One of the dangers of taking a similar feature from a competing game is that your version 1.0 may be up against the original game's 3.0 by the time you get it out the door. Well, whatever else you want to say about Rift, Trion has become one of the fastest studios out there when it comes to fixing this sort of complaint.
The case of the dungeon quests
Case in point, Trion significantly reduced the "plaque" currency awards for its max level expert dungeons shortly after launch. To compensate, they increased the award from the daily dungeon quests - in theory, infrequent players would now have more of a chance to catch up, while players who grind out multiple dungeons per day would take longer.
One of the issues with this approach is that each day's quest is use-it-or-lose-it. If you run only three dungeons per week, but all three are on Saturday because that's your free evening, you only collect the bonus once. If you sign on one evening and you choose to do something else that keeps you from getting around to your daily dungeon run - perhaps helping a friend, visiting a world event, etc - there's no way to "make up" the missed plaque stipend, it's simply an opportunity lost.
The competition over at Blizzard, which has had these types of quests for years, decided to make their token grind a little more friendly by changing the daily dungeon quest into a quest that can be repeated seven times per week (as part of patch 4.1, supposedly hitting WoW servers on Tuesday). By comparison, Trion's emphasis on the daily version felt out-dated. So they're fixing it. By two weeks from now.
The sharp-eyed folks at Rift Junkies caught an interesting detail from a Massively interview on Friday - Rift will now allow you to "bank" up to seven day's worth of quests to complete at your leisure. I prefer this version to WoW's not-yet-released variation, because it is much more flexible in letting you work off your backlog at a reasonable pace.
Improved competition?
Beyond Trion's impressively fast reaction time, I'm hopeful to see this kind of competition in the future. Blizzard has been free in the past to let changes like this take months on end, with routine gaps of six months between patches, because there hasn't been anyone who could be seriously thought of as competition. Everyone else has felt free to let their patch cycles drop to quarterly at best because that's the bar set by the industry leader. While it's still a bit early, it's certainly looking like Trion may make a real run at forcing developers to pick up the pace a bit, which would be a win for players everywhere.
P.S. Unfortunately, like WoW's system, Trion is offering a large currency award to convince players who no longer need Tier 1 Expert dungeons to continue running them daily. I maintain that this is a misguided approach to filling groups that harms the quality of the experience for all concerned, for reasons I've discussed previously.