Rift: My story so far…

Posted on by Nimgimli

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?

Quick Rift Tip – Ability names in the HUD

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m probably late to the party on this, but considering how many characters I’ve started, and the fact that we can have several roles per character, I find it can be challenging to remember the nuances of each combination of skills that my characters have.

Then I was looking through all the settings, if you go into Interface->Screen Messages you can turn on all kinds of damage numbers, and at the bottom of that pane you can turn on Show Ability Names.

It’s probably not something you’ll want to have on all the time but it’s good for reacquainting yourself with a character.

So now as damage numbers float up from a battle, they’ll be tagged with exactly what skill is causing the damage. I find this pretty helpful for skills with a DoT effective and things of that nature.

Check it out!

Rift: List of servers added so far

Posted on by Nimgimli

Update: Trion has put together a great Server Status Page that can help you find a shard with some room.

I went to the Rift forums. It’s a dark, frightening place full of frustration over server queues.

But I did get a list of servers added since launch that I wanted to share, so you don’t have to go there. If you’re just starting out, these are your best bets to avoid long queue times, which aren’t expected to get better any time soon (ie, existing servers won’t magically be getting more capacity, so until people leave them, the queues will remain).

[SOURCE]
Rocklift- US-EN PvE
Dimroot- US-EN PvE
Shivermere UK PvP
Dayblind US PvP
Harrow — US PVP-RP
Immerwacht DE PvE
Rhazade DE PvP
Grimnir – FR PvP-RP
Sagespire – En EU PvP
Deepwood US PVP
Feenring PvP-RP
Stonecrest US PvP
Faemist US EN PVP (added at 12 pm PST)

Alsbeth US PvE (Added 1 pm PST)
Regulos US PvP (Added 1 pm PST)

Estrael US RP (Added 1:50 pm PST)
Tearfall US PvP (Added 1:50 pm PST)

Aedraxis US PvE (Added 3:30 pm PST)
Freeholme US PvP (Added 3:30 pm PST)
Emberlord US PvP (Added 3:30 pm PST)

Silkweb US PvE (added 4:15 pm PST)

Corthana US PvE (added 5:00 pm PST)
Laethys US PvE (added 5:00 pm PST)

Friday 2/25/2011 Updates

Brutmutter DE PvE (added 9:50 am PST)
Felsspitze DE PvP (added 9:50 am PST)

Queuing up for Rift

Posted on by Nimgimli

I have breaking news! Rift’s Headstart Program began yesterday.

*crickets*

What? You mean you’ve already heard this?? 🙂

I didn’t have such a good day yesterday so wasn’t able to sit down for gaming until around 10 PM local (Eastern) time. I’d been keeping an eye on Twitter all day and knew there were some massive queues, so I almost didn’t even bother trying to play. I did though, and thanks to a tip from a friend, wound up on Estrael (spelling?) a PvE-RP server that had, when I logged in, a queue of 7 people. Faeblight, meanwhile, had queue numbers reaching 1000+.

Trion has done an awful lot right during this launch, but I think one thing they did wrong is not coming up with fresh names for the headstart servers. Clearly the Headstart population is not evenly spread around thanks to everyone playing on the servers they were on during beta, or that their friends were on during beta. I mean, that’s where I intended to go.

With perfect 20-20 hindsight, I think Trion should’ve a) used new server names and b) released them at least a week before headstart. With everyone semi-randomly picking a name from this pool of “new” servers the population should’ve been distributed more evenly.

But we have what we have, and what we have is still some pretty huge queues for a lot of servers. And it’s pretty clear Trion will need to roll out more servers for March 1st, so I’m curious why they’re not rolling out more now. I’m fully aware of the danger of having too many servers and then having to close/combine them later, but when we know they’re going to need more next week anyway, why not open them now and take some of the strain off the servers we have?

What’s going to happen when folks who didn’t pre-order get the game next week and want to join their head-starting friends on servers like Faeblight? They aren’t going to be able to get in; that’s my prediction. Better to have “Medium” load servers now, and then have them all fill up to “High” on launch day, rather than have “Full” servers on launch day that new players can’t get onto.

