The first ‘event’ in Rift, strategically placed around the end of the free month, has had some issues. Among them are lag, queues, and unexpected results from the event progressing too quickly. Stuff happens. What I don’t understand is why they or anyone would be surprised. They gave out a very large number of free trial weekends, which are also strategically placed right at the end of the free month.  It’s no wonder that people could not log in and missed the event while sitting in a queue.
Queues look great at launch. By scaling back the number of people who can log in it appears as a resounding success when the servers don’t crash. When people have to start paying monthly fees after their free month, queues create the sense of enormous interest. It’s a known fact that people feel validated in their purchases or decisions when a large number of others appear to be doing the same. It’s why you want people showing up to your events even when you know they’re just bodies in the room — it makes those paying feel more comfortable.
A lot of people like to defend MMO’s as a business when companies make decisions. Well, as a business, I would fire the person responsible for giving out free trials during this weekend. That is, if it wasn’t intentional for the start. Queues also look good when they generate enormous buzz. All press is good press? Rift once again smothers the front page of sites like Massively (Perhaps because it’s paid for. I would know. I worked in the fan site business) which draws the eyes of potential buyers when they see that a game has massive amounts of people wanting to get in. Must be good, right?
Maybe it was intentional. Maybe it’s bad luck. Regardless, the queue situation probably doesn’t matter. Personally, I’m more concerned about the lag. That’s not something you do intentionally. I’ve always been bothered by how similar the game runs to Warhammer Online, and this helps to prove my point to those claiming there is nothing wrong with it. The talk about being able to have thousands of people together is nonsense, and this proves it. I’m also worried about their ability to run an event — something they have placed great emphasis upon with their game, engine, and server technology.
A direct quote about their special technology:
“The technology is flexible enough to handle the weight of the world without crashing and still be expandable for additional players or additional game features.”
When you make claims like that, you open yourself up to scrutiny.
After the dust settles it will be interesting to see how many people stayed after the month and event. Saying the game is dying is premature. I don’t agree with those nay-saying in that direction. Saying the game is addressing serious pitfalls of the industry and that the queues are any indication of success is also premature. I think what we have here is a standardized, albeit generic, game. If the community of MMO players supports this, then Rift will thrive beyond this event. If not, more ammunition will be given those opposing this direction for the industry. I’m eagerly awaiting the next month.
They tried some crazy chemistry and it blew up in their face. I honestly respect the game more now because of it. I wish more dev’s would try sometimes to blow the place up.
And I totally agree with your comparison to W:AoR. Trying to log into the event today post re-start smelled like an old city take fiasco. But Rift doesn’t have any fortresses to disable. Sadly.
Last note, Trion’s customer service saved the day tonight with sweet goody bags for all. lol, I guess that’s all the games are about these days 🙂
The event played out fine for me, generally. This was on EU Blightweild – one of the busiest PVE servers in Europe. There were 3 issues for me.
1) The last boss in Scarwood despawned right before death.
2) Some engine mechanic prevented more than say about 40 people to be displayed in the immediate area (not sure if this was some lag fixing feature) but it was annoying because you could tell you were with maybe upwards of a couple of hundred people but could only see about 50 of them.
3) After the final boss spawned, she appeared to die in under 5 seconds (presumably because of the amount of people stood shooting at her) and then the servers crashed. We got the end of event title, but people really didn’t know at that stage if the event was over or not – and if they needed to go in to the river of souls, or even what that instance was.. So you had raids made up of level 30’s and 40’s heading in to the river of souls when the server came back up not really knowing what too do.
I really like Rift, but this lacked the polish Rift and Trion got it’s praises for.
Theres a video on my youtube chanel, fenlock56 if anyone wants to see some footage of the event,
I really wish Rift well, but I don’t see them surviving the launches of SWTOR & GW2.
It find it rather strange that Trion did not learn from the european muckup last week. It sounds like this week went down -exactly- like last week, despite the delay.
