One Of The Devs Formerly In Charge Of Rift’s Housing System Offers Insight Into How It Became Top Tier

As someone who loves playing around with player housing in video games, I still remember when Rift came out with its Dimensions. Compared to any other housing at the time, the system was incredibly robust – not to mention daunting. I’ll be honest, despite loving housing, I didn’t get too far into it due to it being very fiddly. For me, it was difficult to get things perfect. But for those people who managed it, they were able to do amazing things that couldn’t be done in any other game’s housing system.

Of course, the system wasn’t perfect when it launched. In fact, according to one of the devs who oversaw the feature during their time working on the MMORPG, the system had a pretty big issue with asset distribution when they took over. In a post on their blog (shared via MassivelyOP), Dev Salvatrix explains their approach to fixing that particular issue, including using approaches borrowed from Lego and Magic: The Gathering when valuing and distributing the assets.

The post goes over how assets were chosen and how they were assigned different methods of delivery, ranging from the various methods of acquiring them in-game to determining which ones to sell as part of the shop lootboxes. This process was something they took on when taking the job, as the original distribution of items was apparently pretty haphazard.

From what we’re told in the post, this shouldn’t be too surprising, since Trion didn’t see those who played with Dimensions as being big spenders, something every F2P game needs. According to Dev Salvatrix, they were told not to spend too much time or effort on it for this reason. The only real benefit of having the system was apparently that housing players are more likely to stick around in the game, and they’re good for word-of-mouth marketing of the game.

It’s a bit cynical, if you ask me.

Luckily, Salvatrix didn’t see it that way, and using Lego and M: TG as their inspiration – along with Excel – they were able to make distribution of Dimension assets more sensible and something players were willing to spend money on. According to their post, player housing could account for up to a third of in-game revenue for Rift in some months. So, it seems it wasn’t nearly the waste of time the big bosses thought it would be.