Rift: My story so far…

Well headstart weekend has come and gone. One final evening of play before the masses descend on our poor, overtaxed servers.

I’ve had a real love/hate relationship with Rift during the head start. I had planned to play on Faeblight with a group of very good friends I played Ultima Online, Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot with. I haven’t managed to play a game with “the old gang” since DAoC, really, so I was super excited to find they were all going to play Rift.

The problem is, of course, crowding. My friends either took days off from work or live in Australia. Either way they were able to log in during off-peak times and get down to serious leveling. I haven’t been able to get in much and now I’m already hopelessly behind. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. One time I got into Faeblight after waiting two hours only to hit a server reboot after about 15 minutes of playing. /grrrr Another time I did actually get to play and got to level 12 or so before..yup, another server reboot.

Same crew was also going to play Defiant on Shadefallen. I’ve had some luck getting in there. Queues are much much shorter.

Then on Estrael I’m playing with Twitter friends like @BlamefulGecko (Defiant side). So far I haven’t seen queues there, but I worry about what it’ll look like tomorrow once head start ends and the masses descend.

So I’ve got 3 low-level characters on 3 different servers: not an ideal situation, particularly as two of them are Defiant and the more I run around Freemarch the more it confirms how much I prefer Silverwood.

My time actually playing on Faeblight has been *awesome* though. It’s a great community there, from what little I’ve seen of it. Guardian-side just seems to encourage big rift battles in the 1-20 (ok I guess they’re really 5-20) zone somehow (being able to teleport across the zone helps, I think) – I’m just not seeing battles on the same scale in Freemarch on Estrael (and haven’t gotten out of the tutorial zones on Shadefallen).

Soon enough the queues will be gone and I’ll focus on Faeblight, but that means right now playing these Defiant characters still has a whiff of “beta” to them, in the sense that I know I’ll be leaving the characters behind before too long. I try not to get too attached, y’know? 🙂

The good news is that, aside from the nightly server reboots, the game has been really stable for me (and from what I hear, from everyone). My friends who’ve leveled beyond the starter zones tell me that the rifting is much more like it was in earlier betas; not the watered down level 5-20 rifting that we lowbies have to contend with. So I’m jazzed to get up into my 20s, and if I could just decide what Defiant character/server to play on maybe I could get there.

All this chaos around servers and factions has me thinking longingly about the solo player lifestyle, let me tell ya!

So how was your first weekend in Rift?

4 thoughts on “Rift: My story so far…

  1. I REALLY hope something happens with the current congestion. I’m not concerned that retail folks will elbow their way into the existing servers; when I logged in last night to Estrael, it was HIGH, but not FULL. I’d hope retail folks will purposfully avoid queues and roll on the impending onslaught of retail servers.

  2. Estrael seems to stick to High during prime time. I think I hit a queue of 7 people there once.

    I just hope tomorrow a) brings more servers and b) specifically more PvE-RP servers.

    My worry about crowded servers is people who run out and get the game because their friends are loving it, and so they roll on the same (overcowded) servers that their friends are on. But I suppose that’ll be a pretty small % of players.

    I wonder how many pre-order players have canceled their orders? There’s got to be some percentage of customer who pre-orders at Amazon or Gamestop, gets the code, plays the head start then cancels just before the ship date, right?

  3. They can’t not bring more servers online; pretty much ALL of them are now HIGH or FULL. It’s a problem operators love to have, certainly, but they don’t want to hear retail players complain about queues. Pre-order folks REALLY like the game, and will cut Trion slack; I’m not sure about the “unwashed” retail buyers who are picking it up because they read a single post on a website somewhere XD

  4. Yeah, I just shared an interview where [already my mind has gone blank on the name of the interviewee] from Trion said they have more servers ready to go tomorrow.

    I was thinking about me and Rift since writing this post. I think I’m that kid who loves an obscure band until suddenly the band ‘makes it’ and then the kid accuses them of selling out. LOL When I got into Beta 1 a lot of people were still confusing Rift: Planes of Telara and Tera and not caring about either one. I was paying attention to Rift mostly because of MissDoomCookie on Twitter.

    Then Rift got more and more popular and in response to feedback the gameplay got more and more mainstream, leading to even more popularity and now its HUGE! And I kind of feel like they’ve sold out, though I really can’t blame them…gotta make that money! The gameplay used to be much more “niche” but niche isn’t going to recoup the $50 million+ they spent developing it.

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