Rift – Hotfixes, Patches and Ding – Oh My!

The Rift developers continue to tweak and fine tune their product at an incredible rate. They are consistently addressing the minor issues that can plague a newly released game. As things stand now they can deftly maneuver through hotfixes and updates. If the game is able to grow, I am hopeful that they will be able to continue this level of service.

One of the more frustrating issues in the past month was directly tied to the guild leveling process. It was tied to the guild quest that requires members to close a specified number of rifts and kill and specific number of Rift mobs. For more than two weeks the quest was bugged and not all accomplishments were giving credit toward completing the quest. This was extremely frustrating to say the least.

From what we can tell, Black Sunshine is the largest defiant guild on the Kelpmere shard. With over 400 members we can be seen throughout every zone in the game. Our members span the entire range of levels so we are very active and visible. When a guild quest can trip up a guild of this size, imagine what it does to the many smaller guilds on the server.

Late one night last week I accepted the dreaded Rift/Rift Mob quest. I think the count for that one was to close 100 rifts and kill 1000 rift creatures level 20 or higher. When I woke up the following morning I was a bit upset to see that someone else had accepted the PVP quest. Knowing that the first quest was going to take the longest to complete I felt we should do it first.

Imagine my surprise to find out that we had completed the quest while I slept! Apparently the developers fixed the issue with these quest and they are now working as intended. With so many members contributing, we were blowing through guild quests even before the fix. Now we knock them out even faster. Often we have members asking for us to accept guild quests because they are unaware that we have completed them for the week.

All of this activity also affords us unprecedented access to shard firsts. Daily we are greeted with minor shard first spam, which is nice. But the important ones are the ones we get week after week, telling us of our shard first as we turn in the guild quests. Being the first guild on the shard to complete the various guild quests allows us to have some idea of the guild progression on the shard. If we are the first to cap a guild quest, we are in the lead to reach max guild level.

While shard first isn’t really that big of a deal, the guild perks are. Our members have access to more perks because of all of their effort. I have to admit it is kind of nice to be in the position we are in at the moment. This little side venture into Rift is turning out to be far more enjoyable than I could have imagined.