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?