In all of the hubbub surrounding Trion World’s changes to the business model of RIFT, it might’ve been easy to overlook the fact that the studio wants to encourage players to subscribe by increasing the value of its patron program.
Yesterday on the forums, Trion gave specifics about improvements coming for subscribers. Patrons will soon get immunity to soul vitality loss and enjoy a 50% reduction in auction house commissions and fees. The studio also shifted some features to make them exclusive to the patron program, including rest experience, stacking charges for instances, and the ability to queue for specific (instead of random) warfronts and dungeons. The improved patron program will begin February 10th.
Trion attempted to put a happy face on these adjustments: “The changes outlined today may also provide an additional benefit; we anticipate that they create more opportunities for playing together for all players. For instance, instead of spending all their charges on a single day of the week, a non-patron will need to log in each day to get the benefits of their charges. This increases the average number of people participating in any given activity every day of the week, meaning shorter queue times and more people to play with. Similarly, by placing more people in random queues, queue times as a whole will shorten as the system has more players to work with in order to make appropriate teams.”