Alot of suggestion were made, the most obvious one : Do not make Phase 2 a once-off specific date thing!! Yet there they ignored it. Had Phase 2 been an “every day, for the next week” thing, we would not have seen these issues.
Anyway i’m less concerned with the lag and queues , my issues is Phase 2 and Phase 3 itself. You know “what it actually did” . It was just a pile of “meh” , if you managed to participate you’d most likely find yourself zerging bosses and falling asleep with boredom at some stage. I mean it’s not like there were any CONSEQUENCE of this event, PHase 3 was going to happen no matter what.
Maybe Trion will learn from this…lets hope.
From a purely entertainment standpoint the event was awful. But lets not full ourselves, nobody else in the industry has tried this. So the gamble was:
1) Wait a few months without a major event and run the risk of losing “attrition” subscriptions
2) Chance running the event and see if more people subscribe out of curiosity or leave due to it causing frustration.
No clue which direction it went, but for me Im staying for the next events. If they can run 1 every month or so with increasing stability, Ill stay with the game along time. The rest of the game is great imo.
I find some of this a bit puzzling. Let me just briefly tell you my experience of the River of Souls event yesterday.
I came home from work and went to log into Rift an hour before the event was due to start. Mrs Bhagpuss was already playing on Shadefallen and I went to log into Faeblight, where our level 50s are. To my surprise there was a queue and I was 135th in it. I told Mrs B. and she logged out to join as well. She came in at 172nd.
In about 20 minutes we were both on Faeblight, ready for the event. At the appointed time nothing happened. Soon after there was an announcement that the server was coming down for a brief update, so we logged out. The server was down for less than ten minutes. As soon as it showed unlocked on server select we both logged back in immediately.
So, Faeblight is the second busiest server after Wolfsbane, and we didn’t make any special effort or preparation to be there for the event, but we were able to log in in good time, twice, with only a short wait the first time. Maybe we were just lucky.
On to the event itself. We decided to go to Iron Pines Peaks. We were at Exile’s when the event started and one of the bosses spawned right on top of us. We battled him for a while, along with maybe 15 other people who happened to be there. I died 9 times in about six minutes. We weren’t making a dent in the boss. Then another raid turned up and suddenly the boss was down. I got 10 Sourcestones and that was it.
We tried to get to another boss in IPP and then ones in Gloamwood and Silverwood, but before we could get to any of them all bosses were down and Phase 2 was over. Whole thing couldn’t have taken more than 15 minutes.
We ported to Stillmoor, followed everyone else and ended up on top of a a castle opposite the closed portal to the new raid zone. There was much excitement as everyone anticipated a huge battle. I expected to die repeatedly, again. There was, however, no fight at all.
Cyril for the Guardians and another NPC for the Defiants appeared and had a long conversation, which I thought was quite well done. They said something to Alsbeth that made her decide to go through the portal and that was that! Event over.
To sum up, we didn’t have any serious problems getting in to participate in the event, we had little or no lag during any of the fights, we had no disconnects or bugs and everything went pretty smoothly. On the other hand, an event that was designed to take a week to build concluded in 15 minutes and a damp squib anticlimax.
I would say that, while I personally enjoyed it (Mrs Bhagpuss and I were laughing our heads off afterwards) the whole thing had some extremely obvious, predictable, even inevitable flaws. I don’t doubt that much will be learned form it, but really I would have thought some of the lessons didn’t need to be taught in the first place, they were that obvious.
That ‘innovative event’ is something Asheron’s Call was doing 10 years ago. And from what I read here and on various other sites, they were doing it better, too.
The game took a serious nosedive on xfire. As I predicted.
similarities to WAR is not unexpected, they are using the same engine after all for those that didnt know :s
At this point there is no reason to leave Rift for any other game but one you have a ton of time invested in already (like you did with WoW), because they are all the same MMO with different flavors. So why bash on Trion for trying something different lol? They are trying to distinguish themselves 5 weeks into launch with a public event, and the number of interested players was more then they expected, because different is good right? Or are you going to make a hypocrite of yourself with more ‘ha ha you failed while trying something unique to todays market’ again in future posts?
