We interview Hal Hanlin, Chris Junior, and Bill Fisher about Conquest

ZAM: Is crafting really as valuable as fighting for objectives?

Bill: Crafting was actually so super effective that I had to halve the effect of the crafters. I have one private message from a guy playing a Marksman rogue who said he was kiting entire RAIDS of players. So we had to tone that back a bit. We went out with some very early numbers and had to tweak them. We plan to add some more to the crafting gameplay but I'm not going to say anything concrete right now as everything could change.

ZAM: What objectives and strategies have become the most popular with the stress testers? Are any points seen as more valuable than others?

Bill: A few people figured out pretty quickly that the teams who controlled the teleporters could dominate the map. They were pretty valuable.

Chris: One of the things we added was the inclusion of "hot spots" on the map. Players zoning in can see who had died and where they died. The hot spots are great indicates of action; a few players die and a raid comes in to wipe out the attackers. It really helped focus the war effort.

Bill: The action from the hot spots actually helped us discover a bug, because people kept asking for the coordinates of hot spots. We found out that if you zoom out a little bit you didn't see the hot spots. That's been fixed for this week: you'll see a map covered in red when people are dying. And lots of people are dying in Conquest!

ZAM: How are the rewards divvied up? What's the story with the Conquest ranks?

Chris: Right now we're referring to it as Conquest Contribution or Power Bar. If you participate in Conquest, at the end everybody gets a certain portion of the contribution to fill out their power bar. As the power bar is filled you start unlocking the buffs, which are massive power boosts to your player that work both in and out of PvP.

Bill: It's important to note that that value decays over time. You don't just rank that up once and have it forever.

ZAM: Will players feel penalized for not playing Conquest?

Chris: There will definitely be a benefit to participating in Conquest, but the goal for us to get people interested in playing it and to give them tangible rewards for doing so. We're not going to make the decay so penalizing that you have to be in there every night. It may just be that you have to do it, say, once a week. Do that and your power bar is fine.

ZAM: Are there intangible rewards as well, such as achievements or titles?

Bill: There will definitely be achievements and titles; they're on my list of things to implement; but they're not done yet! That was one of the first pieces of feedback as well, with players asking "Where are the achievements!? Where are the achievements!?" So they definitely will be coming.

Chris: There are other tangible rewards as well. Players have been asking us for a long time to make PvP weapons better and to give them a reason to choose them over PvE weapons, so we're adding enchantments and runes won through Conquest that can only be applied to PvP weapons.

ZAM: What in particular is the team watching when it comes to both the testing and implementation of Conquest? Can you think of other items on this checklist?

Hal: Some of them are messaging, such as making sure players know where things are. Some of them were differentiating the different factions in terms of visibility. It's helping to bring it from just a fun thing to do to a full-blown feature and part of the world. We're fixing bugs, such as one where you couldn't enter a new Conquest immediately after finishing one. They're the standard bugs that you fix before it hits the live servers.

ZAM: Any chance that the three-faction fighting will extend further outside the Conquest area?

Bill: I wouldn't say it's impossible, but it's really not high on the priority list.

ZAM: Have any final thoughts to share with our readers?

Chris: Anyone who participates in one of these play tests will get a custom title awarded to their account when 1.9 goes live. So hey, if you want an awesome title, sign up to try it out! Oh, and we're letting the players pick the titles themselves; we've been taking suggestions on the forums and we've got a top 10 of the ones we like, so they can choose one of those.

Bill: And just one thing we'd really like to say for anyone testing this out or playing Rift: Thank you. We've had absolutely tremendous turn-out, probably our largest in the history of testing features. We had a bit of a bumpy start there, but almost everybody stuck around for the test.

Hal: And people were good natured! They were in there enjoying, loving what they were seeing. It was a fantastic play test, and we can't wait for the next one on Thursday. As for a release date, we've got no definite date on when 1.9 will go live, and if I even guessed I think someone from our advertising team would punch me in the kidneys. Keep in mind that if someone comes up with the most brilliant idea ever, we won't just lock ourselves into a mediocre idea.

Bill: And if something isn't working out, the honest truth is that we'll just cut that idea out. If we aren't happy with Conquest when 1.9 rolls around, we'll hold onto it!

[A brief pause]

Bill: But right now we're pretty darn committed to releasing it with 1.9 [everyone laughs].

Paul "LockeColeMA" Cleveland, Staff Writer