A handful of fans from the official Rift: Planes of Telara forums were recently invited to tour the Trion Worlds office and get their hands on the game. They also had their questions answered by the Trion team.

Q: Will there be other dynamic content in the game besides rifts?

Brown: We have these rare events where depending on how you act you get a friendly merchant or a black market. We have those spread about for flavor. If I kill a merchant and a black market appears, it's up for a few hours. It's very random and dynamic. And then later on you can try it and save the merchant.

McDowell: The biggest problem with these rare events that appear is messaging to the players that something is different and how they can deal with it. There's a learning curve with rifts, but you understand how they work. You understand how invasions work and you can see them from far away.

Hartsman: One of the things we learned through early testing is that you can have all these dynamic elements in a world, but if you've never been there before the fact that something has changed now is meaningless. The entire dynamic nature of everything was being lost. That's why when we started to emphasize rifts, invasions, defend objectives and assassinate the invader objectives, those things are very obvious. They actually change the world when they're going on. They have graphics that show up on the map so you can actually see that something exceptional is happening.

McDowell: We'll probably be doing more dynamic content once we have an established player base who have learned what the world is supposed to be like. Then we can start messing it up because you'll know the difference.

Q: Any plans for a mentoring system?

Hartsman: We're not going to do mentoring for launch, but it's definitely on the post-launch list of things we'd like to do. The system needs to be fun for the person doing the mentoring. We don't want you to lose access to abilities or have to hold onto extra armor. The philosophy we use is that unless something overtly harmful is happening, we err toward the side of fun. If it's fun and it doesn't hurt anything, we keep it.

Q: Will there be holiday events?

Hartsman: They're something that everybody wants to do, but we need to build the game first.

Q: What do you anticipate as being your first special event after launch?

Hartsman: I can't even begin to answer that question without offering up too much information. Suffice it to say, we already have the first event planned prior to launch.

Q: Do you have any events planned that are like the Scourge invasion in World of Warcraft?

McDowell: We have massive invasions! That's our game!

Hartsman: You can definitely expect that there will be days when, for some reason or another, the world's just kind of going to go crazy. And it will be fun.

Q: Will game cards be available for players without credit cards?

Hartsman: It's currently in the plans.

Q: What about security features? Will there be authenticators?

Hartsman: That one we really can't get into too much. At some point, the game will become available for pre-order and by then we'll have a much better handle on what we'll be able to do for platform security. I can tell you on the back-end we already have the ability to report on hackers and exceptional economy conditions. Some of that's already there, and hardware we'll talk about later.

Q: What are your plans for the transportation and teleportation system? Will there be faster travel options after launch?

Brown: You'll have things like teleportation, fast mounts, buffs and guild summoning at launch. You'll have tons of ways to get around. That being said, we're a fully modeled world. There's no reason we couldn't possibly do flying.

Hartsman: We are making enough world so that it feels fun. As such, getting around our world is less onerous. We don't have that level of agony in our game. We intentionally don't have a lot of travel time.