Even trying to buy and sell with other players became near impossible with dropping player numbers and a sudden shift to limit the amount of auctions one person could put up to something ridiculously small (if you, like me, had been auctioning artifacts).
So I left.
There really is nothing in my blog about Rift, despite having spent over 2 years in the game, absorbed in it with so many hours gameplay behind me. There was nothing in my blog about it because I cared too much about the game, and I had become so bitter about the whole thing. Seeing something you love turn from what you considered wonderful into something that grated on you each day.. I just couldn’t put voice to my thoughts without it becoming a full-blown rant, and that really helps no one.
But yeah, Rift has issues. It has had issues since the downfall of Defiance that caused such massive cutbacks in staff that led to poor decision-making that the company then stood behind and refused to change. Maybe they were right at the time.. the game is still running. It still does have players, which is actually more than I thought it would be 2.5 years down the line. But it is appealing to new players with deep pockets who want everything now. It was the same back then, because its the short term impulsive players that will bring in the most cash.
As free to play models go, I consider Rift a failure because its business model and marketing (at least at the time when I still checked on it) are in some ways pay-to-win, and in others making the cash shop very invasive to gameplay, enough that players leave.
I have played several free-to-play games now, but the business model for something like Guild Wars 2 is far more palatable to me. It seems to be working for them to, not just for new players, but for long term players as well. If I spend money buying things from their store, I feel genuine pleasure at having the item I purchased, not a constant nagging about buying more and more and more that I got from Rift that ultimately sours whatever pleasure I got from the purchase. No matter how much money a player spends in Rift, it always felt like the game, the developers, never felt it was enough and they could just squeeze a little more out of you. I didn’t like that feeling. It didn’t feel like a happy purchase when you have the game breathing down the back of your neck pestering you to buy more things each time you are in game.