I'm over here

Yoink

I like how Trion designed the Defiant captial city of Meredian; confusing probably the first time, but easy every other time. No extra spaces or useless corridors. Everything where it needs to be. Best example of this is the Manufactory Area which has crafting stations with the appropriate craft trainer right next to it; a mail box with auctioneer and bank right next to each other. Simple and easy; no need to make a trek back and forth anymore.
--------------------------

Dear Trion

I love dyes. I don't like money sinks. And saying that, i'd like to choose what color dye i'm making. OR give me a greater selection of dyes to create. Having a difference of Light or Dark Cyan dye is just weak (see: lazy).

This... could be bad..

Eek!


I can't find the way to make this the original size; click on it, or go to: http://nerfnow.com/comic/450

How do you play your mmo's?

I think i'm still the same:
- fantasy based name
- whimsical exploration
- admiring the graphics and vistas
- too lazy to make macros

But at the same time, hardened and cynical:
- seeing any opposing faction as a ganker
- seeing quests more as kill X amt then hand in, rather than enjoying a story
- also paying more attention to the experience bar and personal rewards

You're Coin Locked

A bit of maintenance in the blogroll..

The king and queen take a picture infront of a misty plains..

Before Trion implemented the Coin Lock for Rift, I was getting annoyed at the in-game mail spam (I'm looking at you "Baidu")and thought about this:

If you can't develop a good mail spam filter.. then charge people for sending just messages.

Trion looks to fix the mail spam with patch 1.02, but I was thinking if it doesn't work as well.. if you charged say 50 silver per message with the ability to select something along the lines of "valid mail", the sender would recieve their mail cost back, otherwise you'd get the deposit instead.
This will cause these gold spammers to spend their hard earned cash just to send mail and we get a little spliff for opening their nonsense.

Another alternative taken from the idea of the coin lock is to have a whitelist of who is a valid player and who is a spammer, which will still allow the spammer to send you mail, but at increasingly higher cost of mail.

...Buuuuut the coin lock does seem to be working; no spam yet; tho coin locked twice.. hmmm

After playing and thoroughly enjoying Rift these past 2 glorious weeks, i've noticed something: I miss RvR areas where I could interact (see: kill) the enemy faction on a daily basis/when i chose to. In Rift, I've only had two instances where i've seen Guardians:

1. A guilded-rogue following me while getting overwhelmed by monsters; he was actually trying to help me, but I was flagged for Pvp accidently so I wasn't taking chances.

2. The same guild in the starter areas probably looking for realm-firsts.

I'm not a carebear, but I haven't done any PvP (nor feel the need to) in Rift, but I think i'll give it a try, just so I can see who's on the other side. I always remembered when playing WAR that there was a White Lion by the name of Kira that was always a terror on the battlefield (and I tried to avoid as best I could).

Finally, a screenshot that isn't dark!

This (Rift) reminds me more of WoW in that you rarely see the enemy faction, unless you make a specific effort to do so.

**Update: I did try some PvP last night; The Black Garden; a deathmatch-hold the flag type of scenario. It was fun; we dominated; 48-3 kill/death ratio

Now is not the time

..to start complaining and make Rift go downhill, but an improvement I believe would be nice:

To have a multi-colored resource node indicator. Instead of having them all the same color and shape (diamond), why not have them different shapes/colors to differentiate? Sometimes a certain resource is more important than another but i'd still like to know if its nearby. (Yeah, its a bit nit-picking.. but I think it would help)

Rifting along

Still absolutely loving Rift these days; my main Exponent, has reached lvl 21 and has about 18/8/0 in a Reaver/Pally/Void Knight. The specc is best described as a WoW melee warlock without a pet. Being able to agro tons of baddies, dot them up easily with skills that infects closeby creatures and using a instant cast no cooldown aoe when not dotting(shhh don't tell Trion that it rocks). The Pally specc has alot of shield attacks that take advantage of reaction abilities and using up attack points for higher damage. Not to mention an instant cast, full heal 10 min cooldown for when my gf (can't remember soul combination) isn't able to keep up the heals. I thankfully don't use that heal spell very often, even when I'm fighting 5 mobs at a time, I normally don't need to use it.