I don’t think events like this, even if they worked, would be a big part of the decision to stay or leave the game.
Now, logging in the morning and finding my cleric can’t use Shards of Light… that’s annoying. Some kind of explanation somewhere would have helped.
They’re not insane enough to have gated the servers during the event to make them appear at max capacity and/or popular. Our server still has queues on prime days during prime time. They are short queues but queues regardless which from a population perspective is a great thing.
My issue is that they know the number of subs on a server and based on the previous trial weekend could have predicted that some servers would be overwhelmed AND customers queued out of participation. As someone whose household has 3 accounts/players on 3 different servers, the fact that none of us got on for the event was absolutely infuriating. I was willing to just watch over someone’s shoulder and I couldn’t even do that.
Am I leaving the game? Of course not. I have too much fun and it wouldn’t have mattered so much to me if I didn’t enjoy the game as much as I do. They’ll get better but now I know to take precautions and be a little less hyped the next time ’round.
People will always complain about something. The event could have gone off without a hitch, and been pretty damn good, and someone still would have complained. “Well, I DID have to wait in a queue”. Or “Why didn’t I get this or that?” It never fails. It doesn’t matter what a company does right, or even does decently. It’s all about what someone can pick out and say “Ha, told you they would screw THIS up”. It’s kind of sad, honestly.
Rift is a month+ into release. Doing pretty well, at that. Like I’ve said before. It’ll either stand on it’s own two feet or it won’t. If you’re enjoying it that’s all that really matters. That’s why games like EQ are still active. It’s not because they’re the next big thing, or because they’ve done something so innovative. It’s because people still enjoy them.
My only real issue is how quickly the second and third phase ended. I was there for the event, no server queue or lagging and I even got the quest drop item people talk about. It was just that with the build-up of phase 1, well they just raised the bar and our expectations very high only to have it finished in 30 minutes.
As for bugs, I only encountered one. I came upon a rift that wouldn’t advance through it’s stages and there were no mobs associated with it.
@ coppertopper
I read a critique of how things could have been done better and some speculation on why things might have turned out why they did. I guess someone might call that “bashing” a game, but not me.
@ Shadrah
Your logic is astounding. Using your reasoning one can completely discount any criticism of anything ever no matter how valid.
The event was handled in a very poor manner from the word go. I do not even want to touch on the lack of innovation in the design of the overall event. I will just have to agree with the sentiments that the development team has spent more time talking up their technology’s capabilities and to see that technology at work was both a high and a low.
The fact is, while fighting and standing amongst the 500+ other players while participating in phase2 or being completely let down by phase 3, there was little to no lag. Server latency never rose past 100ms. The servers seemed to handle things quite well. The lag only arose when all 500+ people attempted to enter the new instance at once. This actually caused some extreme server unstability across many servers.
That is not to say there wasn’t some major issues with the EU event that caused the server restarts.
The tech worked for the most part. The event however did not. The event was a microcosm of what is wrong with the game and the development team’s vision of what the game must be. I too am looking forward to see the numbers for next month. I truly hope that the consumers send a message to Trion and the rest of the game companies that we want something different than the status quo.
Maybe its because of the server Im on (Harrow), I’ve never had any lag issues. Even during the big events.
I participated in the event. The server was Deepwood. I happened to log in 30 minutes before the start out of sheer luck. The GM made a very polite plea to everyone to not stack on the same zone, repeatedly, to the point of me making fun of the fact that the GM was ruining my immersion in chat.
I decided not to be at Stilmoor so I went to the Highlands. Got on a raid group and moved around killing elite spawn mobs one after another. There were some flagged guardians as well which we tried to avoid hitting as much as possible and instructed on how to turn off the pvp on aoe. All in all surprisingly civil.
At any rate, the second phase was over on our server in about 20 minutes from the start. Then by the time I reached Stillmoor, it was done. Once. The the phase 3 respawned again only to be done again before I had the chance to be there.
