Scaling back the Rift hype

Posted on by Nimgimli

So another Beta Event is behind us, or nearly so. I played a bunch Friday and Saturday this time around.

Mostly this beta event just depressed me. The Rift I’ve been hyping is almost totally gone at this point. The actual rifts spawn very infrequently in the periods of time between invasions. Invasions, when they happen, do spawn a lot of rifts but they don’t last very long any more. I’m unsure if that’s because the rifts and invasions are getting easier or if it’s because the players are bored of doing typical PvE questing and so they throw themselves into invasions to see what those systems are like. Whatever the case, if you want to take part in an invasion you better make a beeline when it begins or you’re gonna miss out.

Listen, Rift is still a solid MMORPG and I don’t mean to imply otherwise. But the “old” Rift was, to me, something really special and unique. The current Rift is a polished, good MMORPG but it isn’t that much different than so many other games out there, really. It has been homogenized into a cookie-cutter game. There’s no longer a sense of danger or chaos to the world. I never found myself banding together with a couple of random strangers to try to overcome the odds and drive an invasion force away from a quest hub. The Era of the Zerg Public Group has arrived.

Public Groups do seem to be working a bit better. Or maybe the players are getting smarter. I was the leader of one public group this weekend and I made a point of ejecting people who’d wandered far away from the fight we were in, which freed up space for local players to join. So maybe other public group leaders are doing the same thing?

Anyway now if you play Rift you pretty much have to join a Public Zerg Group if you’re expecting any help from the people around you. You might get lucky outside of one but I found when I stayed solo no one paid any attention to me unless I was fighting the last mob in a wave. Or if the Zerg horde just rolled over the mob I was fighing because I was in its path.

I’m really glad I got into the early beta events; they rekindled my love of MMOs. Now I just need to find a game that scratches that itch the way early-Rift did.

I pre-ordered Rift from Trion and was already charged for it, so I’m going to play at launch. Maybe things get a lot better at higher levels and that sense of fun and chaos and danger will return. I’ve been self-capping at level 20 just to keep some things “fresh” for launch. So maybe I’m being totally unfair to the game. But as of right now I’m very unsure about that 6-month sub I’d been planning to get. The Rift I played last weekend would not hold my attention for that long. Heck, by Sunday I was bored of playing.

I’d like to run 1 character to cap on each side just to experience the Lore though, which I continue to really enjoy. I hope the game is successful enough that it spawns novels based in Telara, in fact. I enjoy it that much. And playing both sides makes it even more enjoyable, when you see characters from one side appear in a different form on the other (thinking of Shyla).

I shudder to think what Open Beta, Beta 7, will be like. Maybe Invasions will pause to ask if you’d like to be attacked because the invasion leader is sensitive to the issue of being inconvenienced by unexpected things happening in an adventure. That seems like the direction they’re headed, at least. (Yes, I exaggerate!)

Can I ask Trion for a “Classic” Rift server yet? A launch with the rules and systems that we say in Betas 2-4? Because I was head-over-heels in love with THAT version of Rift.

Thoughts on Rift beta 6 patch notes

Posted on by Nimgimli

Another beta is about to begin. I spent some time this morning reading the patch notes and sadly it seems like Trion is continuing to make the game easier. (Will know better once I actually try the changes.)

I get where they’re going… WoW has really lowered the bar when it comes to the difficulty in early levels of a game, and it stands to reason that by dumping goodies and rewards on players ASAP (“3 souls by level 5! Best offer in the ‘verse!”) they’re liable to draw in more short-term players. So I don’t hold these changes against them; I just miss the challenging Rift game we all played in the first few betas. You used to die in the first 10 levels. Crazy right?

This time out, they’ve redone the racial abilities to make them much less unique than they were (a balance change, I believe…people thought the old racial abilities varied widely in usefulness), and they’ve removed the level requirement on previously level-20 mounts:

* Level requirements have been removed from the previously-level 20 mounts. If you can get to them, and can afford them, you can use them. This includes the Collector’s Edition turtle mount.