The soul system is a blast if you're an altaholic like myself. If you don't like the way you're playing, whether it lacks defence, dps, needs a pet, or is tedious, then switching souls and respeccing (small monetary cost) will fix that quickly. By seeing the full tree of talents and skills all on one window makes it very accessible and easy to determine what combination of skills will work well with other soul combinations. It also allows you to see where you want to apply future points; one tree might give you an aoe heal, while another is an aoe damage spell. Sure other mmo's may show future skills one can achieve, but its normally in a list and not easily compared with other classes/souls.

Things of interest:
- exploring normally pays off; with hidden artifacts nestled about, but no 'special' easter eggs that gives epic gear yet.. but i've only explored Freemarch so far

- looking forward to more titles


- a tank's shield is smaller than a cleric's shield... odd

- trying to find Iron Ore to make the next level of weapons and armor

- wishing I could make a red dye

- kinda sucks that you jump from making 6 slot bags to 10 slot bags; what happened to the 8 slots?

- the achievement system seems to be more of an after-thought than a main feature a la Warhammer Online and the tome of knowledge (really liked that feature)

If I had a Million Platinum..

..i'd buy some dyes.. but i'm poor. lol.

p.s. guildies, i like red ;)

--------------------------------------------

I'm all about winning in Rift

Rift Saga - Battle for Eliam Fields

The story continues with Alseides, an Ascended sent to the past to use technology to defeat Regulos...

After departing the Ark of the Ascended, and assisting the good people of King's Retreat, he found himself helping those at the Eliam Fields.

To gain favor with Regulos, the Endless Court cultists were attacking the areas of Freemarch. They not only ambushed and attacked scouts, they would steal technology of the Defiants for their own nefarious purposes.

Technology did have their own side-effects; Alseides had the unpleasant job of killing the local wildlife that was mutated by such technology.

He later was tasked to defeat and obtain cultist insignia's which seemed to fuel their necromantic powers which was given to them by some unknown benefactor.

---------------------------------------------------

We may complain that mmo's these days are weak in regards to the storyline, but we're more concerned about the rewards we get for the time we put in. Even with my character that I try to read the storyline, I find myself just picking up all the quests as fast as I can, and progressing instead of enjoying everything around me.

Rifting along

As you may have noticed, i've added a slew of Rift bloggers to the blogroll for your reading pleasure. :)

How Rift will do better in one aspect than Warhammer: All three races of your faction all start in the same zone. Meaning no needing to walk a far distance just to meet up and quest with your friends if you pick different races. Thus more population in the same area. Simply put: I like it.

It was great for each race to have their own lore and thus their own starting areas, but as we see from its history (ended up all starting in the Chaos zone), it didn't work out too well.

---------------


The gf's character getting her head in the picture ;)

Question: How are you distributing points for your characters in Rift?
Is it nice and balanced or are you focusing in a particular tree/class?

I find with my Warlock/Chloromancer/Necromancer that 80% of my points are going into Chloromancer, while the rest is Warlock.
My Pally/Warlord/Riftblade is a bit more balanced at 70%/15/15... but not by much!

--------------

I noticed a comment from one site how the auto grouping was a negative in their eyes as it fostered people in just joining and then leaving right away once the event/rift was complete. And not only that, but people can join any group at any time.

We thought there would be some reason to this huge statue out on an island.. but there wasn't..

I'll just clarify one thing; if you set your group to private and don't click the "Merge group" button at the top of the screen, no one can join your group; or atleast no one has tried to when i've played.

It normally would seem rude at first if people just joined your group and then as soon as the rift is done, to leave. But once it happens more often, it just seems natural; its exactly what my gf and I did. We'd have our own private party and we'd merge out party into the raid to help in a rift and when we were done and wanted to continue questing, we'd both leave and form up a party again. Now we'll probably realize that as we level up and the rifts get harder (i'd imagine atleast, that they'd get harder/complex), that forming raids and sticking in them is more important as there will be more communication and natural leaders/bossy people will pop up.

