by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

Greetings readers, I’m Dannie “Ignition” Ray and today we will talk about the Rift it Forward community and the debate there currently exists on its legitimacy.

What is Rift it Forward?

Opening a Nephalem Rift is just a click away.

If you aren’t aware of it, Rift it Forward (or RiF for short) is  an offshoot of the Multiplayer Rift community; the key here is that instead of just getting a 4-man party and clearing rifts opening one portal each, you would instead open a rift and play on it solo up to the guardian. Once you have the Guardian on low help you would post in the community chat stating your difficulty, after you invite three more people to your party all four can proceed to kill the Rift Guardian and get loot. Now one of the players that were invited to kill the boss will open the next Rift for you to clear and they will leave you alone to repeat the process.

Of course, you don’t have to be the Rift Clearer. You could be one of the guys waiting on community chat to join in for the boss, all you would have to do then is make sure that for every 4 Rifts you enter, you open at least 1 portal.

Why is it good?

RiF provides optimization of resources, you get 4 Rift Guardians out of each portal you open; you’d also be getting Shards faster as the time it takes to kill a weakened Guardian is minimal. RiF is also a super social experience where you can meet new people and maybe even make some friends or get into a clan.

Rift it Forward provides players with a different way to play the game and can serve as a big jumpstart on gearing a new character.

Why is it bad?

Unless you are in the 20% of people that are actually clearing the entire Rifts, RiF changes Diablo 3 to a game of camping the community chat and hoping you get invites quick. It feels a bit reminicent of the auction house camping which likely led to the AH’s demise.

At its core, Diablo 3 is a game about killing monsters and getting loot; Rift it Forward circunvents a lot of the monster killing needed to achieve our goals of godly equipment and high paragon levels. Like my colleague Stephen puts it: “RiF allows players that have absolutely no business in Torment VI to benefit from Torment VI rift rewards and then after they gear their characters with the drops and shards, they are complaining that there’s nothing left to chase”.

Is it an exploit?

We now use fragments, but full-on keystones will be remembered.

The bad within Rift if Forward has led a very vocal crew to call “RiF” an exploit. Personally, i wouldn’t call Rift it Forward an exploit; instead I think you could label it as the result of a few design oversights.

• Blizzard made it so people could join any game at any time.
• Blizzard gave rift 100% Bonus Drops.
• Blizzard introduced Kadala and the Blood Shard mechanic.
• Blizzard then made Blood Shards drop only on Guardians.
• Blizzard also allowed Guardians to drop Forgotten Souls.
• Blizzard designed Multiplayer Rifts in a way that only one player has to open the portal.
• Blizzard put a BiS Ring on bounty caches and a low droprate so everyone is likely to have a keystone surplus.

If you see, those are all conscious decisions by Blizzard that aren’t bad on their own. When those are put together though, you end up with a community of players taking advantage of the situation.

Does it need to be fixed?

As we’ve seen over and over again, many people WILL flock to whatever is seen as the most “efficient” way of playing the game. Even a lot of those of us who would rather enjoy the game for what it is get affected by this, as there’s this nagging feeling inside of us that tells us that we aren’t putting our limited play time to good use. That is a matter of personal preference and willpower though, but there’s also another angle.

The Diablo 3 Dev team has to balance things out, and the most popular form of playing the game has a huge effect on balance. For example, if most people are doing RiF and they are happy with their droprates; Blizzard could be overlooking that drop rates are a bit low when you are actually playing the game. RiF could now or in the future be holding “proper” players back.

With this in mind, RiF in it’s current incarnation definately needs to be fixed.

But does it have to be nerfed?

Voracity, one of the many rift guardians, gets his skin from Ghom.

We all hate nerfs, and it is always great when we can find a solution to a problem without having to fall on the nerfhammer. So when looking for a fix to this Rift it Forward situation we have to look at the design decisions that have caused it and see what we can do to avoid the nerf.

My goal here is to retain the community aspect of RiF without making players who chose not to participate feel like they are being punished by playing the game “right”.

Here are a few thoughts:

• Add a small Magic Find buff based on how long you’ve been on a game:
  • Provided you cap it at 15-30 minutes, this would encourage people to actually be on a party while clearing the game.
  • Rift it Forward would remain just as effective but you would have more reasons to be a Rift Clearer.
  • In all this would benefit both camps as RiF would get more clearers and traditional players would get a boost.

• Give players additional Blood Shards as they clear the Nephalem Rifts:
  • If you give players 3-5 extra blood shards per torment level, spreaded out evenly through the Rift completion percentage; players would be encouraged to actually play the Rift
  • Players would be compelled to play in the proper difficulty level and experience progression.
  • If absolutely needed,

• Buff the Player who opened the Rift:
  • Imagine the player who opened the Rift had a 10% damage, toughness, and healing buff for 15 minutes (only active inside rifts); the buff would be lost when dying or leaving the game and this would once again give incentives to actually stay on games, play on the proper difficulty, and be Rift Clearers.

• Make the Rift Guardian a legit boss:
  • When you look at Rift Guardians it is pretty clear that they are meant to be a boss type, but mechanically they act more like a Super Elite. After you reach 100%, instead of having the RG spawn nearby you should have a portal open at the end of the Rift. Then you could enter the portal and face the Rift Guardian with proper boss fight rules, no respawning, no new players entering the portal mid-fight, etc.
  • This would be a slight but needed nerf to RiF as players would have to enter and face the boss from 100% health, this would also stop players from effortlessly leeching loot from games on difficulties way too high for them.
  • The portal could be placed near the place of completion if you don’t want the players to traverse the entire Rift.

• Add a mini-boss Rift Guardian:
  • If you change Rift Guardians into proper bosses, why not recycle the old mechanic. Once per rift, have one mini-boss spawn at a random completion percentage; also make it so no players can join the game until the mini-boss has been killed.
  • An alternative to locking the game would be adding a timer and having the mini-boss leave like a treasure goblin if the timer expires before he is killed, this would encourage players to play on the proper difficulty for their gear level and would also put pressure on people trying to invite new people just for mini-boss loot as the timer would be a short window.
  • To make this more interesting, have the mini-bosses be stronger versions of the purple mobs that drop Legendary Crafting Items and allow them to drop these mats on the Rifts.
  • The random nature of the mini-boss would encourage to actually clear rifts as you cannot predict when this fierce opponent will make his shocking entrance.

• Add a proper end-game to Diablo 3:
  • Gearing up via endlessly repeating the same stuff so you can do it faster can only stretch so long, Diablo 3 is in dire need of something to do when you have already collected your desired gear. Ubers are a good mechanic but they lack the proper reward to be qualified as end game, Tiered Rifts on the other hand look super promising but I’m afraid they might just not be enough.

Conclusions

The Cow Level is back through Nephalem Rifts.

Rift it Forward brings both positive and negative aspects to Diablo 3, we could emphasize the positives and fix the negatives without much trouble so everyone can be happy.

In the grand scope of things,RiF might look like just a minor issue but at its core it shows exactly what’s wrong with Diablo 3. Hopefully 2.1 hits soon and it brings us a lot of new Legendaries and many more reasons to keep playing this wonderful game and slaying monsters all over Sanctuary.

Until then Rift it Forward, or don’t. As long as you have fun, it is all good.