Meh, this is just my opinion and I’m sure Trion has played out all these scenarios.

My friends generally seem to be showing huge amounts of patience with the current queues. I can’t say I’m a person who is going to happily wait 4-5 hours to log into a game, and as someone who pre-ordered I do expect to be able to play during this head start period. Hopefully my new home of Estrael will continue to have reasonable queue times (to me, reasonable = 30 minutes or less). I should be able to carve 60-90 minutes of gaming time out of my day and actually be able to game. 🙂

I guess we’ll see!

Rift: Defiant or Guardian, and why?

Posted on by Nimgimli

So Rift is nearly upon us, and fans of the game are making plans on what servers and faction combo to go with in order to meet up with friends and enemies.

Servers are servers…boring! But what faction to pick is a decision I find pretty interesting.

I’ll play both eventually, but I’m starting out as Guardian, which doesn’t seem a popular choice around my friends. I’m curious as to why so many are choosing to go Defiant. Before I ask you that, here’s how I came to my decision to play Guardian first.

First, the question of good vs evil isn’t relevant (to me) because Trion has crafted two factions that are very much shades of gray. Neither side is pure good or pure evil. So to me the lore didn’t factor into choosing sides. I want to eventually experience all the lore of both sides…my decision was which to do FIRST.

About 10% of my decision is based on available races. I don’t like the looks of the Kelari or Bahmi very much, leaving me to play only Eth on the Defiant side. I prefer the look of the High Elves to the Kelari, and Mathosians to Eth. But, honestly, character models aren’t a strength of Rift, in my opinion. Particularly the male character models, and I don’t often cross gender lines when I play an MMO socially (if I play 100% solo I don’t really care, but I’m going to play Rift socially).

But 90% of my decision is based on Silverwood vs Freemarch. I wanted to get maximum ‘value’ out of my initial enthusiasm for the game and I’ve found that Silverwood offers a better experience and less frustration *for me*. Here’s why.

Silverwood is shaped kind of like a football with Argent Glade at 1 point an Sanctum at the other. Both these spots have Portals, and you can zap back and forth across the zone whenever you need to. This makes it much easier to traverse the zone really quickly. Freemarch has no portal (or didn’t, anyway) in King’s Retreat (the rough analog to Argent Glade).

Silverwood also feels more free-flowing. When I play Guardian I end up with quests starting from several different places at any one time. As I chase Rifts back and forth across the zone, I feel like I’m always near some quest goal, in the event Rifts die down or I just want a break from them.

In Freemarch, the quests hubs feel much more discrete. First you do King’s Retreat and then the dockside quests and then the windmill quests (where you have to wait for your chance at Ragnar) and then the beach quests and then if you find him, the Acheesement guy and farmer, then the Scarred Mire then finally you get sent to Meridian… you’re basically working your way around a circle that centers on Meridian, but it feels like I do a lot of running back and forth between quest goals and quest hub, and I finish one hub before starting another…it just feels very very Theme Park to me, while Silverwood feels a little more sandboxy.

Freemarch also feels kind of turned in on itself… for instance if you leave Meridian after first arriving, and head straight back to King’s Retreat, you’ll find mobs that are a bit challenging. But if you circle out along the road you’ll be safe…there’s a ‘pocket’ of higher-level content between the two lower-level areas. Silverwood’s difficulty spectrum feels a little more even to me (which I like…others might prefer the more chaotic nature of Freemarch).

Basically I want to log in and charge through levels 1-20 as quickly as possible, just because I’ve done those levels so many times already. For me, the Guardian experience is going to be the faster experience, and so I’m rolling Guardian at launch. (But I’ll be playing Defiant eventually, too.)

So call for comments: what side did you pick, and why?

Rift server list

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m sure that if you care, you’ve already heard, but just in case…the Head Start Server List has been posted. Mostly it looks the same as the beta list did. Well, at least for the server types that I pay attention to.

