[2022] Guardians of the Rift - Ask us Questions for the Stream tonight & Leave us more feedback!

Hi, everyone! After the Account Security segment of our stream at 16.30 GMT, we'll be live at 17:00 GMT on Twitch with Mods Elena, Husky, West and Creators (Zoepancakes & Alfie!) for a Guardians of the Rift Playthrough. 

We'll be answering your questions during the playthrough and we'd like to invite you to ask any questions for us tonight!

Before you ask something, check this brief summary of what we've discussed so far:

• Waiting to enter the minigame can be frustrating if the game fills up to 60, or if you've arrived slightly later. Last night, we introduced a "peek" function on the barrier to see the % of the Great Guardian so that you'll be able to inspect how far along a current game is, however, we'd like to do more to fix this before the weekend. Today, we're going to allow late-comers to enter the minigame during the first phase. Today, we'll be increasing the total cap of players from 60 to 100 whilst also scaling the group event up a bit more. In the coming weeks, we'll be making a visual indication on the entrance barrier to allow you to see, at a quick glance, whether a game is full or not.
• We have seen several reports of players crashing during the minigame on mobile and we are currently investigating this. Larger-scale group events have a higher tendency to cause crashes and we're aware that raising the cap of players to 100 might make this problem more apparent. For now, we'll be monitoring these crashes and following up with our Game Engine team to determine the cause (it could be environmental). We recommend lowering your FPS if you experience these issues. 
• There are comments about the entrances to the altars being a bit difficult to see. May we suggest looking at the UI in the top left of your screen which should show the altars that are active at any moment? This really helped us when we first started the minigame and it might resolve the issues you're experiencing with the entrances. If not, please let us know.
• We cannot have instances for this content, because players have to leave to go to the altars and come back, and we can't have empty instances because they will delete themselves when there is nobody present. 
• Abyssal Pearls are the unique currency awarded from the Guardians of the Rift minigame. We've balanced the rate of Abyssal Pearls around the expectation that you're getting approximately 8-9 games per hour. It's difficult to know for sure whether our internal estimates were wrong, or whether in masses players need to grow & improve with the minigame. Players are still discovering optimal methods to do this content and the longer waiting times on launch day might also be a contributing factor. After some review, we've decided to increase the rate of receiving Abyssal Pearls by approximately 15%. This can be done by today and will be communicated in a separate newspost. 
• There will be no further changes to Abyssal Pearls after the above point, as we do not want to undermine the efforts of those who have been playing the minigame since its launch. However this does NOT mean that no further balancing changes will be looked at at all anymore. If players want us to revisit the grind for the items in the rewards shop, it can be done by looking at the cost of all items, reducing them, and then refund any potential difference of Abyssal Pearls (this would apply to untradeables only).
• More clarity on the above point: We're happy to change it initially but we really won't be able to review the rates until after the weekend, so potentially some time next week or maybe even the week after by the time we get data in. At that point it'd be really unfair to suddenly award more abyssal pearls considering there's an actual incentive to use them now to try and get lanterns/needles. So in the event that we need to adjust the time to get the outfit/pet recolour in the future we'll opt for a price reduction instead of a pearl increase to achieve the goal instead.
• The Abyssal Lantern was blogged & polled as coming from the rewards shop, however, during development we changed this because developers realized it doesn't make sense thematically for a Saradominist Wizard to sell Abyssal-themed items. It was an oversight to mention that it would not be coming from the rewards shop. We'd like to know how the wider community feels about keeping things the way that they are, or whether we need to allow it to be bought in a way that makes thematic sense. If you would prefer us to make it purchasable, we can do so. We'd set the price at 1500 Abyssal Pearls. On average, this would mean that the Abyssal Lantern takes longer to get than it currently is estimated to get from the rift, but it will of course be more consistent. This is not hotfixable, so we'd fit this within the coming weeks.
• We're allowing cells to be used to "heal" full health barriers and still award contribution, but doing so will not award any Runecraft XP. This should be done by today.
• We're increasing the total point cap from 1,000 up to 1,200! This should be done by today.

This is not an exhaustive list of changes and a newspost will be coming ASAP to highlight in more detail. We're still in the process of reviewing your feedback so this is the perfect time to let us know what else we should be looking into.