I’m assuming this is in response to the complaint that there’s too much running around in the game. Honestly I feel like the Defiants have some legitimacy to this complaint since there isn’t a teleport bind point aside from Meridian, but I’d rather have seen them add a teleport point in King’s Retreat rather than offering level 1 players a mount. Not that having a mount is that big a deal, but must we be given everything at level 1? MMO’s are turning into games like pee-wee soccer matches where everyone gets a trophy.

Expect the complaints of “The world is too small” to increase after this beta, now that people are zipping around on turtle mounts.

Other changes that caught my eye (and I don’t see these as making the game easier…switching topics here):

More consumable reward items have been turned into skills rather than taking up inventory space. No longer will you use items to spawn forces to fight invasions or to buff wardstones; these activities fall under Ascended Powers now. Our bags (and hot bars) get emptier with every patch.

There are LOTS of soul changes, and early release is getting near. I’m getting a little concerned about how much testing these changes will get.

The Ancient Wardstones system sounds very interesting… I’m looking forward to getting a taste of that.

Rift Beta 5 feedback

Posted on by Nimgimli

The extension of Beta 5 into the weekend lured me back into the game. I really wanted to experience more of the new public group systems, and changes to invasions.

I didn’t really get to thoroughly test invasions because I honestly didn’t see that many. Or rather, the ones I did see didn’t survive nearly as long as they used to. So the despawn issue, with the way things are now, doesn’t seem to be much of an issue. The frequency of rifts, outside of invasions, seemed to be toned down quite a bit, and with the ability to pull single mobs from an invasion they got taken apart piecemeal pretty frequently.

The good news about this change is that a solo player can complete the “Kill X Rift Creatures” quests really easily now. The “support mobs” of an invasion do respawn so you can just follow an invasion, pulling singles and killing them, and quickly farm enough mobs to knock out your daily rift-kill quests. If you never kill the invasion leader you can do this until they reach their destination and fight the wardstone (and even after, but they tend to die quickly once they hit the wardstone).

I mean, I guess that’s good news. It definitely make things easier. Though I don’t think easier is better.

The bad news is that I didn’t see many (any?) friendly wardstones in serious trouble. So never saw what happened after an invasion succeeded (which is when invasions despawn). Also players seem to have finally figured out how to use the Rift Loot that heals and levels up Wardstones and most stones are leveled up enough to have turrets, at least on Faeblight/Guardian.

As to these public groups, I’m still not a fan. This isn’t a huge deal because they’re easy enough to ignore, but I gave it the old college try and joined them whenever I had the opportunity to do so, and left myself open to starting public groups.

Typically what happened to me is I’d run up to a rift that had, say, 10 people fighting and I’d get the Join Public Group pop-up. I’d join and find myself in a raid of 3-4 partial groups. Of the 10 people fighting the rift I was at, maybe 2 would actually be part of the same raid I was in. The rest of my raid would be all over the map.

I found the whole experience more distracting than anything. I’d be watching the Raid UI trying to figure out who was here and who wasn’t (a player’s name is brighter if they’re in range, as far as I could tell, but there are also color tints that indicate something) and not watching the combat. Because of this, I let plenty of people right in front of me die because I was paying attention to the health bars of the raid members who were over the hill somewhere.

That’s just me; I’m a total newb at being a healer. But I found that when I left the public groups I was more of an asset to the people fighting the rift I was fighting.

I also found it distracting having people constantly joining and leaving groups. When I was the ‘starter’ of a public group things would go better since only people near me could join. So then we’d have a nice little group of 3 or 4 people fighting and doing well. And then they’d all be gone and I’d have 4 mobs beating me into the mud. Maybe I suck so bad people need to get clear of me!! 🙂

By the end of beta I got much better about just rejecting groups. I’d join a public group and if it was a raid with people all over the map I’d just immediately leave it. If it was a smaller group of people in the immediate area (and sometimes that does happen) I’d stay in it and try to fight as a group (though had mixed success there, too).