Here it is: http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?79032-Official-Rift-Server-List

And in case you’re reading this from work and the Rift forums are blocked:

US Servers

Belmont PvE
Briarcliff PvP
Byriel PvE
Deepstrike PvP
Faeblight RP
Gnarlwood PvE
Greybriar PvE
Keenblade PvE
Lotham PvP
Reclaimer PvP
Seastone PvP
Shadefallen RP
Shatterbone PvE
Snarebrush PvP
Spitescar PvP
Sunrest PVP-RP
Wolfsbane PvE

Europe Servers

Akala DE RP
Brutwacht DE PvE
Trübkopf DE PvP
Argent EN RP
Blightweald EN PvE
Cloudborne EN PvP
Firesand EN PVP-RP
Icewatch EN PvE
Steampike EN PvE
Whitefall EN PvP
Brisesol FR PvE
Rubicon FR PvP

It’s interesting to me that there are as many NA PvP servers as PvE and nearly as many in Europe. One PvP-RP and two PvE-RP servers for each region.

As Moxie pointed out, things could change come March 1st; they might bring more servers online for the ‘full’ launch. We’ll see.

I expect there’ll be queues on the RP servers but I’m going to try not to complain; I’d rather struggle with queues for the first month than be on a server that’s empty once the 1-month ‘just curious’ players move on.

I’ll be rolling my Guardian characters on Faeblight, and my Defiant characters on Shadefallen, at least initially.

I’m tempted to join a Defiant clan with the guys from RiftWatchers and also might roll a character on Argent, the European RP server, at some point.

I plan on being in Rift for a long time… I don’t mean I’ll be doing all these characters on day 1. And no plan survives first contact with the enemy launch queue.

MMO cold-turkey period ends

Posted on by Nimgimli

In the middle of last month I announced that I was taking a breather from MMOs. I had a pretty nice break, playing The Witcher, reading more than I usually do, screwing around with fun games like Battleheart on my iPad.

But I’m ready to jump back in and live an imaginary life to escape from this real one a bit. I just don’t seem to lose myself as much in single player games as I do in MMOs.

I’m such a screwball though… Rift early-launches next week, but this past weekend I kept running into positive talk about DC Universe Online, plus I watched a couple of episodes of Smallville which put me in a pro-DC kind of place. Saturday night, the day’s chores done, my head fraught with worry about my mom and finances. A cocktail or two to take the edge off and my willpower fading, fading… and BLAMMO! I purchased DC Universe Onlive via Steam. That damned Steam should be a controlled substance, I tell you!

Of course I still had to d/l it, and it was getting late and I still wanted to play something so… I’d installed Star Trek Online a while back (I’m a Lifetime Subscriber…I love me some Lifetime Subscriptions!) but hadn’t booted it up in ages. So I decided to play a bit of that and then d/l DCUO overnight.

I rolled a new Star Trek officer (a separated borg, ugly as sin) since I couldn’t remember how to play and jumped in. And wow, did I have fun!! It came back to me pretty quickly but it all seemed better than it used to be. I suspect a lot of the systems have been tweaked/polished/enhanced since launch.

So my borg (Hugh 342 – the 342nd Borg liberated since Data named the original Hugh) wants to return to being human more than anything. Via the cosmetic overhaul system in STO, he’ll be able to. But all those changes cost $$ of some kind that he still has none of. I’m looking forward to watching him dump all his earnings into getting Borg parts removed, his infected skin healed, his glowy eyes replaced with normal eyes. Part by part he’ll strive to become human once again.

I think the last time I played STO I mostly ran patrols, because I don’t remember having so much fun in these missions (they call them episodes in STO).

