Month: April 2011

It has been an extremely long week for the Aggronaut.  I’ve been battling some medical issues, so today I am bringing you a wrap up post through the eyes of someone in pain.  Honestly I didn’t play as much Rift as I would have liked to this week.  When I am in pain I don’t really feel like I can be a responsible member of a guild and server community, so instead I just avoid interaction with people.  This has lead to a good deal more Minecraft than normal.

The End is Nigh

The other day I was out on the Wal-mart website, and like a sirens call there was a link saying that Diablo III was available for preorder.  It isn’t like I would actually preorder anything through Wal-mart, but the link was shiny and reddish and begged to be pushed (not to virus authors, hide your payloads behind red shiny buttons).  I mostly followed the link to look at the pretty screenshots but once I arrived I saw something interesting.

Now if you go out to GameStop or amazon and look up the Diablo III page you just get some generic preorder information but no estimated delivery date.  However if you look in the above image (and I took the liberty of zooming in for you) Wal-mart lists an estimated delivery date for the game.  Do they know something that the other companies don’t? 

Honestly, chances are they do.  Wal-mart is known for their heavy handed practices at least in the music industry, so it is not a large stretch of the imagination that they would have the same kind of sway over the video game industry since they represent the single largest game seller.  I cannot see Wal-mart posting a date they have no background intel surrounding.

I am not immune to the irony that I am posting Diablo news when I have dedicated so much time lately to talking about the failings of Blizzard.  Thing is… this is Diablo, it is not like I won’t be playing it.  I ‘ve spent countless sleepless nights playing the first two, and if this one is half as good as those were it will be well worth the potentially brief ride.  You can take the info with a grain of salt, but just thought I would point out the date.  Would make a good deal of sense, considering that would mean a d3 launch just prior to Blizzcon.

Scary Numbers

Keeping with the tinfoil hat theme, I had read a couple of posts recently talking about the declining player base as represented on the WoW Census website.  So it got my curious about what numbers the realm I played on, Argent Dawn might show.  I can remember during the launch of Cataclysm, I went out to the website to see what kind of effect the normal post expansion bump did on our server population.  For Argent Dawn, it listed that we had roughly 20,000 active players.

This morning when I pulled up the same stats, it was registering only slightly more than 8,000 players for Argent Dawn.  The question is, what exactly does this represent.  Was there a massive drop off in the usage of the WoW Census add-on?  Did Argent Dawn really lose over half its player base since the launch of Cataclysm?  I honestly don’t have the answers, and am puzzled by the results.

If you look at the wider picture, WoW Census lists the total combined US and Euro player population at 4.5 million.  Now I don’t know what this looked like several months ago, but we have long heard the touted 12 million players figure spread around.  From what I had heard as far as a breakout, that represented 8 million US and Euro players and 4 million in the growing Asian markets.  So if you take that into account as the numbers, the figures from WoW Census would show a drop in players by nearly a half.

Problem is, I have no way of knowing how accurate the WoW Census data is.  Publishers have been reluctant to give out any real player numbers.  The last one I can remember showing how many players were logged into a server was Dark Age of Camelot.  WoW census gets its data from voluntary submissions through their custom add-on.  So what is uncertain is if we are seeing a true drop in subscribers, or just a drop in usage of the add-on.

All I can really base things on is my own incidental data from the Argent Dawn server community.  I know the guild I once lead has dropped on WoW Census from the 5th largest guild on the server to roughly the 12th.  These kind of numbers test out at least incidentally in my head, as we have had a large number of players quit for various reasons.  I myself left to go play Rift as did several others, however there is an even larger number of players who are quitting simply because they are tired of the MMO genre.

All of this taken into account, are the recent changes like Call to Arms, and the cosmetic changes to the Warlock pets simply meant as a way to bribe players to stick around?  Once upon a time I used to play this game called Horizons.  It offered the ability to play a Dragon, something no other game has done to this date.  As they began to hemorrhage subscribers, they started adding in additional content for the dragon players, knowing they were the ones who couldn’t get a similar experience anywhere else. 

2 years down the line, all that was literally left playing the game were the players who for one reason or another just wanted to play dragons.  So I guess my curiosity is, are we starting to see GMs putting in content for the sole purpose of trying to glue players to the game?  Like I said, I don’t really have any answers but it is food for thought nonetheless.

The Rifts are Closing

There is a well thought post over on Ardwulf’s Lair entitled “Rift on a Downward Spiral?”.  If you haven’t managed to read it yet you certainly should.  Basically there has been a lot of back and forth amongst the bloggers making significance that there has been a 20% drop in gameplay hours for Rift on the gaming communication Client Xfire.  To Quote Ardwulf…

I personally have played many games in the past that were losing players faster than you could count.  I played Warhammer for about 6 months after release and Age of Conan for a month and a half.  In both cases, after the free month was over the servers felt noticeably lighter for the lack of players.  Rift most definitely does not feel like a dying game, at least not over on the Shadefallen server.

Another good take on the numbers is at Lowered Expectations, which presents some other data.

I however present a completely different picture.  The main issue I see with judging the performance of a game based on a third party communication client is this.  These services are not nearly as popular as the regular users seem to believe they are.  I’ve used both at various times throughout my gaming career, and ultimately I get bored with them and simply quit logging in.  Currently I use Raptr as a chat client, but I have long ago turned off its ability to track my gameplay habbits.