So why aren’t public groups working (IMO) in Rift when they did so in Warhammer? Because in Warhammer they’d form at Public Quests. Public Quests always happened in the same place, on a schedule. So people would go to a specific area to do a specific quest and join the group there. They’d stay in that group until they were done with whatever they set out to accomplish. Then they’d leave, sometimes as a Group (head off to another Public Quest) or as individuals.

In Rift, rifts happen everywhere. You chase one down, or stumble upon it. Join the group. Rifts don’t last very long usually and once a rift is sealed there’s no single obvious next place to go. There might be 2-3 other rifts nearby, plus an invasion running past. Which one to go to? Even if you decide as a group to go to another rift, things get confused because you’re not going to “The Windmill” you’re going to “that fire rift east of here” and invariably people get side tracked or confuse east for west or end up going to the life rift to the east or whatever. And so the group gets scattered over time. You wouldn’t believe how often I see in chat someone /shout “Another rift over here!” as it we could hear the direction he was calling from.

Now again, you can just ignore public groups, to be sure. The only downside there is that you never know. If you’re at a rift with 10 people and they all really ARE in a public group then you probably want to get in on it because otherwise no one is going to help you (people naturally focus on characters in their own group/raid). So really, you have to at least try. But constantly joining/leaving groups in the chaos of a rift battle can be dangerous. I died more than once because I was focusing on getting into or out of a group rather than on combat.

I think Trion needs to keep working on this system. There needs to be some way to keep a group focused. I’m not sure what it is. At the least, don’t put a player who clicks “Join Public Group” in a raid where most of the players are far, far away. Maybe groups need to auto-split out from raids when the group leaders get too far apart? Just thinking out loud here…

I don’t want to end on a negative note though, because jumping back into beta reminded me of how much I enjoy the game. I snuck in a bit on Tuesday or Wednesday night and the community was pretty bad. With all the VIP keys being given out, the servers were horribly laggy and I got the sense there were a lot of people playing who were committed to other games, and who were just trying Rift out of curiosity and looking to re-affirm their decision not to leave their current game for Rift.

By Friday night and Saturday morning, things seemed much better. Lag was much reduced and the community was more upbeat. Those “tourists” were probably back in their “home” game doing raids or something.

There’s something about combat in Rift that just brings me joy. I’m sure it’s too fast for some people and too slow for others but for me it just feels good. I fight constantly because I find fighting fun. When I’m going to get or turn in a quest I don’t go around mobs, I go through them for the joy of doing so (not so much with Rifts since I’m up against a time limit with them).

Popping back into Beta 5 re-affirmed my decision to pre-order and to commit to Rift for a 6-month stint. I do reserve the right to change my mind, of course, and I hope Trion stops making the game easier. I have faith in them that they’ll do the right thing.

Listening to player feedback: a double-edged sword?

Posted on by Nimgimli

Trion Worlds has gotten a lot of good press from the fact that, throughout their beta process (we’re up to Beta 5 at the time of this writing) they’ve listened to player feedback and made changes accordingly. This feels like a real breath of fresh air to disgruntled MMO players who never feel as though they’re being heard by the devs of whatever game they’re playing.

But is this always a good thing? When does “We respond to player feedback” become “Ours is a game designed by committee”?

I’m not saying the sky is falling and I don’t think Trion has gotten to that point yet, but I have been vocal about my enthusiasm for playing these beta sessions because I fully expect Rift to continually move closer and closer to “Generic Fantasy MMO #78” as the signature system of the game, rifts and invasions, get modified in response to player feedback.

Let’s face it. Players, or at least vocal players, taken as a unified voice, generally tend to want things easier (and then complain when a game ceases to be challenging). Rifts and Invasions can be damned inconvenient. To me, that’s what makes them so freakin’ awesome. For once the world doesn’t carefully operate around you so as not to get in your way. Quite the contrary.

But of course this inconvenience isn’t always popular with players, who expect Things to Work The Way They Did In That Other Game I Played.

