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Went through the game update archives and came across this:

Vanguard Build 1818 Patch Notes 4/25/2007


GAMEPLAY NOTES
- Riftway Stones have appeared at several altars throughout Telon and will allow faster transit through their magic. Scholars believe that these stones have simply been "out of phase" with the rest of Telon since the time of the cataclysm. In order to use a Riftway Stone to teleport you must acquire a Riftway Shard - now available at general goods vendors.
- Travelers must attune at each Riftway Stone in order to return to said stone via another Riftway Stone on the same network.
- There are currently three known Riftway Networks - each stone in the world belongs to one of these three networks.
- The Riftway Stones at New Targonor, Ahgram, and Tawar Galan are only destinations - and may be reached via any Riftway Network.

As others have said, there were not that many in the beginning and you had to discover them on your character before using.

Also it appears the only contintental rifts that were linked were NT, Ahngram and Tawar Galan. Meaning you could not be on Qualia for example and rift to any rift stone on thestra. You would have had to rift to Ahngram first, then take a rift to NT and THEN rift to where you wanted to go in Thestra. Atleast thats how I interpret this. I could be wrong. My daughter was born 16 days before VG launched and while I remember having to get a rift shard and discover the rift stones to use them, I did not get to use them much as I did not get much time to play being a new father so perhaps someone else can chime in.

Looks like the March 23, 2007 patch was the first patch they increaes the amount of EXP killing a mob gave you:

Vanguard Build 1780 Patch Notes 3/23/2007

The following two updates went live with this morning's (3/23) server restart:

Adventuring Kill Experience UpdateExperience rates for killing NPCs have been increased significantly. The experience changes start as a small amount at low levels and scale up to a large amount in the early twenties. From then on, the increase remains fixed. This increase should be very noticeable for players above level fifteen. This change is in response to actual player leveling times not meeting our original target times within many different subsets of the player population. This increase will bring us much closer to our goal without exceeding it.

Looks like GU2 on 08/16/2007 was the end of Equip Expertise as well as when everything became BOE or BOP:

Bind on Equip

All equipable items that were bindable are now either bind on equip or bind on pickup, with the majority of the items being bind on equip. Here is a quick overview of the affected items:

All equipable items that were bindable are now BOE or BOP
All uncommon and common items are BOE
All rare world loot items are BOE
All rare (and higher) items that are not on world loot tables are BOP
All containers are BOE
Quest rewards will remain soulbound as they were before this change
Any rare items already in the world, that would have become BoP and thus soulbound, will instead become BoE. All new items that drop will be BoP. This will prevent cases where characters could be stuck with items becoming Soulbound that they can't use.

This change was made for a variety of reasons.

Removes items from the functional trade economy after the item has been used once.
Helps regulate economy as items are effectively removed from trade.
Changes to the deconstruction system allows all players regardless of sphere to feel a "gain" even after they have upgraded items in a slot, we did not feel that binding an item to our customers and presenting them with nothing back for its value was worthwhile.

Item Level Requirements

The rules for who can equip items has been streamlined, equipment expertise was too confusing for many players. This puts a stronger emphasis on gaining levels to allow players to equip more powerful items. It also restores demand for items that were trivialized due to the varied range of Equipment Expertise per item type and slot.
Items in Vanguard now have a minimum level required to equip.
The minimum level required to equip items is now displayed on items, so players do not need to do math to figure it out.
This only applies to items that are equipped on the adventuring, crafting, or diplomacy tabs of the character sheets. Mounts are excluded from this limitation.
Equipment Expertise has been removed from the game.
Any items you were wearing that are higher then 5 levels above you will not be removed until you remove them yourself.
When GU2 goes live, crafting tools in your crafting tool bag will become soulbound when you use them in the crafting process. In the future, we will have a BOE confirmation when placing a crafting tool in an equipped crafting tool bag.

Good info, thanks Mort. Keep it coming.

No problem! I am reading through various patch notes and taking note of any changes that occured that players would like reverted or whatever. Have to do this now since the forums will be taken down in roughly a week. The only other things I came across so far is it appears GU3 in Dec of 2007 is when APW went live and thus when they introduced thr Raid system.... its also when Randolph was introduces to Telon as well lol.

You are correct, Mort.

If you were on Thestra and wished to rift to Kojan you had to go to a hub rift to do so. You couldn't do it from just any rift on the continent. The rifts required payment and it was an actual item in your bag that you paid for.

As for EE... It would be awesome if that could be brought back, and BOE done away with (even if only on an alternate rule-set server).

Yeah the original rifts were color coded not for level, but for which riftway system they were on (I think that was loosely based on level). Like if you wanted to go to say, Berenid Hills, you'd have to go to the nearest rift of that color in order to rift there. You'd have to get a riftway map (not in game, but like on a website or make your own) to see what "network" the rifts were on).

I didn't really like this system too much. The only thing I liked about it was forcing the player to go to the rift to unlock it before it could be used. The rifts weren't in safe places either, so if I lowbie tried to go there, they'd most certainly get ganked.

I'm one of those players that just hated spending 30 minutes /just to go somewhere/. I loved exploring, but when it took an hour for groupmates to assemble, this is why people stopped playing the game.

Oh I just found some info on the original system if anyone is interested: http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/60258

[quote="Mortuarius"]Went through the game update archives and came across this:

Vanguard Build 1818 Patch Notes 4/25/2007


GAMEPLAY NOTES
- The Riftway Stones at New Targonor, Ahgram, and Tawar Galan are only destinations - and may be reached via any Riftway Network.
[/quote]

The hubs were inbound-only from any normal Rift Stone on any continent. If you rifted to NT, you either left via the ferry (NT, Ahgram, and TG had galleons that ferried players between the continents), or you left on foot/horseback. There was no rifting back out from a hub riftway, they were 'destination only', and for that reason the hub cities rarely got used for anything other than crafting/banking. Tanvu was not a hub originally.