Just a quickie before I hit the sack before PAX.

So some Defiant ?? types were in Argent Glade tonight, nuking the NPCs. The locals (myself included) were spread too thin and too low level to do too much about that. So I just ignored them. Yeah, it was slightly annoying when they killed the tradeskill vendor that I need to buy supplies from, I’ll admit.

But a few people *seemed* to be really upset (and full disclosure they may have been RPing but if they were I can’t use my catchy title so I’ll assume they were genuinely mad). Like I said, they killed the tradeskill guy I needed to talk to but by the time I’d typed a scathing remark into chat, and before I could hit Return, he popped back into being. So I sheepishly erased my scathe and went back to tradeskilling.

So things I learned:

• Townie NPCs repop really quickly.
• You can chat between factions. I assumed that would be impossible based on games like DAoC and WoW. My bad.
• If these guys had wanted to, they could’ve made a real nuisance of themselves by standing there and chain killing NPCs

I think they were just gathering up server firsts… they got one for each NPC they killed. Which tells me Trion approves of their behavior. And I do too. I’m looking forward to more open world PvP as I ‘grow up’ in Rift.

And I’m hoping Trion was clever enough to put in balance systems. Like if these guys had chain-killed NPCs and never were attacked by players, I’d love to see some high level guards spawn to run them off eventually. (I just worry about days when low level zones are pretty deserted and some player is trying to work on tradeskills and enemy players chain kill the only vendor that low level player can utilize, and he can’t find high level player characters to help.)

For the record I did try to spawn a Flare but I guess you can only do those on enemy wardstones. Damn!

So back in beta (I know, bring on the hate) those zone-wide invasions — y’know, the ones that pop a quest into your log — used to give quest rewards. Then they were taken out because, really, the system was kind of borked. You had to do very little to ‘complete’ the quest and you’d get the same rewards as someone who’d fought constantly to drive back the Rifties.

I was working up a good rant about these invasions… how winning them got you nothing and losing them cost you nothing and so they seemed pretty pointless to worry about unless you were in an RP mood. (Hold your hate and corrections for just another moment, please.)

Then the other day I was bashing around with a new character; a cleric. I fly in the face of logic with my characters…this dude is (for now) Shaman/Cabalist/Warden and at low levels he’s a total hoot to play. So I’d just gotten into the real world (Guardian side) and was doing that first quest hub (putting out fires, fighting wanton destroyers and those ember dudes). I was level 7 or 8. And one of those zone-wide events started up.

Then I heard Rudi’s Wagon was under attack. “Poor old Rudi!” I says to myself, “He needs help!” So I jumped on my turtle and took my lowbie self into the fray.

And OMG what a fun fight that was! We had 3 invasions hit at once. I was healing (OMG #2….me healing. I’ve been playing MMOs since there’ve been MMOs and I never heal) which worked pretty well considering both our raid and all the invasions were level 8 or so. And we prevailed! Rudi’s Wagon was saved, and my Rift goody bag was overflowing with knick knacks and planerite. I collected it all, disbanded and went back to questing (at my level there was no sense trying to help the rest of the zone). Just a few minutes later the call went out that the Guardians had prevailed. Huzzah!

And I noticed my Rift goody bag was lit up again. I opened it to find a blue sourcestone item; a reward for taking part in the event.

Call me a nub, but I’d never put 2+2 together like this before, because generally when one of these events happens I either jump in for the duration or ignore it completely, so I’d thought whatever rewards I was getting was for the “local action” that I was taking part in, not the greater event (since I’d be fighting when the event completed). This is the first time I’d seriously fought through part of the event and then disengaged and been able to notice the reward for completing the event. I don’t know what the threshold is for you to get it, but (for my level) I was chain-healing (plus tossing out the odd nuke) for probably a solid 5 minutes of chaos. It felt more like an hour. So (again for my level) I’d contributed a significant amount to that particular battle.

Anyway this was news to me and I figure somewhere out there is someone else who didn’t realize there were zone-quest rewards. So I figured I’d share.

While I have your attention, I also wanted to belated point out a good Rift post at Massively. Karen Bryan offers some good tips on buffing Wardstones and public groups. I always buff Wardstones…I think there should be an achievement with a title for doing it enough times.

Anyway one tip I wanted to add, sort of related to public groups. People talk about forming groups to take on a named mob so that players don’t have to queue up to wait for respawns. I’ve found that as often as not you can get credit even if you don’t form a group. Just attacking the mob during the fight is often enough. Also lots of times the quest isn’t to kill the mob but to do something heinous to its still-warm corpse, and again you seem to be able to do that even if you weren’t the one to kill the mob. So check it out. It doesn’t always work, but it often seems to, at least at low levels.

Last night I decided to roll an alt on Faeblight, mostly for crafting. But of course he had to get to Argent Glade before he’d be any use as a crafter, which meant running through the tutorial again.

