RIFT: Some notable items from the recent 1.4+ releases

[Ughmahedhurtz]

* Fixed a startup crash when running on Wine/CrossOver with low video memory. If you still experience crashes when entering the world, try enabling the low quality renderer and/or playing at a lower resolution as a workaround.
* Significantly improved memory usage in highly populated areas.

* The Looking for Group tool goes cross-shard with the other shards in your wargroup.

* Repeatable quests (daily, weekly, etc) no longer count against the 25-quest limit in the quest log.
* Collected quest items that are placed in your bank now count toward the total required for the quest and will be withdrawn when the quest is turned in.
* All characters now have a 'quest bag' attached to their quest log which holds items that are either gained during or required for quests the character is currently on.
* Looted quest items will automatically go into this new quest bag.
* You can move quest items around inside the quest bag or move them into your general inventory if needed.
* Regular items go into inventory bags as usual, and cannot be stored in the quest bag.

* Bind on Pickup items can now be traded to other eligible characters within 30 minutes of looting the item.
* New items added to your bags (from looting, trading, etc.) are now highlighted in the bag UI the first time they are seen. Once you close the bag for the first time after obtaining a new item, the highlight is removed.
* Souls are now available from your friendly neighborhood Calling trainer. Removed the Soul Quests, although players who currently have these quests will be able to turn them in normally.

* Guild Master NPCs (the ones who sell guild charters in Sanctum and Meridian) now provide an additional service: resetting spent Active or Passive guild perk points for a fee.

* A number of zone event boss abilities have been slightly reduced in severity and have better warning visuals or casting times added to them.

* Hit points for zone event colossi now scale based on zone population.

* Toned down the number of visual effects that display during large combat situations.
* Added an audio cue to the confirmation popup when you are invited to a group.

* Characters can now have up to fifty macros each.
* You can now drag items and abilities into the Macro Commands field to insert their names into a macro.
* A slash-command glossary has been added to the Macro window to better explain some of the many slash commands in the game.

* There is now a "Take All" button when reading mail with attachments. Also touched up the Mail UI buttons in general.
* Added a button that allows you to "take all attachments from all mail items" in your inbox.

* When combat logging to a text file is enabled, the Rift client will no longer open and close the log file for every line written. Instead, it will leave the file open and flush new data every half second. The interval for flushes can be tuned in rift.cfg with the CombatLogFileFlushInterval value.

Now here's an interesting note that certain *cough*other games*cough* could learn from:

Addressing issues with healing in PVP focusing on instant and passive healing, reducing the effectiveness of healing for targets involved in PVP combat. This should help with a number of issues related to general Cleric survivability and effectiveness. These changes only affect active PVP combat, they have no impact on normal PVE gameplay:

What? Divorcing PVP nerfs from PVE nerfs??!? WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN--

Also:

1.4 will introduce a number of changes to make acquiring PvP gear more enjoyable. Players will now be able to upgrade PvP store items more frequently without needing to hoard Favor to purchase high rank items.

Interesting patch, IMO.

[JamieW]

To be fair, SWG tried to address PvE vs. PvP in one of their first patches by reducing PvP damage to 25% of normal damage. It isn't quite the same, I know, b ut it isn't a wholly unique concept to Rift.

[Alemi]

To be fair, SWG tried to address PvE vs. PvP in one of their first patches by reducing PvP damage to 25% of normal damage. It isn't quite the same, I know, b ut it isn't a wholly unique concept to Rift.

Everquest 2 did this years ago, too. I'm not entirely suprised Rift went this way since a chunk of their dev team comes from the hall of SOE.

Lots of good stuff in this patch, regardless!

[Void]

server xfers are free now right? what server are most people playing on? might come back and play a bit

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Yeah, server xfers are free if your target server is on the list. It's basically an expanded version of Blizzard's population-based xfers, with the only restrictions being a 1-week cooldown and no xferring to high-pop servers.