Rift version 1.9 rolled out yesterday. I haven’t had a huge amount of time to check it out, but what I’ve seen so far I’ve really liked.

The Summerfest World Event has some fishing-related quests (maybe too many if you don’t like fishing, but I do) and there’re now daily fishing quests as well. So that’s been fun, though it could be argued that they need the special event fishing spots to spawn in more than one place at a time:

I haven’t tried an Instant Adventure yet but hope to do so this weekend. They’re prominently displayed both in Sanctum and Argent Glade (and I assume the correlating places on the Defiant side).

The mentoring stuff is GREAT. All you do is right click on your portrait and pick your level. Takes just a second and no cost (I’m used to EQ2 where you have to find an NPC and pay in-game gold to self-mentor down). So, for example, I was running through Silverwood doing Summerfest quests and a rift spawns. I’m level 37 and it’s full of level 12 or whatever mobs. So I click my portrait, level myself down to whatever level I want and jump into a Public Group and have a lot more fun than I would have going in totally over-leveled. Once the rift is sealed I right click on my portrait again, cancel the Mentoring thing and I’m back to 37. Great system.

You can also Mentor while doing Instant Adventures. I’m looking forward to going back and doing all the dungeons I missed on the way up. I still have all the gray quests so I’ll scale myself down to an appropriate level and use the dungeon finder. I think you can also just do a random dungeon and the game will scale you down if you land in one lower level than you. Don’t quote me on that yet..I haven’t tried it, but I think I read you can do that (and that you can turn off the mentoring part of that if you just want something random and level appropriate).

There’s a lot more to 1.9 of course but I’m still exploring it all… but those sneaky Trion types sent me an offer for a year’s subscription for 30% off ($116 for the year) right when I was high on the game so yup, now I’ve got the until next June to keep exploring the world at my leisure.

A few weeks ago my social networking flock returned to Rift after getting excited by the announcement of an upcoming expansion. I dutifully followed because I hate being left out!

I wound up enjoying myself more than I expected to, and I’ve continued to putter around in the game, mostly playing on weekends. Work has been extremely stressful lately and it turns out Rift was something familiar and comfortable that I could slip into and kind of lose myself.

I think this is how a lot of people feel about World of Warcraft. They leave it, often loudly, and move on to other games but then months or years later they’ll (sometimes sheepishly) re-subscribe and find that a bit of time away has left them able to enjoy their old standby again.

WoW doesn’t work that way for me. I just don’t like it any more; I think I have too much baggage associated with it or something. But I vocally quit Rift and now I’m sheepishly enjoying myself again. So yeah, Rift is my WoW.

This is going to sound dumb but the addition of fishing to Rift means a lot to me.

Last night I played hooky from work. I had a ton of stuff I should’ve been doing but I was feeling mentally fractured and fragile and just needed to tune out. I installed Rift on the living room PC (and by the way, their streaming client technology is spectacular; I was able to start playing no more than 5 minutes after I started downloading the client), put my feet up on the coffee table and made room for my couch buddy (aka Lola the dog) to curl up next to me.

And I went fishing in Argent Glade. Fishing requires virtually no skill. You left click to cast, wait for the bobber to bob and right click to real in. Very similar to fishing in other MMOs. There’s a Survival skill that goes with it. So you fish to catch stuff, use the little fish you catch to create lures to improve your fishing experience, and use the big fish you catch to cook food that heals/buffs you.

The trainers and suppliers are right near the fishing hole in South Argent Glade so you barely even have to move. So I sat there, tuned out, fishing with one hand and scritching Lola behind her ears with the other, listening to the denizens of Telera as they came and went. (It’s pretty funny how much “roleplay” revolves around a male character hitting on a female character, often in the most frightfully clumsy way. I hope the players running the male characters are being intentionally bad at their pickup techniques!)

I didn’t “advance” very much (I fished up some gold and some artifacts and some of the food you can make has decent healing abilities) but I didn’t care. Finally there was a “downtime” activity to do in Rift and every once in a while I just want to be in a world without really doing much, but I need to do -something- else I get bored.

