Ever wondered how other free-to-play projects on Steam got Overwhelmingly Positive or Very Positive reviews, Trion? I can give you a few examples. There's a certain free-to-play MMO game here on Steam where you can get almost *anything* in the game by trading the in-game items with other players for premium currency. Little by little you will accumulate enough premium currency to buy almost *anything*, except for a few cosmetics which are availible only for real currency and for a limited time. Cosmetics, Trion. Not top-tier PvP/PvE equipment, not character classes, unattainable by other means. Cosmetics.
That being said, almost every item in that game can be bought and/or crafted using the in-game resources. Is it grindy? Yes. It will take you a while to get somewhere and get the needed resources. The things is, however, you don't need to spend a penny on it to get a viable character, both in PvP and PvE. All you need is time and the will to play and have fun with other people.
Now, let's talk about Rift. Not only is it grindy — god-awful grindy, not only do you need the resources/hundred kinds of different currencies, you also need the crafting skill/reputation required to get the things you need — the *only* way for you to get the premium currency without paying real money, is to buy REX, which gives you a portion of premium credits and costs unreasonable amounts of in-game currency. Apparently, god forbid you from making the premium currency and the advantages it gives you — numerous advantages — more accessible to your general public.
I suppose you forgot the meaning of the word "accessible" at this point.

I'm using my friend's account to post this because you banned me without any further notice from the community hub for calling you out on your fraudulent schemes; funny thing, it was me who invited this friend of mine to play Rift in the first place. Needless to say, we both are sceptical about touching Rift ever again considering your business practices and paywall policies.
Also, nice moves, Trion, acting like a little kid who sticks his fingers in his ears and starts yelling because he doesn't like what he's hearing. Next you'll start removing negative reviews like some megalomaniac indie developer who can't take criticism. Sure this will make your game better and shift the Recent Review ratings to Overwhelmingly Positive, eventually!
Nah, it won't. Just kidding. Watch your player base dwindle as you invent new ways of leeching money out of people. Either that, or show some respect to your player base. Take a look at your forums, reddit, steam hub, you'll find more specific suggestions on how to improve your game from your very players; more than you would like.
Make the game more accessible in general, and people will come to support you. Earn their trust and loyalty, and their money, not by building paywalls, but by making the game more accessible.

PS: This is a copy of the thread I made on the Community Hub, in case of the thread getting overrun by trolls or deleted for no good reason. This negative review is here to stay, unless Trion does something about their pay-to-win policies.

used to be a zillion times better then WoW till it went F2P but now its just P2W. sad end to such a great game. nothing but a sinking ship now thats getting pretty full of water.

if you like pvp don't touch this game!
1)there is no pvp untill max level do to low population and removal of incentives for f2p'ers
2)max level has a huge gear gap so when you 1st start you will lose 90% of your pvp matches do to no fault of yours or your teams since matchmaking will tend to stack the better geared players on 1 team. (lack of players is also at fult here)
3)do to to pvp matches consisting of steamrolling your opponent or getting steamrolled, pvp is unfun. there are very few matches this will not happen in.
4)rift has about 10 souls for each of the 5 callings that you can mix and match BUT 1/4th are useless for dungeons/raids and 2/3rd are useless in pvp. a note: the 5th calling is a pay one with about 7 souls, the 7th you need to buy in a soul pack and since it didnt sell well they have not fixed the weapon procs or the resistance bugs it has.
5)you can p2w to top gear and avoid this. (this is good or bad depending how you look at it) end game gear is only $400 if you want to be "competitive"
6)the rift engine is still unstable even with the new fix and you sometimes get dc'ed normally when your winning a pvp match.

so what about end game raiding?
well do to rushed content most end game raids are bugged for month upon release and sometimes forever after(there are still bad bugs in content made when rift first came out). they are also removing hardcore raids but not to make rift mainstream (like wow did) but do to rushed content people can not beat the bugged content without making it easier also if your a streamer and stream raid content you run the risk of a guild wide ban if you do something the devs don't like or if you have an "agitator" in your group.
for normal dungeons again do to low population and a change to the que system no ones does these untill end game and at end game people just want a fast run.

