When Patch 1.1 went live, my Rogue got all his soul points refunded. Ugh. My Warrior did as well.

I love that Trion makes a point of letting us rebuild when they make significant changes to a soul, but I’d like it even more if they gave us a chance to take one last look at our old build before we got wiped, because I can *never* remember exactly how I had my points spent!

See, I’m not a min-maxer. Planning out a character sucks all the fun out of a game for me. I live for the rat pellet reward of the Ding and when I already know exactly how I’m going to spend my points, it takes the fun out of the process. Suddenly leveling becomes a chore intended to unlock the points I need to follow my plan. That sounds like my day job all of a sudden. (And absolutely no offense intended towards people who study skill trees and work out ideal rotations and things of that nature…we all have our own personal set of activities that are fun for us.)

So I wing it and have fun. But after the last patch I decided to be… responsible? Instead of winging it, I maxed out my Bard points so I could do some healing, and spent the rest in my Nightblade. At level 17 that meant 5 points for the Night Blade, 17 into Bard.

Now I’m a responsible adult who runs his group buffs and spams Cadence to heal 5 other members of the raid. I guess people like having me around and I don’t die. I feel like my Rogue is more ‘efficient’ than he used to be.

But I’m bored as hell. In groups I basically spam 2-3 abilities over and over, sticking in a Motif now and then. Last night, for the first time, doing massive invasions started feeling a bit like a chore.

And I realized I’d fallen into the trap of playing my game the way others think I should play it. I think a numbers person would approve of my build so far, but I’m not a numbers person. Well, I am…I mean I write code for a living. But when I’m playing a game I’m not about the numbers, I’m about the emotions. About seat-of-my-pants adventuring.

I’ll probably keep this build for when a group I’m in for more than 2 minutes needs extra healing, but I need to buy a 2nd role and spent points in a way that’s fun for me, even if ‘hardcore’ players look down their nose at me.

I need to roll an alt as a gatherer…I’m really thinking, just for grins, of making him totally random. Pick a class randomly, pick my souls randomly, assign the points to souls randomly. I think it’d be fun to see how hard such a character would be to play…

So I’ve been pretty busy lately and not having a lot of time to do the things I enjoy.

During this time I’ve been skimming Twitter and, without really digging in to what’s going on, my casual glances seem to be picking up on a theme of some discontent coming about in response to some planned (or already implemented?) changes to some of the Rift souls. I’m am honestly ignorant of the details; something about balancing PvE souls based on PvP? One specific I heard is that the Bard’s reactive heals (Cadence, for instance) will only affect a party, not an entire raid.

Meaning no disrespect to the people who’re upset about the changes but… these are games. If you have the kind of free time to get so immersed in a game that you can be upset about these changes, you should feel thankful.

I have an experiment to try: set aside 5 days and don’t play any games. Instead, spend those 5 days working at your job, cleaning/rearranging your house, filling out forms, talking to lawyers, paying taxes, dealing with your landlord and all the other unpleasant chores that life throws our way. You’ll knock your “To-do” list down and feel so much better about yourself for having all that crap out of the way.

Now go log into Rift and tell me that the changes that have been made have really ruined the game for you.

I could be wrong, but I think instead of being disappointed you’ll be delighted to be in-game having fun again.

<Begin Vaguely Related Anecdote>

Last night I finally sat down to do some gaming about 10:15. This week has sucked and will continue to suck through Sunday, so I was just grateful to have the chance to unwind a bit. I didn’t have long to play but wanted to at least smell the air of Silverwood and do some crafting quests.

I awoke in Sanctum and got the quests from that strange little man that always has work to do. I wasn’t really paying attention to what was going on when I activated my portal to teleport back to Argent Glade. Mistake on my part.

As the aether settled around me in Argent Glade I opened my eyes to a world where all hell had broken loose. There was an open rift in front of the tavern and another smack-dab in the middle of Quicksilver College. The countryside was awash in rifts, in fact. I wasted no time in joining my fellow Guardians in beating back the denizens of the Plane of Earth.

Alas it was too little too late and the Guardian Wardstone in Argent Glade fell. Only one remained in Sanctum Watch so I ran to the porticulum and returned to Sanctum, and from there out to the Watch. A dozen or more invasions were headed for the Wardstone but were still some ways off. I joined a raid and we made our way up one road, slashing, hacking and burning down invasion force after invasion force. I worried that we were over-extended so I left the raid and rode back to the Watch. Sure enough forces were drawing near along the other road, but happily I wasn’t the only one who’d fallen back. Another raid formed, and another purge of Earth denizens was underway. The Wardstone was saved!

In the meantime other Guardians were gathering to fight epic bosses from the Earth Plane. The community was self-organizing very nicely. We headed to Overwatch Keep to take down the final opponent and just as we arrived, he fell.

After that it was just a matter of mopping up and finally peace returned to Silverwood.

* * *

I looked up. Somewhere in all that I’d gained a level, and I won a purple sourcestone to get myself some shiny new gear with. I had two green gear upgrades in my rifting goodie-bags.

I looked at the clock. It was nearly midnight. Where had the time gone? My legs and back were cramped, my dog was looking neglected, the world seemed a bit fuzzy and indistinct. I had been so focused on the game that I hadn’t moved (aside from fingers on keyboard and mouse). My quick visit to make some Burlap Shoes had turned into an epic confrontation that left me grinning ear-to-ear and thankful for having a way to escape the depressingly mundane life I’d been leading this week, at least for a few hours.

When our grandfathers wanted to have some fun they rolled a hoop down the road with the aid of a stick.

We’re blessed with the chance to play these wonderful games that no other generation has experienced. Take a moment every now and then to appreciate how good you have it.

As mentioned on Twitter, going to PAX East has dampened my enthusiasm for MMOs a bit. Or more accurately, it has enhanced my enthusiasm for other games; I saw so many non-MMOs that I’m interested in playing that it makes dedicating myself to an MMO seem constricting. Since PAX East I’ve purchased Slam Bolt Scrappers (PS3), Atomic Zombie Smasher (PC), Arthur: The Role-Playing Game (PC but not new…it was on Impulse for $2.99 last weekend) and snagged the demo of Dungeons (PC). Whew!

So on top of going back to The Witcher (based on everyone having fun with DA2… I want to finish The Witcher so I can then go back to DA:O and Awakening and finally catch up and play DA2) I haven’t put a lot of time into MMOs recently.

But I did get some time into Rift this past weekend and, as usual, got caught up in events beyond those I’d planned when I logged in, having a ton of fun in the process.

But one thing I did encounter which irked me a tad. I ran into a non-public group while trying to close a rift. There I was, ready to beat back the denizens of the plane of earth. It was going slowly since I was alone. Then I spotted help on the horizon. Huzzah! I went to click the Public Group button and it wasn’t there.

Bwa? Huh?

Turns out it was a private group consisting of members from a guild. They got to work sealing the rift. There wasn’t much I could do buy lurk behind them and contribute DPS (was playing a Rogue DPS build). If I tagged a mob and got aggro they’d ignore me, working as a team to kill the mobs they’d tagged. Generally this resulted in my death, which then allowed them to tag the mob I’d been fighting and get credit for the kill. I’m not saying they were doing this maliciously but when you’re in a group you tend to only pay attention to other members of your group.

So like a hyena I skulked around the edges of the party, sniping at mobs they’d already tagged. Aside from making me feel like a leech it wasn’t really that bad. I still got decent rewards and stuff, so I’m not really complaining so much as marveling at the fact that I missed that Public Group button, since I wasn’t really a fan of the system when it was first introduced.

But now I find I miss it when it isn’t there. I guess I’ve been converted.

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!