-----------------

On the topic of communication, I've encountered three kinds of players in mmos:
- Chatty; always talking about any topic
- Serious; only about the game or the situation within the game
- Silent; just does the quest/rift and follows orders

I fall into the Serious category, unless i'm playing with RL -core group friends then i'm semi-chatty ;)

Rift Random Thoughts

I've been having ALOT of fun with Rift these days... alot of addictive-mmo-playing fun.. which is a nice change to boredom and waiting for the next big thing.

One thing i've noticed these days is on the Faeblight server....

... there is alot of world chat going on. As an RP-PVE server, people tend to be more bubbly and emote more, which is nice, tho it does make for a big wall of nonsense that I don't particularly pay attention to/read. Its nice though, it seems like there is a better community in this RP server, but then there is...

..very little raid chat. When people join up together to form a raid for Rifts, it goes quiet; no one says anything, there is no leadership, everyone just attacks, attacks, attacks and when the rift is done, everyone disbands. There is no "good job everyone" or "nice rift" or even "thanks for the timely heals".. everyone is all business... or maybe they're all asian gold farmers. lol. I haven't done the first dungeon (Iron Tombs) or any pvp scenarios yet.. which i'd hope has more communication.

On launch day (i didn't do the headstart), there was quite a bit of people kind of spamming the world chat for guild recruitment. Now its..

Pew pew pew!

..almost non-existant guild recruiting. I see maybe half the people I encounter in the teen levels to be guilded and haven't seen any recruitment on the world channel. It makes me wonder whether there is a special channel i'm not connected to, or something i'm missing once again. I didn't find much info on whether there is guild experience/levels, but i'm guess not, otherwise i'd imagine there would be a greater urgency to get more people guilded.

----------------------------------

I have a question that i'll pose here and ill rely on the more experienced crowd to answer this. One of my characters has hit lvl 14ish and has been to the Defiant (capital?) city of Meridian and there are quest givers associated with my mage class (but not ones that picked as my 3 souls) that give specific quests in regards to rifts. When I select that quest, it prevents me from accepting other quests from other mage npcs. My reward is of that soul which I don't have right now.

What will happen if I complete this quest?
Will I get to insert that soul and switch when necessary/on the fly and how? (I read alot about more flexibility but just that fact)

-------------------------------

In regards to invasions in Rift.. I normally end up protecting a town , but never end up going to a rift source. Are we just supposed to defend the town from being taken over, or are we also supposed to go to rifts and there will be monsters we can defeat and actually close them, like normal non-invasion rifts? (once again this stems from my inexperience; highest lvl is 15)

------------------------------

I did try respeccing my souls, and as a level 15, it only cost me one gold piece. To respecc again, it didn't cost more, and I read elsewhere that it all depends on your level (i REALLY like this).

Slow and Steady doesn't win the race..

I really hope that, for my own benefit, that alot of people just pre-ordered Rift, but didn't actually get the CE. I've been thwarted many times while trying my best to scramble to an ore vein, only for a player on their two-headed turtle to swoop in and steal it. ;)

Tell me that doesn't look hauntingly beautiful!

Rift has been a great experience to see an mmo in it's beginning stages and see what a very good launch is. Where you can get into a server you want, get the names of your characters (probably THE most important thing for me), have no pressure of having to keep pace with players who level faster than I do and encounter minimal lag. I love how rifting is important, but not overly critical and it doesn't put me at too much a disadvantage that say Warhammer did if you didn't do scenarios and open rvr for influence rewards. The biggest disadvantage is just the mounts that everyone has and getting places faster than me, but that was my own fault for not pre-ordering (and I did have an option of buying a CE from the local Gamestop).

Something I found interesting was how monsters interact with each other, or more specifically with other monsters. In a newbie area, there are wolves that attack nearby fire squirrels and in turn become fire wolves. Or when rifts open up, the monsters start attacking nearby npcs or other monsters. It reminds me of UO where you'd see an ettin fighting a *snicker* goat... i wonder who wins? Answer: the goat. But just b/c you help it doesn't mean you get the right to loot the ettin.

As with WAR, ill try to post screenshots with coordinates on where special artifacts are located.