I haven’t played Beta 5 yet, but I was concerned by these lines in the patch notes:

* Invasions which succeed will now despawn after 10 minutes, or 3 minutes if left out of combat.
* Invasions no longer aggro as a group and can be split.

Both of these changes appear to be ‘nerfs’ to invasions (I’ll be delighted if we discover that I’m totally wrong about that). I’m not entirely sure what they mean by “succeed” in that first line. Does that mean take down a Wardstone? I’ll assume it does since I can’t think what else marks ‘success’ on the part of an NPC driven invasion.

Combine that with the ability to ‘pull’ invasion members one at a time, and no longer will players have to self-organize into groups to drive off invasions and restore quest hubs to their working state. Instead, players will avoid the invasion force and let it kill the Wardstone asap so it’ll then despawn in 3 minutes. Pity the player who initiates combat with the invasion, thinking he can pull a single and defeat it, as s/he will be shouted down by those impatient for the invasion to go away.

I see this as another step towards the game I played in early Betas going away and Rift becoming much more generic. These changes appear to ease the pressure to join forces with your fellow player, and that’s a shame. (And this coming from a confirmed Soloist.)

I’m also on the fence about the new public group system. I understand how healers struggled to see who needed healing (though I generally healed ‘through’ mobs when I played a healer) and I understand the benefits of the system, but now you’re really going to have to join these public groups when rifting. In early betas, everyone helped everyone since no one was grouped. Once we’re in a group, though, we all tend to have tunnel vision and only help fellow group members. The player who chooses not to join the public group will be ostracized, whether deliberately or by circumstance. Honestly if they’re going to have public groups at all, they ought to just make them totally automatic. (As I said, I’m still on the fence about this system since the benefits to healers might outweigh the downside of the end of solo rifting.)

While I’m on a roll, I’ll also voice my disagreement with giving everyone all 8 souls so early in a character’s development. I’m not sure any character should have access to the entire palette of souls available for their class. I think the game would be much more interesting if Cleric A had access to souls 1, 2, 7, & 8 and Cleric B had access to 1, 4, 5 & 7. With everyone having access to all 8 souls, “flavor of the month” builds will blossom even more swiftly than they would have with limited souls. If you’re playing a level 20 Cleric and aren’t specced just so, expect to be shouted at. I’ve already seen a bit of this in earlier betas.

Don’t read this and think I’ve given up on Rift; that’s certainly not the case. But I hope somewhere in Trion there’s a core group of developers with a vision that they’ll hold true to, regardless of what the players want. Players don’t always want what’s best for them in the long run. I really hope they don’t nerf the rift system and keep the world dangerous forever. Yeah, you might log in and be in the midst of an invasion… tough. Life is hard and chaotic (and let’s face it, death penalties in Rift are pretty light) in the world of Telara. I hope that never changes.

Salem: Permadeath and open PvP

Posted on by Nimgimli

I saw a trailer for Paradox’s Salem over on Arislyn’s Tumblr page. I’d only heard a tiny bit about this upcoming MMO: basically that it took place in Colonial New England, was a sandbox game and so lots of crafting and what-not.

Now I’ve learned that it features permadeath and open PvP. The creative director, “Brother Bean” says he believes the player population will police itself and find its own balance. It’s a brave direction to take and I enthusiastically support the plan while at the same time doubt it can succeed. I’m glad I’m not investing in it, but I’m happy it is being made.

Here’s the problem with punishment in MMOs, in my opinion: it’s binary. When someone commits a crime against you, your options are: ignore the character or kill the character. There’s no other law or recourse beyond slaughter. I think for a system like Salem’s to work there needs to be the potential for some kind of (player run) police force. If you steal a chicken from your neighbor, someone should be able to forcibly take that chicken back and then make you pay some kind of fine. As it stands now the only way of doing that is to kill you and loot the chicken and fine from your corpse, which seems pretty extreme.

