What Went Wrong with Rift’s River of Souls Event

Rift’s first major live world event took place over the past two weeks, entitled River of Souls. Entitling it a “disaster” and noting devs have been offering apologies for their mistakes, PC Gamer editorializes on what went wrong and how to learn from it.

The problems started in the first stage of the event, which required players to complete a few daily quests and close Death rifts around Telara; unfortunately, it was simply unbalanced. The high-level zones didn’t have enough rifts constantly opening to satiate the max-level community’s thirst for new items (which could only be acquired during this one-week event), resulting in lower-level areas getting flooded with level 50 players. It’s clear that this wasn’t the intended experience (since low level characters had no chance at participating, thanks to the roaming bands of max-level characters stealing all the rifts in their zones) but to their credit, Trion pushed through regular updates in an attempt to make sure there was enough to do for everyone, and enough incentive to do it. Eventually, they struck a balance, but it came at a cost: a week-long delay of the second and third phases of the event the real meat of the content, which were supposed to include large, epic battles with Alsbeth the Discordant’s full-blown planar invasion.

But that’s not what we got on the Seastone server (apparently the event’s success varied from server to server, but even the best reports weren’t very good). Instead, phase two was short and extremely simple: there were no rifts that needed closing or towns that needed to be saved just a few simple bosses in each zone that were slaughtered in a matter of minutes. In fact, the entire World Event would have likely ended in under a half-hour on my server if not for instability causing full-blown crashes that required Trion to reset the event a number of times. The servers that didn’t actually go down were still impaired by lag and disconnection errors. Even if you ignore the technical hurdles, the event seemed conceptually flawed: with such a short window of time to participate, the majority of players would miss the event anyone that wasn’t sitting around waiting for it to happen didn’t have a chance to participate.