Are there any points you want us to cover in the Q&A Playthrough? Leave them here. 

Hi, everyone! After the Account Security segment of our stream at 16.30 GMT, we'll be live at 17:00 GMT on Twitch with Mods Elena, Husky, West and Creators (Zoepancakes & Alfie!) for a Guardians of the Rift Playthrough. 

We'll be answering your questions during the playthrough and we'd like to invite you to ask any questions for us tonight!

Before you ask something, check this brief summary of what we've discussed so far:

• Waiting to enter the minigame can be frustrating if the game fills up to 60, or if you've arrived slightly later. Last night, we introduced a "peek" function on the barrier to see the % of the Great Guardian so that you'll be able to inspect how far along a current game is, however, we'd like to do more to fix this before the weekend. Today, we're going to allow late-comers to enter the minigame during the first phase. Today, we'll be increasing the total cap of players from 60 to 100 whilst also scaling the group event up a bit more. In the coming weeks, we'll be making a visual indication on the entrance barrier to allow you to see, at a quick glance, whether a game is full or not.
• We have seen several reports of players crashing during the minigame on mobile and we are currently investigating this. Larger-scale group events have a higher tendency to cause crashes and we're aware that raising the cap of players to 100 might make this problem more apparent. For now, we'll be monitoring these crashes and following up with our Game Engine team to determine the cause (it could be environmental). We recommend lowering your FPS if you experience these issues. 
• There are comments about the entrances to the altars being a bit difficult to see. May we suggest looking at the UI in the top left of your screen which should show the altars that are active at any moment? This really helped us when we first started the minigame and it might resolve the issues you're experiencing with the entrances. If not, please let us know.
• We cannot have instances for this content, because players have to leave to go to the altars and come back, and we can't have empty instances because they will delete themselves when there is nobody present. 
• Abyssal Pearls are the unique currency awarded from the Guardians of the Rift minigame. We've balanced the rate of Abyssal Pearls around the expectation that you're getting approximately 8-9 games per hour. It's difficult to know for sure whether our internal estimates were wrong, or whether in masses players need to grow & improve with the minigame. Players are still discovering optimal methods to do this content and the longer waiting times on launch day might also be a contributing factor. After some review, we've decided to increase the rate of receiving Abyssal Pearls by approximately 15%. This can be done by today and will be communicated in a separate newspost. 
• There will be no further changes to Abyssal Pearls after the above point, as we do not want to undermine the efforts of those who have been playing the minigame since its launch. However this does NOT mean that no further balancing changes will be looked at at all anymore. If players want us to revisit the grind for the items in the rewards shop, it can be done by looking at the cost of all items, reducing them, and then refund any potential difference of Abyssal Pearls (this would apply to untradeables only).
• More clarity on the above point: We're happy to change it initially but we really won't be able to review the rates until after the weekend, so potentially some time next week or maybe even the week after by the time we get data in. At that point it'd be really unfair to suddenly award more abyssal pearls considering there's an actual incentive to use them now to try and get lanterns/needles. So in the event that we need to adjust the time to get the outfit/pet recolour in the future we'll opt for a price reduction instead of a pearl increase to achieve the goal instead.
• The Abyssal Lantern was blogged & polled as coming from the rewards shop, however, during development we changed this because developers realized it doesn't make sense thematically for a Saradominist Wizard to sell Abyssal-themed items. It was an oversight to mention that it would not be coming from the rewards shop. We'd like to know how the wider community feels about keeping things the way that they are, or whether we need to allow it to be bought in a way that makes thematic sense. If you would prefer us to make it purchasable, we can do so. We'd set the price at 1500 Abyssal Pearls. On average, this would mean that the Abyssal Lantern takes longer to get than it currently is estimated to get from the rift, but it will of course be more consistent. This is not hotfixable, so we'd fit this within the coming weeks.
• We're allowing cells to be used to "heal" full health barriers and still award contribution, but doing so will not award any Runecraft XP. This should be done by today.
• We're increasing the total point cap from 1,000 up to 1,200! This should be done by today.

This is not an exhaustive list of changes and a newspost will be coming ASAP to highlight in more detail. We're still in the process of reviewing your feedback so this is the perfect time to let us know what else we should be looking into.

Are there any points you want us to cover in the Q&A Playthrough? Leave them here.