I’m not sure how to handle punishment in any other way. If you put a character in some kind of prison, the player is just going to log off and go do something else. Maybe some kind of tax system where a % of any wealth you pick up magically goes to whomever you’ve mistreated?

Maybe Salem will work; I’d love to be proven wrong. But there are just so many bored gamers out there who’d happily spend time to strengthen a new character just so he can then go and grief someone else. Sure, the ‘community’ will then kill him in turn, but that’s small comfort for that character’s initial victim, who now has to start over.

Hmm, maybe a semi-permadeath system where you only stay dead if the person who killed you manages to stay alive for 24 hours after the killing? And the dead has the ability to speak to the living and plead his case…

I dunno, just a random thought. What do you think? Could permadeath and open PvP ever work together?

What MMO devs can learn from The Witcher (and other SP RPGs)

Posted on by Nimgimli

So as mentioned in my last post, I’ve been playing my $5 copy of The Witcher and really enjoying myself. In a lot of ways I’m playing it almost like an MMO. I spend a lot of time wandering around harvesting herbs, or “grinding mobs” by hunting at night for experience and loot I can sell for Orens (the game’s currency).

One of the problems I often face when stepping away from MMOs and into single player games is that I forget to save. Years of MMOing has driven the “Quick Save” concept from my brain. Luckily The Witcher autosaves every time you enter or exit a building. So that’s something single player devs can learn from MMO developers: don’t make the player have to worry about bookkeeping tasks like saving.

But this post is about the teaching the MMO devs. The world of The Witcher feels more alive than just about any MMO feels, assuming you take the PCs out of the MMO. Obviously a SP game is never going to have the odd and weird interactions you’ll have with other people in an MMO, but the NPCs in The Witcher seem so much more alive.

Imagine Stormwind or Qeynos with no other players in it. What do you see? NPCs that either stand in one place or patrol along a set path, day or night, rain or shine, saying the same thing over and over again. They act like what they are: automatons. In The Witcher when it starts to rain, all the townsfolk scurry for cover. Not only that, but they’ll grumble or joke about the weather. I did a double take when an old codger ducked under the eave of a house and looked out and cackled “Ha! The neighbor’s laundry is getting soaking wet!”

To be fair, I won’t be playing The Witcher for years and years; if 3 years from now the same codger was saying the same thing every time it rained, it wouldn’t seem as amazing.

Now I know WoW has started to dabble in this kind of behavior via phasing, but generally you have to do something to trigger phasing. In The Witcher, even quest NPCs will move. At night they’ll be in their homes, during the day on the streets or at their place of business. Now the devs weren’t a slave to this ‘realism’ and you can barge into an NPC’s house in the middle of the night and talk to them about a quest and they won’t freak out. Having to wait until morning to talk to them would probably be too much realism.

Last is point-of-view. In The Witcher you play Geralt, the titular Witcher. And you always play the game as him. But when there are cut scenes, you’ll sometimes see the world through another character’s eyes. This can add richness to the overall experience.

[Trivial spoiler ahead]
Fairly early on in the game you meet a barmaid and save her from thugs. She is so grateful, and you so exotic and charming, that she agrees to meet you to “reward” you. She chooses the place: a (supposedly) haunted abandoned mill beside the river. You won’t be disturbed there. Assuming you make the appointment, you and she head into the mill for a bit of non-interactive nookie. At that moment the point of view changes to some folks who make their home across the river from the mill. They hear these faint moans coming across the water and assume it’s the ghost. One comments that there’s never a witcher around when you need one. The scene cuts back to the doorway of the mill where you can clearly hear the young lady’s cries of passion. (Yes, The Witcher is an M-rated game).
[End spoiler]

Now that moment took longer to read about than it did to experience and it might not translate to a blog post very well, but in the moment, playing the game, I found it really funny. We’re always playing these heroes charging through scene after scene but rarely do we get to see the repercussions of our actions. I know most MMO players are notoriously impatient and I’m not urging devs to stick in a bunch of video cut-scenes and their accompanying loading times, but the odd quick in-game cut scene showing your character from someone else’s point of view could really help to flesh out your adventure.