Now I’m really looking forward to both the 1.9 patch tomorrow and the expansion later this year (I think?). I don’t expect I’ll be playing Rift straight through, but I do expect it’ll be a game I keep installed on my system as my “comfort zone” MMO, ready to be re-subscribed to whenever the mood hits.

So I joined the flock and re-subbed to Rift yesterday, for a variety of reasons, the main one being that gamer enthusiasm is, for me at least, super contagious. Too many of my friends seemed to be having a blast for me to not at least take a peek in. I mean, it’s only $15 to sub-up for a month and satisfy my curiosity.

What I found was that really, things haven’t changed. Player population is still a huge issue in the mid-levels. I play on Faeblight, Guardian side, and I checked the Social Window at 9:30 Eastern on a Saturday night and here’s what I found (click for a readable version):

You can see that the level 50 population seems pretty healthy and there’s a reasonable amount of under 20 people running around but between 20 and 40 is deserted. Now, I don’t know how accurate the Social Window is — honestly these numbers seem crazy small even to me. But they do bear out my anecdotal experience; it’s really difficult to get a group together in the 30s.

The reason this is a problem is that there are Story-Quests that require a group. In my particular case, I had to close a Fire Rift (a static, placed Rift like you encounter in the intro, not a random Rift) in the Scarlet Gorge. Ironically I did encounter another player in the Gorge and helped him close the Rift before I got the quest, but when my time came there was 1 other player in the zone and s/he was AFK or just ignoring me. I tried and tried to solo that Rift but it’s designed for 3 players and even though I was over-level I wasn’t -that- over-level. I’d given up on the whole thing and was riding out of the zone to find other entertainment when I got a ping of exp/reputation and I realized someone had just killed a Rift mob I’d previously tagged. I rode back, dragging a train of mobs with me in my desperation to get there on time (I’d pushed the Rift to stage 4 of 5 solo) and found a level 50 taking down the final boss. I auto-joined her group and managed to tag the mob with 1 spell before she killed it, and I got the quest complete.

I know the announced expansion will support Mentoring so that those level 50 players can come back to the rest of the world and help out the mid-tier folks and get some fun out of doing so, and I think that’s the single most important feature of the expansion. The only other solution I can think of is some kind of Hireling system for folks who’re stuck with no companions to help them take down small-group content.

So my day in Rift sucked, right?

Actually, no it did not. It didn’t take me long to slip back into the cadence of my bardic rogue and it was fun to be roaming the world of Telara again. Also there is one upside to the sparseness of the population and it’s that when you do run into someone you’re more prone to interact with them. Think about it…when you’re walking down a city street you don’t talk to strangers but when you’re on a country road and haven’t seen anyone for 20 minutes and pass someone walking the other way, you’re more apt to say “Hello” and exchange a few pleasantries. That’s how Rift feels. Also the lack of other players out there makes the world challenging in a good way.

Also the dynamic Rift scaling seems to be working as advertised. I closed a few Rifts solo while wandering deserted areas. The only tricky bit is when you push the Rift into 1 too many bonus stages and get it to where you can’t defeat that stage’s mobs. Then you can’t close the Rift and don’t get credit. That seems like a flaw to me. Why punish the players for pushing into bonus stages? I got to where I’d run around until the timer ran out after about stage 2 so things didn’t get too difficult.

So I had fun and I don’t regret spending my $15 but I don’t think there’s enough here to hold me. The solo PvE experience isn’t that compelling and is filled with very unheroic feeling chores. Last night I had to gather firewood and water plants, for goodness sake. My bard dude fights almost on auto-pilot, spamming the same 3 attacks to build combo points and restore health and then hitting a finisher, either melee or ranged depending on the mob. Over and over again. After TERA this kind of combat feels really uninspired solo; clearly you need the dynamics of a group to make all these skills meaningful. Ditto the varied Roles. When playing alone there’s no reason to change Roles.

Still, I’m sure I’ll re-up for a longer term when the expansion comes out. Trion is still enjoying it’s “Good Guy” status in the MMO Player community; they seem to have managed to avoid doing anything to really piss us off and the regular roll-out of game updates makes me want to see them succeed.

I do wish I could summon the moral fortitude to get rid of all these past World Event trinkets though. My inventory is FULL of those things!