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?

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
Tr�bkopf 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Massively ran this. It seemed timely given recent discussions. Urge you to go full screen and HD.

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.