you can do open world pve untill 60 with little to no issues but at 65 the paywall will smack you in the face. open world pvp is dead and the one pvp server is barren.

the game used to be so good with a great f2p model but 6 months back they changed to an aggressive cash shop model and now rush all content before proper testing can be done that will normally crash the server like last week when it was down for 2 day because they didn't test the holiday updates or just leave some things outright broken for months untill they get around to patching it. some holiday events even have the same bug pop up every year that never gets fixed like a Halloween quest that doesn't give defiants the reward. sadly this game was a hallmark for a good f2p model but has now gone the way of the other rippoff f2p games.

p.s. there is a item in game that lets you buy credits with in game gold but the amount you need to get is very hard to amass since alot of end game things give little to no cash (about 30% only give 1 silver and thats the lowest amount possible)

so, rift. my very first MMO. when i started playing i fell in love with it. was such a good game, all the specs and classes were completely somewhat balanced, pvp was fun-ish(not a pvp fan honestly) and pve was the best thing i've ever found. i played a rogue and ended up becoming a world first member of the fires of heaven. sadly the game has declined and declined and declined. plane touch wilds was an "ok" "expansion" if you were to call it that. and primalist is dumb. 1 button top dps is very very "pay to win" as people would say. and then the nerf to mind of madness came. nothing was challenging. nothing was fun. and now there is a expansion that MUST be bought in order to play. rift is officially dead.
uninstalled.

P2W (locked equipment even if you are a subscriber) ,dead but with enough fanboys to make it look like people still play it.They should add a pay to uninstall option to make the pack complete.

I would just like to say this game this to be amazing i use to love this game played if alot in 2012. The game was fun. fairly simple and intresting to see how different i was to other mmorpg's

Coming back and trying it again.... this game is very lacking

I check the game is free now pretty cool, micro transaction, uhhhh not a big fan of that but sure but playing this game for a while. i felt like this game is just pay to win or grind really hard i know you would be expected to grind in mmo rpgs but this is like 2X the grinding to the old rift and i just wanna play some dungeons do some rifts meet some new people. Now most of the time its just grind.

Pay2Win

What have I done with my life?

Once upon a time, Rift was a wonderful game, a great 'classic' MMO that had meaningful content, good raids and dungeons and was really worth investing the time into. Then Trion Worlds started bleeding money on failed project after failed project and Rifts Dev team got axed down hard. To try and compensate things went F2P and things were fine at first. Hey we get nifty new costumes and I don't need to pay a sub fee anymore (I still did, even if the original patron perks were pretty bad by recent standards.)

The shift was subtle at first, gear became purchasable, either directly or in directly through lotto style loot crates that you can buy for special mounts and get decent gear on the side (A great deal till you realize the currency you get for the mounts is character bound, and the gear you get from the chest is based on your characters class. Meaning that before you'll ever have the currency saved to get that special super shiney mount, you'll have wasted more cash then you will want to think about on what is basically worthless chests and gears as opening them on a different character who could use the gear, means your currency is split. Well played Trion.) Tangent aside. What this gear purchasing did was create a stigma in the "PuG" raiding community, as you had to have the achievements to even be able to join the raids, and if you didn't have a guild that did them? You were SoL.

Things like that continued to spiral out of control, when you realized how long it would take to grind out the dungeon and raid tokens to get gear, but feel free to buy Patron status and token boosters to cut down on that time by several hundred percent. Turning what used to be a fairly smooth and natural gear progression into something akin to an Asian MMO's level of grinding. Oh and because of course it is, the pvp is entirely based around who out gears who.