Story is a whole ‘nother blog post. I’ve actually been surprised in The Witcher, and have stayed up too late playing not because I wanted to make the next level, but because I wanted to see what happened next. Your average single player RPG doesn’t have a plot that could rival even a very pedestrian novel, but these stories are still better than those in most MMOs. As a best case scenario an MMO might have an interesting story that it takes you weeks of play and lots of groups to unravel, and spreading it over that much time tends to diminish things.

Anyway, that’s my mutterings for tonight. It sounds silly but the first time the NPCs in this game reacted to weather I kind of stopped and stared. And that was when I realized I’d been away from SP RPGs for a little bit too long. 🙂

Taking a breather

Posted on by Nimgimli

I am excited about Rift. Or at least, I was excited about it. I think I still am. We’ll see.

But Rift isn’t out for another month or so. After the last beta I found myself a bit adrift. I’d been playing Aion and was entertained by it, but I knew it wasn’t something I was going to play long-term so it started feeling a bit pointless. My renewed enthusiasm for WoW had wilted away. I thought about Guild Wars, Star Trek Online, Champions Online, LOTRO, EQ2, FF XIV… but in every case playing felt like a waste of time because I knew come Feb 24th I was headed to Rift.

So finally I decided to just take a break from MMOs. I do this from time to time. This time out I picked up The Witcher, a game I own on DVD but which I’d repurchased on Steam for $5 during the holiday sale. I’ve tried to play The Witcher several times but it never really stuck, but this time it has (so far). I think the Enhanced Version that Steam sells is more enhanced than my DVD version with all patches (including the ‘enhanced’ patch) or something. It just plays better for me now.

The funny thing about me and MMOs. When I start spending time away from them, they start to seem a little bit silly. I get progressively more dismissive about the genre the longer I’m away. I see arguments raging over builds or classes and I start feeling like people put an inordinate amount of somewhat negative energy into something that ought to be fun (negative from my point of view; I’m sure they’re not feeling it in the same way). The pinnacle of my “MMO withdrawal” is when I get to this obnoxious “holier than thou” place of sneering condescension towards anyone who is wasting their time playing an MMO when they could be enjoying other things like, oh, beer can collecting or shoe-lace repair.

Then invariably I wake up one morning with a burning desire to log into an MMO and my love for the genre re-ignites and I sheepishly resubscribe to something.

But until that happens I’m kind of bastard to be around, if you’re an MMO player. At least at this point I’m self-aware of the process.

Since Twitter is the place I most often talk about MMOs, I’ve stepped away from there too. I’ve been feeling frustrated with Twitter anyway; I felt like conversations kept devolving into rather pointless arguments that were ultimately caused by the 140 character limit. I’m still using Buzz and I have some automated tweets hitting Twitter, plus my daily ITworld post promotion. And I bop in now and then to make sure no one has @ed a tweet at me that I need to respond to. But time-on-site for Twitter has gone from probably 12 hours a day (I mean time a twitter client is open, not time I’m actively paying attention to it, of course) to maybe 12 minutes.

This has freed up a lot of time and in some ways life feels a lot more relaxed. I also accepted, without really thinking about it, the Goodreads.com “Reading Challenge” for the year. My goal is to read 30 books (2.5/month) which I thought was somewhat ambitious until I saw my friends setting goals of 100 or more! But for me 30 books is a reasonable challenge (I’m already behind) so I’ve been devoted some of this Twitter-freed time to reading.

I’ve also got some personal stuff going on with my mom being sick and my brother and I trying to figure out how we’re going to pay for her care, so that’s put a full stop on spending money on gaming. I already paid for Rift and I’ll still spend the cash for a 6-month sub (assuming I bounce back to being an MMO fan by then) but it has meant not being tempted by titles like DCUO and sales on single-player games. Resisting the temptation of buying a new MMO always feels pretty good; so often in the past my curiosity has driven me to purchase games I almost knew I wouldn’t like all that much. And actually looking at my huge backlog of unplayed or barely-played single player games makes me feel pretty silly about feeling a ‘need’ for new games (games that I know will be available for a fraction of their new cost in 4-6 months).

