UPDATE: The patch notes for Update 1.01 are up! Check them out on our wiki page.

As we previously mentioned, Rift Update 1.01 is scheduled to launch today, March 10. While the patch notes haven't been posted yet, Trion Worlds CCO and Rift Executive Producer Scott Hartsman has published a letter that outlines the game's first real update. Here are some of the things you can expect to see today:

• Raid rifts!
• Improvements to Rift, Invasion, and Foothold experience gains
• See more quests at once in the tracker if you choose
• Better item stack management
• PvE end-game difficulty better suited to the power of real end-game characters

Hartsman also mentioned that the team is working on other improvements, which include upcoming fixes to mages and mail spam. Check out his full letter below for more details.

What a Launch it's Been!

Hey, everyone.

As you’ve probably noticed -- We launched! Last week was four retail launches in four different territories. By and large, everything went extremely well. Nothing exploded, and we’re rapidly adjusting to the pace of being a live game.

Now that we’ve all collectively survived the process of taking a game from Beta to Live, it’s time to resume focusing on what’s coming up in the future.

In the next day, you’re going to see our first real update. (8AM PST Thursday for the NA servers, 2AM UTC Friday for the EU servers)

This first update does have some new content, and also includes a rather large collection of tweaks, fixes, and updates that come from a few different sources.

They’ve been picked out of what people have been reporting in game, as well as a number of beta-reported polish items that didn’t make it in time for head start, and also some further refinement and tuning after seeing what happens when people finally get the chance to play characters that’ll be around forever.

Some of the things to expect tomorrow are…

• Raid rifts!
• Improvements to Rift, Invasion, and Foothold experience gains
• See more quests at once in the tracker if you choose
• Better item stack management
• PvE end-game difficulty better suited to the power of real end-game characters

Making sure that we can do an update like this successfully is an important step on the road to doing even larger scale content and systems additions in the not-too-distant future.

Our team will be right here while this first update is going on. We’ll be checking out the servers alongside you, and will be here to respond to any surprise issues that do occur.

We also have a lot more in development than the first look you’ll be seeing tomorrow.

On top of ongoing new content and large feature development, many of which you’ll be hearing about on our site and others, there are some other, smaller improvements we’re working toward – I wanted to call these out specifically since they’re pretty frequently commented on.

• Mages. Yes, we’re both listening to you and paying attention to the post-launch gameplay data on our servers. While a well-played mage does do extremely well, and mages are very well represented in the overall number of active characters, there are issues with competitiveness in some low and mid level ranges and certain combinations of souls, due largely to mages’ overall fragility and cast times.

• Mail Spam. Chat spam protection has been going really well on the whole, which, predictably, pushed spammers into mail. We’ll be putting more protection in place there soon.

• Event Contribution. This system is being reworked to be more in line with the idea of events being massively social occurrences, and the focus on abilities themselves will be going away entirely.

• Anti-Hacker Protection. As a very high priority, we’re working on new and interesting ways to help you make sure your account is protected from password phishing and keyloggers. In the short time since head start, we’ve already banned a couple thousand spammers, hackers, farmers, and thieves. We’ll continue improving our detection and ability to take action on them well into the future.

• Dismount and Exposed. Expect some changes here as well.

Thank you all for your dedication so far – We look forward to this first small update, and a host of even larger ones in the future!

- The RIFT Development Team