Throw in the usual batch of awful awful people that come with the F2P crowd, and it's hard to even argue if just playing it for the social aspect is worth it. From an Role Play standpoint it does a few things right and many things wrong. The lore is built out of wet tissue paper, and few people even follow that, open world role play is almost impossible to find and when you do? You're going to wish you hadn't. One of the good and bad things it has, are Dimensions, or just player housing. Easily costumizable zones and area's you can do a great deal of things with. Probably the most positive thing about this game these days, minus the obvious cash shop tie in's to building materials. Of course, player housing is always a double edged sword for role play as it becomes cliquish and impossible for new people to really get involved.

In the end the final nail in the coffin that made me write this review, was when they released the new single zone, not an expansion pack, not a new continent. But one area. They wanted to charge one hundred dollars, for the new class that came with it, as well as some relatively worthless in game items. This harkens back to the Ember isle map they added years ago, it was free, it was an amazing area and I still consider it their best zone. And while you can still reach this new zone for free, and the new class can be picked up for the low low cost of about 30 bucks (Without the cyber swag). I can only stop to realize, Rift really isn't the same. And it's just not worth the time anymore.

Oh and there's easily another 1-2k hours missing from that playtime. So there goes that entire year of my life! Shoulda put that time into something I could have gone professional instead. Like Solitaire.

RIFT is the perfect World of Warcraft clone. It has everything WoW has:
Same interface, mechanics, professions, auction house, instances, raids, BGs, item naming, controls, addons on Curse, talents, etc,

It also has the additions that WoW has always needed:
- Random Zone Events (constant, running all the time)
- Rifts (which appear randomly and massively accros the map)
- 1 and 2 players dungeons (Chronicles)
- Built-in mechanics that in WoW you need addons (sell grey items, quest guides, etc)
- Instant Adventures, which randomly matches you with a bunch of players and then you keep doing infinitely chosen grinding quests in a zone, giving massive EXP and rewards (the best way to level).

But mostly important it has AN AWESOME CHARACTER CLASS AND ROLE CUSTOMIZATION. It's something like "make your own class and roles":
- Caster DPS-Tank-Healer
- Pure caster DPS
- Caster and Melee DPS
- Caster with Pet DPS and Healer (or just DPS)
- Melee Tank with Healing habilities
And a LOT MOOOOOOORE.

Regarding the Free to Play aspect of it: you can completely play the game without ever spending a penny, but a few restrictions:
- You can't sell on the Auction House
- Limited bags (very annoying)
- You will have to grind a lot in order to buy mounts

But I was so hooked the first day that I bought the Classic Collector's Pack, unlocking a lot of extras, plus giving 1 month of Patron, which means 40% additional exp = faster leveling. Also, I WANTED to pay, because I was willing to help Trion. This game DESERVES money. It's polished, addicting and well crafted.

If you want to play WoW but aren't willing for a comeback, RIFT is your game!

RIFT is a great game. As of writing this review I have logged almost 4000 hours. Mhmm. Almost four thousand. One hundred and sixty-six days. It's a safe assumption that I'm a veteran player that has been enjoying this game almost since release!

After hearing about it, I was worried about Trions Free To Play buisness model. I am happy to report (contrary to other opinions) that there is NOTHING out of reach in game to non patrons (subscribers) or those that don't want to spend hard earned cash for pixels and code, The F2P system in RIFT is created as such to allow people to purchase Credits using in-game currency. It might take a damn sight longer, but you could get everything, including sub time, just by something as simple as selling artifact collections.

Combat is pretty fun, and the souls/roles (Calling/Class) system is one of the best i have ever experienced in an MMO. Mage tank? Sure! Cleric bard? Done! A Warrior healer? Go for it! Each class is updated by the devs fairly regularly, so all of them are fairly balanced, there are a few exceptions (looking at you Physician...).

The world is huge, and gets bigger with each expansion. It still looks pretty good despite it's three year long run and is still one of my favourite MMOs ever.

TL;DR Great game with a ton of content, entirely free to play, if you don't enjoy it I'll personally refund your free for free.