I thought that would suck, but actually it didn’t, and it went by pretty quickly. This guy (Meglivorn) is a Rogue, like my Defiant character Past on Estrael, but I decided to try some souls I’ve never played with. So far he’s a Nightblade/Bard and y’know, I’ve already forgotten his 3rd soul. Riftstalker, maybe? I don’t plan my characters out really. Eventually I’ll have to in order to be accepted into groups and guilds and things, but it’s nice knowing I can worry about that later.

What’s also nice is how different he feels from my ranged Rogue or my DPS warrior even though he has aspects of both. And of course he can become a ranged Rogue later. At the end of the day it doesn’t make much sense to have more than 1 character of each archetype, but I still want more than one.

I guess this is role-playing to me. Two characters, same archetype, but in my mind they’re very different people with different motivations.

Also, the new rogue is a High Elf and that changed the tutorial slightly and gave me a little bit more story. I’ll have to make a dwarf I guess, to see what else I can learn. (My ‘main’ on Faeblight, Aethelred, is Mathosian.)

The fact that Rift is here to stay (and I’m back to thinking I’ll do that 6-month sub) is sinking in and I’m feeling less frantic about *must play* *must level* *GOGOGO!* and understanding that it’s going to be there for a long time to come. Faeblight really feels like home, even with the queue. I’m sorry @BlamefulGecko but your guildmate Past isn’t going to be around much.

During the beta process we saw lots of changes to the game, some of which I really didn’t like. I still wish some of those changes hadn’t been made, but they were, and what we have is what we have and it’s still very, very enjoyable to me.

I’m feeling a Stargrace vibe these days. Real life has enough bad shit going on to fret over. I think I’m just going to enjoy playing Rift (and I want to get back to STO too) and not fret about details that might have been different, y’know?

So last night found me swimming to the bottom of the sea to explore debris left from the bridge collapse (there’s a fatigue system so I couldn’t swim over to the Defiant end of the bridge!) and poking around mining tin. The low-end tip of Silverwood was actually quite busy last night and I wasn’t so interested in competing over mobs to rush on to the next quest hub.

Trion passes one of my MMO tests: is there interesting stuff to look at in places you don’t need to go? So yeah, there’s a sunken ship under that bridge that I’m sure very few people see. I love details like that. The waters off Sanctum are deep and dark (be careful, there’s a spot where you’ll start ‘falling’ through the water and might end up so deep you can’t get to the surface before you run out of breath). There’re little details all over the place for explorer types.

Meh, I’m rambling. Sorry. Just really enjoying the game and wanted to talk about it but not having anything “significant” to say about it today. 🙂

So of course yesterday was the official launch of Rift.

I have to start by eating crow. When Trion added a bunch of servers and none of them were PvE-RP I fussed about it. After all in headstart, of the 3 PvE-RP servers two of them always had a queue (and in the case of Faeblight, a big queue) in prime time and one of them teetered on the edge of having a queue (Estrael was either HIGH population or had a small queue). I assumed with the retail launch these three server populations would swell further as retail-buying role-players sought a new home.

But last night, the queue on Faeblight, at least, was smaller than it had been. It was about an hour for me at about 9 pm ET. I queued up, finished writing an ITworld post I was working on, walked the dog, fed the guinea pigs and got done just in time to log a character in.

Oh, glorious Silverwood, how I have missed you!!! I played Defiant in alpha (guess I can say I was in alpha now, eh?) and in head start but my heart belongs to the Guardians). I had such a blast romping back and forth across the zone, using the portals to insta-travel back and forth when needed. I’d intended to do a lot of questing but rifts kept popping up, luring me into their not-so-tender embraces. I used that opportunity to earn some more souls as well as complete my crafting daily.

I’m not sure if I was lucky, or if they’ve changed things, but the Public Group mechanism seems to be a lot better about sticking you in groups that have nearby members. When they first put those in I’d hit the button and find the raid I was in was spread across the zone, but that didn’t really happen last night.

Nothing super-special happened in my play session — nothing you haven’t done a dozen times already — but it was just good solid fun. My only complaint is that Rift can be so intense that when I finally got up, every bone and joint in my body (aside from my hands) had gone stiff from sitting so still and intently staring at the action on-screen. 🙂 I guess that’s the kind of problems games ought to have!

Honestly it was the most fun I’ve had in Rift since beta 3 or 4, which prior to now have been my ‘sweet spots.’ I’m not sure how to quantify why it was more fun than later betas. Maybe just because I’ve so missed playing in Silverwood, or maybe the server had just the right number of players on it (I spend some time feeling like I was alone in the zone, and some time being in full raids of combat madness). Whatever it was, it was pure awesome!

I hope you’re all having as much fun playing as I had last night!