Better, worse same as other world events? The more recent one that comes to mind is the opening of the Ahn Quiraj gates and the undead invasions, which I have a vivid memory of.
AQ: What I remember is multiple server crashes before and during the event. Westfall graveyard respawns after our boat went MIA in, wait for it….wait for it…
Stonetalon mountains!!!!!!
Lag gallore to the point where I was no longer playing a real-time, but a turn based RPG.
By the time I managed to stay in Silithus without getting kicked, it was too late on a Tuesday night (yea thanks for that Blizzard a working day and patch day no less) and I was too disgusted to proceed. The server was Lightbringer also known as LagBringer.
Similar results were had with the undead invations with the only difference we were not stranded on the boat in Stonetalon. The extra instance bosses were yet another content recycling effort to which Blizzard “excels” at.
Despite the technology claims (which I mostly dismiss as marketing BS) lack of proper planning will come to bite you in the rear. I agree with those who already mentioned that it definitely is better to have those events span multiple days/weeks. It gives a better feeling and gives more people more of a chance to experience them.
There were about 200 people on the screen at the same time. It was not smooth, but was playable for me. I am sure on other servers the sentiments would NOT have been the same.
However, I do not think that we can fault Trion for that. Regardless of what server loads they have, that cannot account for all the variability of internet speeds and the fact that some people run quad cores with three way SLI and others run core duo’s with GeForce 7900s.
Ultimately, technology will always be a limiting factor. Period. The main question is: Why have Trion and others not learned from past mistakes, theirs or others so as to mitigate technical and gameplay issues?
Despite that, I have not experienced an engaging event that went smoothly on any other MMO either so that tempers my criticism.
One of the reasons I wasn’t that interested in RIFT was the very low cap on players per server. It really isn’t a MASSIVELY multiplayer game if there can only be so many there…which means during lower hours there are even less than normal since you’re looking at a small portion of an even smaller base. Sort of seems like a step backwards in server setups to me.
Pretty funny but I didn’t have a queue to get into the game after the forced shutdown because I am not on one of the two servers which does, if you still play on those servers, it’s your fault, not the game’s.
The event was kind of blah but I kept up 60ms ping through the whole thing, even the end at the River of Souls so it couldn’t have been too bad. Me thinks some customers need to buy some mroe RAM or stop playing on thier Comodore 64.
Sadly I was away all weekend for Military training. Even if I had realized that Phase 2 and 3 was a one day event I couldn’t have made it. I’m sad, but not heartbroken over missing it.
I was told by a friend that everyone with an active account is suppose to get a goody bag from the event, I haven’t got one yet though.
@Bhagpuss: Once you logged in ..if you disconnect or log off, the system remembers you for a short time period so that you can get back in without having to go thru the queue again.
My experience is similar to yours. I had to log off when they makes us logged off. As soon as the server unlocked I checked the queue and it was 432 on Faeblight and I decided to log on my other server which have 135 queue on Shadefallen. I sat in the queue for 2.5hr and when i logged in, it was already Phase 3. I read on the forum while i was waiting that Faeblight event finished in about 30min.
The whole reset before the event is very suspicious to me. There’s no real explanation why they restarted after 1hr pass scheduled event.
I was really upset after the whole thing..but I’m over it and I see that their remedy is acceptable.
If I was the company, I’d demote the Project Manager for the event. He’s not running another project again. Atleast Co-lead it. (I assume that idiot that intro Free Weekend is the same project manager..or atleast should have taken that into account)
So what have we learned, well I guess we sort of knew this all along.
You can’t have 1 day, 1 time events. The servers can’t handle the amount of people that try to log in and those that can’t log in feel cheated for having missed the event.
Ways to fix it?
Phasing, like WoW does. This lets everyone experience their own world events without altering the world for everyone else. (Lamest solution imo)
Multi day/week long events. Everyone has done this to some extent. It works well.
