Five Things I Wish Rift Had

Rift has managed to take all of the essential “must have” bits of various games I have played, and roll them into one easy to use interface.  I think this is many ways has lead to the “familiar but different” feeling so many players have had. However, as I play the game, often I have a moment where I think, “man what I wouldn’t give for this feature from this game”.  As a result I have built a list of the top five things I miss from other games.  I have listed these in order of least to most important.

5: Appearance Slots and Items

How many times in an MMO have you had to replace a really amazing looking green item, with a horrifically bad looking blue or purple?  I know for me, this has happened over and over in every game I have played to this point.  In a game with appearance slots, this is no longer a big deal.  You upgrade the item, and drag your old item into the appearance tab for that gear slot and presto, you have the good stats without the horrible graphic.

The first game that I encountered the concept of appearance items in was Everquest II.  I had fired up a new account, for my third time playing and noticed the added tab.  I pretty much ignored it for several weeks until one of my guild members explained how it worked.  On the right side is an image of the default EQ2 appearance interface.

Their implementation included a mirror of every cosmetic slot available, displayed here as a second tab of equipment.  When you placed an item there, your character took the appearance of whatever that item was.  For example, as a Dirge I preferred the look of dual wielding Katana, to the daggers I actually used.  This gave me control over the way my character looked without being forced to gimp my potential performance.

They carried this concept further, in that through various holiday events, and from the station store you could purchase appearance only items.  They would have cosmetic benefits, but no actual stats associated with them, or at the very least be extremely low level.  Through this you could completely change the way your character looked, you could be a plate wearing mage, or a robed warrior.  Your appearance items became a way of setting the stage for your character in general.  In an already intricate game like Rift, adding this extra layer of depth I feel would give us so much for so little additional work.

4: Player and Guild Housing

I was relatively slow to jump on the housing bandwagon.  We had it in DAoC, and it was nice, but not really a game changer for me.  My first few times playing Everquest II I did not really get involved with it much.  I had friends that were big on player housing, and I saw them shell out what I felt were silly amounts of money to keep multiple room houses going.  They were cool places to go to and visit, but I never really could see myself becoming a housing freak.  When I joined the Discord guild on Crushbone, all of that changed.

Above is some footage from our Guild Hall on the Crushbone server.  The first time I set foot inside of it, I was simply breathless at the amount of time they had spent and the creativity they displayed.  This unlocked a whole world for me, and finally lead me to start thinking outside of the box.  The items you could craft in EQ2 were nice, but always left me somewhat wanting.  However what I saw inside our guild hall was a creative “misuse” of various items.  Rugs became floating platforms, shelves became stairs, and slowly piece by piece I began to dissect the through process behind it all.

After a week I had lavishly decorated my 2 room starter home, and moved up into a 6 room home in the neutral Sarnak town.  I poured over the various housing websites, figuring out which rugs could be used as second floors, which walls worked best for what, and which holiday events have you items that mimicked glass.  Before long I had a rich pirate hideout, with Kobald bartender that greeted patrons as they entered the room.  It became this grand meta-game that added so much to the overall enjoyment of the MMO experience.  Player houses became this rich tapestry for each player to craft into their own environment to match how they saw themselves.

Critics of player housing have always said that having it in the game causes your capitol cities to become vacant.  But for me, I can say that I never saw this aspect of it.  The towns I experienced were always bustling with activity, and the housing area became an impromptu block party as players spent almost as much time just hanging outside, than they did in the homes themselves. 

Sure we spent plenty of time using the craft machines in the guild hall, but it gave us a firm connection to the guild.  The guild ceased to be this intangible grouping, and became this firm construct where we all saw each other in a regular basis as we were passing through to other places.  Each of us had a hand in making our environment look better, and there was never a question of where to meet when you needed something from one of the other members.  It gave us a central focus, that I can only see Rift benefiting from.

3: Threat Meter

I’ve learned to live without it, but this is one of the tools I miss most from World of Warcraft.  The threat meter gave tanks a readout of how close other players were to them in threat.  In MMO games, there are often time reactive abilities you can use to either increase your threat or reduce the threat of other players.  In the case of the first, you should be doing that already.  In the case of the second, threat reducing abilities usually are too little too late when a player has already managed to pull the mob off of you.

As a warrior tank in Rift, I have abilities that let me transfer threat that another player is generating to myself.  Problem is, especially while pugging, it is difficult to figure out which player you should proactively give these aggro dumps to.  Without threat meters, or at least in game dps meters, it is difficult to assess how much of a risk each player has in pulling aggro.  Currently we just have to wing it and hope for the best, but it would be nice to make an educated decision on the matter.

The other side of the coin is that threat meters allow good dps players to control their own aggro.  If you see yourself edging close to the tank, you can back off slightly or do your own abilities that will help to curb your own aggro.  How many raids have “Must Have and Use Omen”, in their application?  It became important enough, that eventually blizzard added in their own lackluster threat meter to attempt to bridge the problem.

