After last Friday’s news about RIFT 2.5 and the road leading toward 3.0 and the Plane of Water, Trion chose a pretty cool time to drop a new update on the Public Test Shard (PTS). Yep, the Ember Isle underwater content that’s going to serve as a prelude to what we may see in 3.0 is now available for player testing! The team is holding a special playtest event Today, October 29th at 3 PM PST, but the new content is playable outside of that time frame as well. Keeper Ivan in Tempest Bay (next to the porticulum) will take characters directly to the action and allow players to test out the new story quests, daily quests, carnage quests, rifts, and even a zone event that will be debuting during the test today.
Aside from that news, Daglar also posted a couple of updates for the PvP community regarding the new warfront matchmaking system and 5 vs. 5 matches that are currently in development. Keep reading to take a look.
Originally posted by Daglar (Source)
Just a couple of quick updates for folks.Matchmaking
Saw this release note come through last night:
The warfront matchmaking system will attempt to match up players of similar PvP skill levels. There have also been improvements to getting groups to be included in matches regardless of size.5 v 5
Just got out of a meeting with engineers and designers regarding the discussed 5 v 5 test. Work is spec’d, if things go according to plan, we’d release that during 2.5 but not at the release of 2.5. No rewards, just pure rankings for that. Also, this would be something we’d likely not leave on all the time.Conquest Tweaks
Behind on this, as with many tasks that land directly on me. I have a giant pile of feedback from the last playtest to go through and implement. I still expect to have a new version out during 2.5 – but again, not on the 2.5 patch day.When Steppes goes live – we will be wiping Freelancer’s Marks of Conquest. Gear that used to require Freelancer’s Marks of Conquest will no longer require CQ marks. New marks will be awarded for new rewards.
PvP Dimensions
The engineer responsible for this is dealing with higher priority issues for the time being. The feature is not canceled and will not die, but won’t be able to take top priority for some time.
One other bit of news if you haven’t been keeping tabs on the official forums: Iron Pine Peak will be getting a pretty huge makeover in the near future and even sooner on the PTS. It will be turned into a zone for the level ranges of 27-35. A fair chunk of daily quests have been removed from the zone, but many remain. Most of the story quests will simply be tailored down to the new level range. The only major story quests that are disappearing will be the Exodus of the Storm Queen quests, which will probably reappear again at some point in the future.
The zone will also be seeing the same quest consolidation/streamline process that the early-level zones such as Freemarch/Silverwood have seen. For more information, check out this thread.