Increase the amount of 1 day events. The more 1 day events there are the less people will feel obligated to attend everyone, or get upset about missing one. Do you get upset if you miss a Tol Barad in WoW or an Invasion in Rift? No, because you know another is coming soon.
Having 1 day events that don’t happen very often is a bad idea, regardless if you got to attend it or not.
. So why bash on Trion for trying something different lol
Umm so what exactly Trion did different? They picked a wow gameplay with sub par engine (war hammer engine is inferior to wow). They did not do anything different in any area – not in gameplay design , nor in technology
They made loud and boisterous claims about how innovative they are when in fact they are 100% derivative.
Had trion at least backed up with good technology I would respect their claims, but their only accomplishment was making a wow clone which is worse than wow. In EVERY aspect
“but their only accomplishment was making a wow clone which is worse than wow. In EVERY aspect”
Your right. I should go back to WoWs superior Talent system.
@Max: tl;dr: WoW clone.
I think that about sums it up, right? That’s all you REALLY said. At least bring something constructive to the coversation.
If you like WoW, then stay with WoW. There, I said what you said without being negative.
@The Event: To be honest, this wasn’t a one day event. It was a one day phase 2/3. The event itself has been happening for a while now. If you didn’t get to be in the big invasion, or whatever it was, who cares? If you participated in any way you still got some pretty damn good rewards. I didn’t get to see the end of the event, either. I did, however, get a really nice ring and trinket. That suits me quite nicely.
If you like WoW, then stay with WoW. There, I said what you said without being negative.
Lol . My point was being negative .Rift doesnt bring anything new and despite claims to the contrary is inferior technologically to wow. I want bash products which claim a lot but do not deliver.
@Max
So your point was to troll, how old are you?
ZOMG I don’t like a game that isn’t WoW MUST SMASH!
@Epiny:
So every opinion is trolling? Having a view on something and expressing it because, God forbid, not everyone’s taken in by the new little darling that is RIFT is trolling? Simply not liking RIFT, is that trolling?
To re-arrange your own words: “ZOMG someone is defending WoW?!? SMASH. BURN.”
This is all in addition to the fact that he’s totally right, but, hey. How dare anyone criticise RIFT? It’s so unique, such a breath of fresh air, such a miraculous feat of developer ingenuity and originality that it’s frankly RIDICULOUS that people can find anything wrong with it.
You can have a different point of view, that’s fine. If you don’t like Rift that doesn’t at all bother me.
He is intentionally posting in a manner to incite people though… that is being a troll.
You are doing the exact same thing epiny. I find what he said to be mirroring my own opinion.
And if we look closer, he doesn’t even resort to personal attack, which you did.
So calling someone a troll who words their post in a way to intentionally incite other people is a personal attack? I guess, I should don’t really take offense to being accused of it.
I don’t have a problem with anyone criticizing Rift, merely the manner in which you do it. Do it to WoW and I would probably react the same.
Saying something is worse than WoW in every way then not citing any reasons as to why it is worse, is in my opinion, an attempt at a troll. I was trying to point that out by characterizing the average person who partakes in schadenfreude. This has devolved into me appearing to be a Rift fanboy, which I’m not.
If you are going to say Rift sucks you have every right. I would just hope you would give reasons, so that we could have an intelligent conversation about the pros and cons of it.
Not “zomg it sucks because it isn’t WoW” which is how I took Max’s post.
I’ve been watching the populations of the servers like a hawk and the latest results are down from before the free time, it isn’t even close. The populations are completely tanking at this point, I think most likely we’ll see merges within 3 months, sooner if one of the AAA MMOs come out sooner than that.
[…] I’d bemoan the fact that I missed such an event, but it seems that I didn’t really miss anything and, given my gaming schedule, it’s not likely that I would have been able to get in to see […]
Well, at least you don’t have to wait long for another MMO to hit; Age of Empires Online is going into beta soon.
Didn’t Aion do something similar to what Rift just did where they gave the players a bunch of bonuses for subscribing, then put out the first tier of content and then just left things to die because they made a game that their North American subscription base hated?