Last night, for instance, I did Hide & Seek (I think that was the name). If you’ve never played STO, here’s what this one episode entailed (going from memory here).
[spoilers for this very early episode]

I was sent to explore a nebula. I beam up to my ship, the USS Scintillate, and we zoom off to the nebula and find a Federation ship under attack by Gorn raiders. We make short work of these raiders, but the Federation ship is still in trouble; it needs dilithium crystals. So we fly around to dilithium mines to beam up crystals. Some of these are defended so we had to trade a few more broadsides. Bring the crystals back to the crippled ship, who now gives us the location of a refining facility where we can get the materials we need to explore deeper into the nebula. We head there, fight off the defenders of this facility, but can’t beam up the stuff we need because of the facility’s shields. To get rid of the shields we need to find the shield generator plant on an asteroid, and beam down bombs to disable the shields. The bombs are supposed to give the people in this shield generator plant time to escape (the Federation doesn’t blow up worker-bees, apparently). That taken care of, we head back and get the materials we need.

That lets us warp deeper into the nebular. There are “dense objects” that need to be scanned. More defenders pop up as we cruise through the dense gas. I’m loving the vortexes and eddies in the gas as we fly through it. We scan 5 objects and the last (of course) is a massive asteroid totally enveloped in mines, and with Klingons defending it. Battle ensues and soon there’s one less Klingon ship threatening Federation space. We use our phasers to target the mine fields until we can get close enough to beam down to the facility on the asteroid.

Once we get dirtside, we have to fight our way through Klingon defenders to get to a computer console. We start downloading data crucial for Starfleet, but that’s going to take time. While the computers talk to each other my team spreads out to defend the console from Klingons and their alien wardogs who’re beaming down to stop us.

Finally we get the data, beam out and then get the heck out of there. Episode complete! We get our just rewards from Starfleet.

All of that is ONE quest! And it told a neat bit of story along the way. I can’t wait to follow up the leads we got from that computer and learn what those dastardly Klingons are up to!

Fun stuff. More fun than I remember it being the first time I played. I think the difference is that I’m in no rush; STO will definitely be my ‘side MMO’ for a while now.

In the meanwhile DC Universe Online beckons.

Getting old FTL

Posted on by Nimgimli

This is a pretty personal post, so y’know, feel free to skip it. It isn’t anything to do with gaming but sometimes it just kind of helps me to throw things out into the ether…

I tell ya, I don’t want to get old(er). My mom (82) went to the hospital a week or so before Christmas because her back hurt and she couldn’t move (she had to use Life Alert since she couldn’t get out of bed). Since then she’s been bouncing from hospital to a physical rehab center for the elderly, and back again. Every visit to the hospital (the rehab center had to call 911 Tuesday night become mom couldn’t breathe) reveals a new ailment. Now it’s high potassium levels, to go along with her congestive heart failure, emphysema, pneumonia and of course the back trouble is still lingering.

Before this last trip to the hospital she could walk about 30 feet without having to rest, but needed an oxygen tank (and y’know, that loop thing that you see old people wearing). Now she’s bed-ridden again and needs a full oxygen mask to breath, so she can’t really talk very much.

She keeps on fighting though and her mind has been as sharp as it has ever been, until today. Today she asked my step-sister where the horses were. She was worried about the stables. (My mom is the daughter of a fisherman and she grew up on a family farm. When she was young – remember she was born in the 1920s – everyone still kept horses.) Now it’s hard to say if that was from the many drugs she’s on, or if her mind is finally going.

I mean, it isn’t like we can find a doctor to talk to. Two days she’s been in this new hospital and the doctors all continue to evade my step-sister (who is the only family member still living in the area). The nurses aren’t allowed to tell us anything. Mom might have hours to live and she might have something that they can clear up in a couple of days…we can’t nail down anyone who can answer questions.

In the meanwhile the family is running around in circles trying to find a way to pay for all this care. If she’s going to go home we’ll get a reverse mortgage (she’ll need 24/7 care even at home, at least for a while), if she’s going to wind up in a nursing home then we’ll have to sell the house to pay for it. Mom makes too much money to qualify for Medicaid, but far too little to pay for the care she needs.

Either way, getting the money takes time, and at-home care providers ($250/day) aren’t going to take care of her for free; in fact they require an advance deposit before they even consider it. So do we start rolling on the reverse mortgage, which mom would have to understand and sign (it’s a 96 page form!) and hope she’s going to come home? Will they even approve it without her living at home?