I realize that as a tank you should know which players are likely to be the ones in need of your help.  However issue at hand is that with all of the rebalancing of abilities, each time a patch of hotfix happens the situation on the ground can completely change.  For example, mages never used to be an issue either in single target or AOE damage.  However after the recent round of buffs, they can rip a mob off the tank faster than anyone. 

I am all for trying to keep this game pure, and keep from dumbing down the content.  But I think a threat meter is a beneficial tool that helps both the tank and the dps make smart decisions about their own actions.  I would far rather Trion introduce an official system for handling this, that meets their own standard than have some third party parser come forward to fill in the gap.

2:  Better Nameplates

This is hands down the thing I miss the most from World of Warcraft.  While the default nameplates, for the most part sucked, with the addition of the third party add-on TidyPlates, your name plates became an amazing resource for tanks.  At a glance, you could see the health bars of all of the mobs, and with the ThreatPlates add-on it plugged into your Threat Meter, displaying which mobs were currently aggro’d on you.  In addition, the nameplate showed the castbar of the mob, which made switching to a specific target to interrupt considerably easier.

One of the things tanks have had to do throughout the ages is tab through the targets in an attempt to maintain aggro.  The problem however is, tab target routines have been mercilessly lacking in sophistication.  I cannot count the number of times I have seen an extra pack pulled when a player accidentally tabs out to a group of mobs they are not currently fighting.  I myself have been guilty of this on more than one occasion.

However with a good set of nameplates, you can do the same function as tab targeting but do so more intelligently.  In wow, you could target the mobs based on their nameplate, and as a tank this let me keep swapping targets to whichever mob was dropping the lowest to keep up aggro.  In addition to this, it became far easier to pick individual targets out of a pack, and pick up adds when they got into your group of players.

In Foul Cascade, the final boss on Expert is a spider that periodically impregnates a player.  A few moments after this attack, a spider add spawns, which needs to get picked up by the tank.  Traditionally the groups I have been with stack the ranged on one of the pillars, and have the tank kite the spider in a circle around the pillar. 

If the spider adds spawn from a melee player, your normal cleaves and AOE attacks have no problem picking it up.  However when the spider comes from a ranged player, it is always slightly difficult to target this new and relatively small spider in the midst of your players.  Having a targetable nameplate would make it easy for me to target this new add, throw my shield, and continue kiting without losing a beat.  If not full fledged nameplates, I would love for Trion to at least make it so you can target a mob by clicking on its name, now that you an at least scale those to make them more readable.

1:  Guild Bank

The fact that I have to include this one on the list is pretty boggling to me.  At this point in the MMO game, a guild storage system should just be considered as one of those must have features.  The fact that Trion did not get this functionality in before release just seems like a massive oversight.  However this blemish, is on the record of an otherwise flawless launch, at least by MMO standards.  The reason why this is a major problem, boils down to something simple.

Your guild, should be a group of players that ultimately want to help each other.  As a result, guilds tend to want to be able to pool their resources to help one another out.  For example, as each of us leveled a smithing profession, we tried to make sure all our lesser metals were going to the aid of another guildmember still in need of them.  As I completed cobalt, I started sending any I got to the next person in line, and by the same token I was getting fed Titanium from those ahead of me.  Having a communal store of resources makes this process easier and more transparent.

Now that we have gotten into the realm of experts and beyond each of us has a stockpile of useful items that ultimately could go to the benefit of other players.  However with them taking up space in individual player banks, it became far more difficult to coordinate things like enhancements when a member finally gets the rare mats together for that much needed upgrade.  If we were able to keep a tab full of item enhancements we could literally have stacks of whatever anyone in the guild needed, ready for the crafters to augment gear with.

I think this seems as such an issue to me because of the fact that I am very community minded.  I think I was broke all the time in wow, because instead of hitting the auction house I dumped every rare resource I managed to get my hands on in the guild bank to share with others.  While it won’t make me rich in the long run, I like helping my guild family anytime I can.  Not having a way to share freely, feels like a step backwards in MMO evolution.

I have seen posts hinting that this functionality is indeed on the way, but it will easily take the “most needed” spot until the day it is finally patched in.  Rift is an extremely social game, it requires players to coordinate on a regular basis and actually develop a sense of community.  In this environment, it just feels foreign to have no way for a guild to pool their resources.  I look forward to this feature, and I hope whatever implementation they take, outshines all the many examples of guild storage to date.

Wrapping Up

Now that you have seen my top five and explanations for why I believe each is crucial, I am curious to hear what your most wanted items are.  The big one for me that came close to making the list, is some form of a “one bag” system.  I detest having to juggle individual bags, and ArkInventory (pictured to right) was one of the first mods I installed each time I rebuilt my wow interface.  However I felt the above list would give more benefit to the game as a whole.

Soon I plan on doing another top five list, but this time the top five add-ons I hope Rift never gets.  Those who know me, I am sure can guess at what some of those might be.  Basically I am hoping that overall the game stays pretty pure, because this return to MMO roots is a lot of what has appealed to me.  However in the post-wow environment, I realize that it will be hard to hold up to the “no add-ons” mantra forever.  I hope they really do continue to add features to the robust default UI instead of letting the add-on community run wild.