Age of Empires Online is not a MMO. Trust me on that one.
Saying something is worse than WoW in every way then not citing any reasons as to why it is worse, is in my opinion, an attempt at a troll.
Arguments were presented plenty. You choose not to notice them
I was trying to point that out by characterizing the average person who partakes in schadenfreude. This has devolved into me appearing to be a Rift fanboy, which I’m not.
You resort to personal attacks first and foremost. That is a definition of a troll. Instead of attacking arguments (which were about rift technological inferiority) you straight up attack people bringing them up.
I wouldn’t say it’s technologically inferior, actually. Superior, in fact. The only difference is that WoW runs on an engine that’s at least 6 years old and has been finessed every step of the way. Whereas Rift runs on an engine that WAR ran on. A game that was quite noticeably underdeveloped and not taken care of. By comparison, Rift’s engine is still in it’s infantile state. Even know the engine runs better than it did for WAR.
@Shadrah: You know it’s the same engine DAOC used. So in fact, it’s been around far longer than WoW’s.
@Max
I will apologize right now. I didn’t mean to make a personal attack. I took your posts as the run of the mill “I hate anything that isn’t WoW”. Perhaps I reacted in the wrong manner; public opinion would show that I did regardless of my thoughts.
I don’t like people criticizing any game without stating their reasons as to why they don’t like it. I felt, it would appear incorrectly, that the following statement was too vague:
“They made loud and boisterous claims about how innovative they are when in fact they are 100% derivative.
Had trion at least backed up with good technology I would respect their claims, but their only accomplishment was making a wow clone which is worse than wow. In EVERY aspect.”
I felt this comment was an exaggeration of the issue with no evidence to back it up. This is why I reacted the way I did. Again, I apologize. When I’m wrong I like to admit it publicly because I feel it doesn’t happen enough on blogs and forums.
@Keen: Is it? That was something unknown to me. If that’s the case, I can’t see how it would be so heavily plagued by lag. DAOC was graphically inferior, sure, but it would have been plagued by the same engine restrictions. Either way, I don’t run into half the issue I did in WAR in Rift now. It takes a LOT of people in one spot for me to lag out in Rift. Even in WAR there for the last 6 months. We’d have a few hundred people in the same zone and it was fine.
@Epiny , thanks for appology. I gladly accept it , and indeed it such rare case on the internet
I might been myself coming as overly assertive about the qualities of RIFT . That is in part my personality, part is the product of side by side comparison based on playing games, playing them on emulators, running emulators and studying multiplayer game design
Rift claimed to have “superior” technology. I have experienced server crashes , major zone slow downs and unplayable lag just with 80 players in battles. So all in all -they cant handle more than 100 comfortably. The world event fiasco is just another proof of this.
While back in early vanilla release I was part of 200+ (maybe even 300+) world pvp raids and it was quite playable. WoW had some minor issues with transactions (think they coupled them to database too much) so loot lag was common occurrence , but other than that it was very smooth.
More over I played on trinity based wow emu servers with over 100+ which also performed extremely well. WoW client and network stack is extremely efficient and well written as far as MMOs go.
The only game which performed better was planetside – in large part because they delegated a lot to client and generally trusted client for some mechanics (thus avoiding network related issues)
p.s. And I dont even like WoW as a game. It just technically the best MMO I seen. If I had choice to pick the engine I would my make my own mmo with I would pick WoW over anything else.
The whole UO game core and mechanics with WoW’s graphic and network engine – one of my dreams… 🙂
@Max
I think someone said Rift is running on the WAR engine, which is also the DAoC engine. (I would love to see a link behind that) However I remember in the first 3 months of DAoC coming out we had 200 vs 200 battles and it was playable. I’m not saying lag free but playable.
My computer is old so I lag when I play MMOs. I use to lag in Dalaran when that was the “place” to be. I lagged really bad in FFXIV and so so in WAR. I lag in Rift when I zone into Meridian. I typically blame lag on my end more so than the game.