So that’s where I am right now. Playing The Witcher (and dabbling in other SP games), waiting for Rift and trying to decide what I’ll do there (the guild I had lined up is turning out to be not as good a fit as I’d thought it would) and staying away from Twitter and the too-frequent aggravation I allow it to cause me. And learning a lot about Power of Attorney, reverse mortgages, early withdrawal of life insurance and all the unpleasant ways that the health system you spend your life paying into will turn its back on you when you really need it.

I’ll be back my socializing self when I’ve gotten past this miserable bastard phase I’m going through. 🙂

Choice, game design, and MMOs

Posted on by Nimgimli

Once more into the breach, my friends…

In my last post I talked about Rift and groups and solo play. An interesting theme seemed to arise from some of the comments, and one that I found curious.

Today I want to talk about player choice and game design. I’m going to keep using Rift as an example but this could equally well apply to certain other games.

At the risk of over-simplifying things enormously, when you log into an MMO you have some broad decisions to make: the first is what style of gameplay you’re about to undertake. Are you going to putter around & craft? Just logging in to visit friends? Are you planning to solo? Are you planning to Group and go after content that way? For the purpose of this post I’m looking, once again, at Solo vs Group.

Say you’ve decided to Group. Now you’re going to pick a role. Do you want to be the Healer? A Tank? DPS? Buffing/support?

Let’s say for the sake of argument that you want to be a Group Healer. So here’s your character; a blank slate. Since you want to be a Healer, you pick Souls & Skills (in another game this could be Talent trees or whatever) that are heavy in healing capabilities. If you want to be a Healer and you take a bunch of skills that are focused on Taunting, you’d be a pretty poor Healer, right?

Can we all agree so far? Healers should take skills that help them heal. If a Healer takes skills that emphasize taunting over healing, you’re probably not going to be a great healer. Does this illustrate an example of bad game design? Does anyone think that?

Now let’s back up the decision tree a bit. Back up to the Solo vs Group decision. Here’s where my opinion seems to diverge with some others. When I decide I’m going to Solo I use a build that emphasizes that play style. I don’t take a bunch of group buffs: I won’t be in a group! I will look at self heals, or self shields, or perhaps a pet. I will probably set up a hotbar full of various consumable items that will help me to either survive or reduce down time between fights. Conversely if I’m going to Group I’m going to skip the self heals and instead take, maybe, a group-based stat buff or an AOE taunt or something else that works best in groups.

When I suggested that this was the best way to play Rift solo (specifically I said that if you’re going to solo a lot, some kind of self heal or pet will make life easier), some people suggested back that if playing Solo required using certain (Solo friendly) skills, it was an example of bad game design.

I don’t understand the difference: Healers need to take healing skills, Tanks need to take tanking skills. Everyone seems to agree on this and no one seems bothered by it. But when Soloers need to take solo skills, suddenly its bad game design?

It is essential to keep in mind that the only permanent decision you make in Rift is your archetype. That you’re stuck with, but within it, you can have several (at least 3 and maybe 4) Roles and each Role can use any 3 of your 8 souls, and each Role can have its own distribution of skill points and skills. You can switch Roles anytime except in mid-battle. And if a Role isn’t working out, fr a few virtual coins spent at a trainer you can reset it and build it anew as something else. So if you’re playing Solo and someone throws you a Group invite, you tap on Hotkey and now your Grouping Role is active.

To me this is the opposite of bad game design. I find it to be kind of awesome in fact. But it *seems* not everyone agrees.

Twitter Brawl: Grouping and Rift

Posted on by Nimgimli

I got into a bit of a tussle on Twitter today with @arkenor and @scopique over the question of Rift and grouping. Ark said “I don’t think you’ll get terribly far in Rift without grouping.” and I took exception to that. I mostly solo and do fine.