I've been part of 2 major invasions in what is a special part of Rift. Basically the sky opens up with rifts EVERYWHERE; you can't go anywhere without there being a rift in the general vacinity. And for those that haven't been exposed to the game, rifts are tears in the sky that spawn normal and elite baddies. Your goal is to generally defeat and close rifts while defending your town's power source. If the power source is destroyed, the enemies are able to spawn their own energy source which spawns even more enemies. What is special about all of this other than it being impossible to ignore, everyone stops what they're doing and goes to defend towns or attack rifts. Camraderie is built by fighting together, protecting and healing others. I've found communication is very important, otherwise your raid gets dispersed and can easily be caught be a roving elite npc band. No one seems to take leadership though, unlike Warhammer where people took charge and it worked better.

I've noticed one thing that needs an update, is when salvaging armor (in particular), and you select the skill, your cursor doesn't light up. The first few times I tried the skill, I thought the skill was broken. But after you select the skill and then select the armor, it does break it down.

Need to save up for a mount! lol

Wanted Dead or Alive: Color Dyes

I just realized, I haven't seen anywhere to dye my gear.. or vendors that do that for us... everyone kinda looks the same. And that makes me a sad panda. Hopefully i'm just overlooking something. =)

I want Fire Squirrel Orange dye!

Just One More..... RIft...

I couldn't stop laughing during this battle; it was incredible how everyone had banded together to protect our town. For the uninitiated, enemy npcs will spawn and start attacking your town; it causes most players to abandon what they're doing to protect against the enemy onslaught. You also get a pretty good reward at the end too.

heh.. its a goooood game. The crafting is fun; the screenshots below show how you can get (from various ways) augments for crafting which make your items more powerful (i've seen that concept from LoTRO).

Click on them; the first one shows different augments, and the second shows an area to put in the augment item.


One shot shows the normal item, the other, shows the augmented item.

Rift is...

pretty good. And pretty addictive.

Why oh why, would I select this mage staff as a reward if i'm a tank??? Durrrr

Some things of note:
- very little lag if any
- nice graphics; the rifts in particular, you can't miss it
- there are ALOT of rifts happening all the time
- there are alot of people that apparently pre-ordered the game; there are two-headed turtle mounts and fairies everywhere
- right now, you cannot mix classes from different archetypes; from the little reading I did on Rift, I had the impression you could mix a class from the tank archetype with say a mage class; but really, you get 3 specialized classes within one archetype
- fighting skills require you to purchase higher ranks a la WoW
- the UI is very snazzy and super customizable tho it needs a better tutorial

How to add another action bar:
Press Esc to bring up the Options Window
Select Settings
Select Action Bars
Select how many action bars you want
Close Window
Select adjust user interface
Use the small window to the left to scale/move the action bar wherever you like/how big you like it
**ill post a picture of how to do this later

- rather high respawn of creatures, atleast in the lowbie areas
- very little drops of magic weapons (only 1 weapon and one armor in 4 hrs of gameplay)
- achievement screen is rather vague on it's use
- typing while other screens (map, user interface editting, etc) are open is a great thing
- concentration on rifts looks like this will work (unlike WAR and their PQs)
- the ability to merge your party easily into a raid for a rift is perfect; tho being able to leave it after and keep your original group would be better
- normal retail buyers have a 20slot bag, while a preorder/CE edition will have a 24 slot bag.. doesn't seem to make a big difference yet; you get 2 4slot bags rather early
- all party members can select their own waypoint
- **knock on wood** no crashing, no glitches.. perfect so far
- no queue to my medium population server: nice :D

Playing as Alseides (Pally/Reaver/Warlord) on the Aedraxis server. Lookout for Jomu as well.. probably be a Chloromancer :) Will try to get to Faeblight to join the rest of the blogging community =)

Taking a Poll on Rift

What server and side are you picking? I'm looking back on people's blogs but I can't see what servers everyone is going to be on.. I only remember Faeblight is popular.. but i still want to know the side they picked ;)

-----------------------------

Picked up the game from EB today and expected there to be none, but the wall was jammed pack. The gf will be joining me which is exciting; i'm not gonna be fanboyish and rant and rave about it to my friends. I'll try my best to be honest and let them see and try themselves (*remember: WAR*)

See you in game (i really hope my names aren't taken already) :)