Just wondering but does anyone else remember when Wintergrasp first launched before it had player limits? All of Northrend would crash on our server because the amount of people going there. I would love to see more about Trion’s technical advances they are claiming to make. I honestly believe they have done nothing innovative that is noticeable client side. It runs at best as well as WoW and at worse… well at worse you can see the results from the live event.
RIFT, DAOC, and WAR are running on the Gamebryo engine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamebryo
According to that link, this engine also powers Oblivion, Epic Mickey, Lego Universe, and Civ 4, among others.
For that matter, I recently picked up Blood Bowl and Defense Grid, which both use Gamebryo as well…
So, uh. Yeah. The engine doesn’t mean much.
I’ve always seen a lot of people blame the “engine” as the source of bugs and glitchy performance in the past. Seeing so many games come from the same engine, some have received very high acclaim, makes me blame the engine less.
The Gamebryo engine was little more than a framework Trion could build the game around…
To go as far as to say it’s the same engine as DAOC or even W:AoR is pure silliness.
“However I remember in the first 3 months of DAoC coming out we had 200 vs 200 battles and it was playable. I’m not saying lag free but playable.”
I don’t have the same type of memory then, or maybe I forgot my rose colored glasses concerning DAoC. I remember fights with max. 40ish people (total) lagging like hell, with graphics being a slide show. And before you ask, I work in the graphic industry and always had a top notch computer able to run all the high end games with max settings (or close to max).
@Epiny & Merovingian
I remember something closer to Epiny’s experience. But, 400 in one area would have been pretty bad, closer to unplayable than playable in my opinion. However, slideshows at around 40 or so people never happened to me. I can’t imagine it reliably happened to a substantial population actually, or the game would have been a total fail. That it is way too few in one area for a game like DAoC to start giving people slideshows unless it is a client issue. That kind of lag happened in WAR all the time though (which was one of the saddest, most unbelievable failings of WAR in my opinion).
Hell, half the time our guild was running w/ 40 people almost every RvR night just from our alliance. For relic raids, we could have well north of 100, other times lots more. We didn’t typically lag all over the frontier as we looked for Hibbies and Albs to murder.
I remember still only being level 30ish, no one had hit 50 yet, and we had an easy 100+ people on our side and atleast the same of Albs. We fought for 3 hours at one of the mile gates in the middle of the frontier.
It may not have been 200 vs 200 but it was well over 100 on each side. We also easily had 200 people show up for the first keep assault (again no one was even 50 yet when we were doing this stuff) We took it by sheer zerg force.
It was not rose colored glasses, you may have had a different experience but trust me, I’m not misremembering it. If it had been a lag fest I wouldn’t have sat there and healed people for 3 hours.
Little bit of clarification here
“gamebryo” is a name for a rendering engine (the one which displays stuff), game engine (logic like AI ,player controls ,scripts etc) and set of tools (like assets and map creation, speedtree etc). So its quite big and diverse , there are many iterations of it . One of the Earliest ones being DaoC and Morrowind
Gamebryo was always primarily a client side engine with little to no networking component. DaOC has completely custom server and custom client side network stack. So did WAR. Not sure about Rift. Gamebryo is responsible for drawing stuff on screen, not for anything else.
Network part in mmos is specifically designed for that task and different even from multiplayer shooters (its more complex generally and has more layers)
There is 2 types of “lag”. client performance (related to ability of your computer and graphics card to render scene) and network – the whole chain of client-server-client communication. Affected by your network connection ,server
architecture and amount of data (which is related to how many other players are in your vicinity for example)
Both parts are important for end user experience . In Rifts case they do have issues with both, but the main problem is network part. Their “better” graphics requires them limiting drawing other people to x (i think it was 50 or so) so its kinda ok, but their network and server part can not efficiently communicate to 200+ people in same area. -you get broad “zone lags” which affects people not even with rendering distance of the event
I posted about general MMO architecture in my blog a few weeks ago:
http://armchairdesign.blogspot.com/2011/04/what-mmos-are-made-of.html