But there’s all kinds of nuance here. What does “fine” mean? Did Ark mean Grouping (as in joining into one of those artificial constructs that MMOs offer) or did he mean grouping as in, working with others? If he meant “You won’t get far in rift if you insist on doing everything by yourself” then in fact I’d agree with him and the whole discussion was a big Twitter misunderstanding. Scopique pointed out that as a Tank he didn’t do well soloing when it came to fighting rifts and again I do understand some builds aren’t built for solo play.

I just wanted to elaborate here where I’m not limited to 140 characters. I’ve played 3 characters so far: a Warrior build to 17, a Mage build to 20 and a Cleric build to 16. I’ve spent most of my time outside of dungeons solo, by which I mean not Grouped. I feel like I did fine, by which I mean “I was having fun, making steady progress and never feeling overly frustrated for any length of time.” I haven’t played a Scout so maybe you can’t solo as a Scout; I don’t know one way or the other. And maybe things change past level 20, so I can’t speak to that either, but I’m pretty sure Ark isn’t past 20 and can’t speak to it either.

Now that said:

1) Dungeons absolutely require Grouping, I agree. You won’t be able to solo a dungeon until you’re horribly over level, and you won’t be running into random other people in there.

2) I also agree that you can’t get very far fighting rifts without playing cooperatively with other characters. I spent a LOT of time fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with other players, but very little of it Grouped. I consider this Solo play: your definition might be different.

3) Warfronts don’t give you a choice: when you enter one you get put in a Raid (though I never tried /leaving it)

4) Some builds are going to be more forgiving than others. If you play a pure tank then you’re going to look at a lot of dying or a lot of downtime. I suggest being an Apothecary if you’re going to go pure tank and want to solo. Mathosians have a great racial shield that turns damage into heals too. That helps.

But:
4a) You have more points than you can spend on 1 soul. So (making numbers up) at level 15 you might have 20 points to spend, but you can only put 15 into a single soul so unless you’re just going to throw away those extra points, you have to take at least 1 other soul. If you plan on soloing I urge you to pick a soul with either a pet or self heals. Both will keep you upright longer.

(And remember that you can have several Roles, which essentially are character builds, so if you enjoy Solo some times and Grouping others, you can easily do both on 1 character by having a Role for each playstyle. Each Role can use a different set of souls and point expenditures. You can switch Roles any time except in the middle of combat. So if you’re Soloing at a rift and someone throws you a Group invite and you accept it, a tap of a key will put you into your Group build.)

Solo players will probably die more often than people who’re always grouped. That’s true of most games. The death penalty in Rift is very light though. I do die a lot when I’m not being careful. But see above: re frustration (or rather, lack thereof).

Quest content is intended, for the most part, to be solo content. That’s true up to level 20 (except for Dungeon quests) and I could swear I’ve read an official source saying that’s an intentional design decision but I can’t find a citation now. So maybe we’ll have to wait and see.

The rift reward system is built to accommodate solo players. The one flaw with this is that you have to ‘tap’ a rift mob to get kill credit for it (for daily quests). I’m hoping they can change that. But you’ll get plenty of experience and rewards remaining solo while fighting rifts, and you’ll get quest rewards for Invasion Quests even if you spend the entire invasion solo (assuming the good guys win, of course).

It’s no secret I’ve been having a huge amount of fun playing Rift and I really want other players to give it a chance and hopefully wind up having as much fun as I am. Will Rift be fun at 30? 40? 50? I have no idea, but when it comes to games I’m an optimist. I know I’ll get my $60 (Digital Collector’s Edition for me) worth of fun out of it in the first month — in console gaming that can mean 10-12 hours of gameplay. After that, it’s anyone’s call.

But when I see something that I perceive as misinformation (based on my experience playing) that might turn potential players away, I’m always going to challenge it. Sometimes I’m wrong, and sometimes I’m right, but the discussion that results is often enlightening.