Next week we’re seeing a lawyer to help sort all this out… but damn, the not-knowing just drains you. And wondering if she’s even going to be alive by the time we meet with the lawyer (and next week was the earliest appointment we could get…we made it about a week ago).

And then of course you start feeling guilty because you’re worried about money when your mom is fighting for her life… but without money she won’t get the care she needs, so… it’s a big circle.

But man, nothing prepares you for this stuff. No one teaches you the skills of dealing with the health system, y’know? Much of what we’ve learned has come from word of mouth from other people who’ve gone through this same process, and it’s a process that most often ends with funeral expenses.

It’s like death and dying is a dirty little secret in our society.

Now there’s me, my older brother, my younger step-sister, and then a 2nd remote step-sister who I rarely talk to. NONE of us have kids except the distant step-sister. And I keep thinking “Who is going to be our advocate when we’re getting shunted from hospital to hospital? While we’re all alive, we can take care of each other, but one of us will be the last..”

To quote The Who: I hope I die before I get old.

I wish I had the choice for a peaceful, pain-free death at some time of my choosing, when I can start to see the end and feel like life isn’t really worth the pain any more. I’d estimate that’s at 75 or so, depending on health. I really, really don’t want to be so old I can’t feed myself or move around. Let me die with dignity. Maybe I need to move to Sweden.

But for now, I just wish my poor mom would slip away, or come back to us. Her hovering in this twilight place where she “wakes up” and is in some strange hospital room, over and over… I hate that she has to go through that.

And there’s a point to this post besides me being a whiny bitch again.

PLEASE, if you have a single parent who is elderly, have a talk with them about situations like this. We should have done this; we should have bought the house from my mom and let her live in it for free. That would’ve protected some of her assets. It’s worth talking to a lawyer who specializes in elderly law, too; they can suggest other ways to both protect assets and be prepared for a situation like this. If you don’t handle things the right way, the health care system in the US will just bleed you dry of all your assets then toss you in the cheapest nursing home that is available.

My brother and I talked about taking these steps many times but we were always too squeamish about bringing the topic up with my mother. And now she’s paying the price. Don’t make the same mistake we did. I know this isn’t an issue for many of my readers (most of your parents are probably still quite young) but do keep it in mind when the time comes. Hell, maybe make sure your parents have had these kinds of talks with THEIR parents, if your grandparents are still around.

Remember this?

Posted on by Nimgimli

OK this is going to be my last Rift post for a while. I know I’m straining the patience of my friends and I’ve clearly over-taxed the patience of other people. (If you think Jennifer was rude here you should read some of her tweets about me. She confirmed to Petter that she was talking about me. Such a mean thing to say.) The funny thing is, when I was “up” on Rift people were mad at me, now I’m feeling a more moderate reaction to it and people are still mad at me. Some people just enjoy being mad, I think.

The problem is that it’s really hard for me to convey the differences in the game that I’m seeing, but let me re-post this image:

Click on it to enlarge it, please. You see how many invasions were crawling all over the zone at one time? And back then each invasion was a linked set of elite mobs. It’s hard to say for sure but I count about 42 invasions roaming the zone at one time. 14 earth rifts open and a lone fire rift. 10 friendly defense forces deployed. It was EPIC! And maybe the servers are still hitting this kind of numbers in other zones or at other times and I’ve just been missing them; that’s entirely possible. I hope that’s the case, in fact.

And y’know, maybe that was too many. People were complaining that they couldn’t get anything done BUT dodge invasions. If you didn’t like the game that way, you’re absolutely entitled to your opinion and, at least from what I’ve seen, Trion has heard your concerns and acted on them.

Me, I liked it that way. I’m probably in a minority. But if you can imagine what it was like “on the ground” during these invasions maybe you can start to understand the differences I’ve been talking about.

And that’s it. I’ve worn out my Rift welcome and then some. For those of you who’ve engaged in lively debate over these past posts, thank you very much. It’s nice when we can have different opinions and still be civil to each other.

See you in release.