Is the Grass Greener on the Other Side of the Life Rift?

Well, as mentioned in my last post … recently hit 50 Guardian side in Rift.

While the win/loose ratio was about 1:1 for my 10-49 experience… it was both a challenge and rewarding.

The second I hit 50 that all changed in a bad way, it could have been a bad mix of premade vs single / duo groups.

However, going from 1:1 to about 1:25 doesn’t seem like it’s the fault of the match making and / or the server; and instead is driven by the people playing the game.

So now we’ve decided to change it up a bit, and rolled Defiant characters on the PvP-RP server Harrow.

Right now we’re sitting at around level 20, I’m playing more or less the same character (Belatris – Female Elf Chloromancer).

In the end, it’s not the first time I’ve jumped factions to have a more enjoyable PvP experience, although I’m certainly happy that I’m not the one that brought it up.

Either way, everything’s looking good right now, with any luck we can get these characters to 50 within a month or so … give or take.

Rift – End Game

Well, we finally made it to 50 in Rift.

While we didn’t do much once we dinged last evening, we did start the PvP ‘grind’… which honestly isn’t much of a grind.

Port Scion is actually reasonably fun, and the quantity of NPCs makes it less painful then the other Warfronts.

Thanks to my hording of favor from 1-49, I pretty much had the complete level 50 starter set (about 5 peices of gear in total). So I’m not doing to bad in the Valor department with around 12% damage reduction.

I last only slightly longer then my better half, who’s sporting less valor … but has chain armor (instead of cloth).

Warriors seem a bit of a pain at the moment, but I’ve no idea if this actually due to a game imbalance or a gear imbalance. At this point I’m leaning towards gear… but when I’m able to survive longer against a rogue then a warrior … I do have to question it.

We hit about 15% into PR1, so with any luck I might be able to have PR2 by the weekend. According to what I’ve seen ‘Hardcore PvPers’ have been able to get PR6 within a couple of weeks … a month tops.

While I’m not them, at least anymore I shouldn’t be THAT far behind.

Age of Micro-Transactions

With more and more companies trying out the ‘free to play’ style games I thought it was about time for me to throw in my two cents.

Firstly, I’ve got nothing against the idea on paper. However, the conversion of a monthly fee game to a ‘free to play’ game is usually a rather harsh experience.

Just as an example, with Age of Conan going ‘free to play’ I decided to download it and take a look. Only to find out that the character class I wanted to play, required a purchase at the cash shop.

Seriously? I bought the game when it first came out for $50. Ended up playing a month, until moving on… and I can’t even use all the character classes that were a part of the $50 game that I bought?

There’s alot of small things like that the bug me about the free to play style games.  Rather then sitting her complaining about it … I’d like detail what I’d like to see from a free to play game.

Solid Balanced Gameplay

If you want to add classes to your cash store, the game play needs to be balanced. If the latest cash store item / class / race is hands down the BEST in the game … you’re not better then that sleazy used car salesman.

More Vanity Less Utility

Wow’s micro transactions are a good place for any F2P model to start… mounts, vanity pets. If you have a wardrobe feature, like rift, you could even thrown in some costumes.

Giving people the ability to change the look of their character with affecting the game in a meaningful way … would be a huge plus.

Expansion Content

Things that get added after release, treat them as ‘small’ expansions.

Want access to that new raid … that’ll be $10.  The new instance … $5. New Race … $15. New Class … $15.

Offer the ‘world event’ for free to wet people’s mouth… not a bad deal.

Anyways, just my two cents … I somehow doubt I’ll ever see this happen. It’s much to easy to market gear and key game peices, forcing people to a cash shop just to play the game how it was intended.

A Rift Apart

Rift 1.3 hit not too long ago, in part the experience of searching for patch related information is what caused me to start this blog.

Belatris’s Rift incarnation is a Chloromancer, for those who don’t know that’s the mage healing ‘soul’.

I enjoyed the soul though 1.0 to 1.2, needless to say I was a bit on the ‘worried’ side when I saw the wall of text that was the test shard’s patch notes. While I fancy myself a math person, all those numbers honestly scared even me. I really didn’t have much in the way of an idea how my beloved mage, who was in the upper 30s would handle in 1.3.

In the end, it wasn’t so bad … a little bit scary when trying to keep a tank up at first. They put a hurting on the class for instance healing at early levels.

It seems like they are trying to ‘reward’ people for going deeper into a tree … Chloromancer for instance dramatically changes between 49 and 50. That 51st point you throw into the tree REALLY changes the whole class.

While I can certainly understand their intentions and motives, I’m not sure it translates well to … you know everyone below 50. Chloromancer wasn’t the only soul to get this treatment, Justicar also had a similar treatment.

As this is my first post, I don’t want to seem overly harsh. Rift is a very, very strong game. I think the term WoW Killer is thrown around too much, so I won’t use it. I will say that it’s the first game that I’ve seen push the MMO genra forward in a while.

Dynamic event based content (rifts) and the ability to adapt any ‘class’ to a given situation (mage healers, rogue tanks ZOMG!) is certainly a welcomed addition.

There’s also the fact that 3 months into the release, they are still going strong … and have put out 3 major patches.