On top of this, on Raptr I have less than a half dozen friends that use the service.  The greatest majority of my friends use Steam, and in reality even if you purchased your game through steam like I did, there is no solid reason why you should actually launch the game that way.  Ultimately I think the Xfire and Raptr communities represent a niche of gamers.  Quite possibly the game simply doesn’t appeal as widely to that niche as it does others.

What I am seeing on my own server is a decrease of the wow tourists.  I know them well, I was one for years myself.  A wow tourist is a player who goes out, plays a new game for the free month to get a break, then ultimately returns back to their core game feeling validated in their decision.  I was a tourist in every major MMO release since WoW shipped in 2004, I played my free month, maybe a month extra but ultimately I returned back to the mothership.

Who I am seeing glued to Rift are an older demographic, the players who remain nostalgic about Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, and ultimately the good points of Warhammer online and miss those games as truly viable platforms.  It is less likely for me to be able to explain a boss fight in “its like this wow boss” terms, but more likely to be able to say “Iron Tomb feels so much like Muire Tomb” and get a response.

I know it is probably a bit hypocritical to dismiss claims that Rift is dying, in the same post I present numbers that show a decline in WoW subscribers, but to me you have to consider the two sources.  With WoW census you have a tool that takes a broad survey of players who are not even running the add-on, trying to come up with base numbers of who is available on the server at a given time.  With these guesstimates, you are looking at a third party tool that has absolutely nothing to do with the actual gameplay.

All that said, I have seen a decline in the player base in Rift.  However this is a good thing.  We have managed to shed a lot of the “barrens chat” types, and kept the seasoned mmo veterans who are willing to work for their rewards.  I have seen the high end public channels continue to grow and get more helpful with time.  So in the grand scheme of things, I think this decline will ultimately be good for the various budding communities.

A Safe Haven

With the recent pain I have been in, I have like I said been shunning anything that would involve someone else relying on me.  As a result I have logged in for a bit, completely my event dailies and usually logged shortly thereafter.  The rest of my time has been spent over on the Stalwart Minecraft server.  Every so often I get an idea in my head that just has to be built, so my city of Belgarde has been expanded in bursts of creativity.

The most recent burst of effort has involved the left side of the image above.  Previously I had this open area, where a good number of monsters spawned each night.  The dock area that I had built up was unfortunately a part of this overall area.  So one of my goals for some time has been to find a way to both secure the docks and increase the protected space of Belgarde.

In a city like the one I have been building, not much actual food production could happen inside the protected walls.  Ultimately each city is ringed with a network of agriculture areas, that feed resources back into the walled area.  In a game like Minecraft, where any undeveloped land is sure to spawn monsters, simply dotting the countryside around Belgarde with farms really didn’t fit the bill.

As a result I decided to extend out the walls to loosely encompass an area of land that would ultimately be built up as farms.  So far I have managed to complete the wall, and a guard station.  In addition to this I torched off the entire area to immediately stop the monster spawns while working on developing it. 

I cleared and terraced an area in the upper right-hand region of the new walled zone.  This has become the first farm in the area, and includes a large house, work shed, and a large fenced off field of crops.  I don’t want to create cookie cutter homesteads, so this will take some time to design and build each structure to feel cohesive but look somewhat unique at the same time.  I will post additional shots as I get more things built.  Right now the general region just looks unfinished.

Wrapping the Wrap-up Post

So that’s all the assorted bits and pieces that didn’t really seem to fit elsewhere thematically.  I finally managed to pull the trigger and order the new laptop, so next week sometime I should be blogging from it.  I have a number of topics swimming around in my head that should make for at least interesting posts next week.  Given my irregular posting habits in the past, I am still shocked that I have managed to maintain a month of posting something each day.  While it might not seem like much for the bloggers who have been hard at it for three years or so, but for me just being consistent for a month is a proud moment.

I think I killed most of my audience yesterday with the massive Minecraft thread.  Then again, I keep arguing with friends as to whether or not I actually have an audience in the first place.  I still feel most days like a little kid sitting in a huge cardboard box on the living room floor pretending to be on TV.  I say whatever comes to mind on a specific day, and out comes a blog post.

Comments from Community

One of the things recently that has been getting under my skin more than I should allow it to is a series of comments surrounding Rift.  I realize I spend a good deal of my time evangelizing the game, and a month and some change after release a lot of the new has even worn off for me.  Thing is I am still enjoying it more than I have enjoyed any other MMO in a long while.

All that said, the general frustration I have had, and have even posted about this before now, are those comments surrounding the lack of innovation in Rift’s quest system.  Tipa at West Karana gave a great run down of the game from the point of view of a player not yet max level a month into the game.  Problem is for me at least, deep down in the post are the same sentiments I have had trouble understanding before.

If you have read this blog for a bit I commented (in Three Things Rift Didn’t Get Wrong) on similar statements about the questing system from MMORPG.com.

Ultimately I guess the question I pose is, what exactly do you want instead?  We have arrived at the quest system we have today through a long line of prods and pokes and tweaks over the years.  Granted the big evolutionary jumps came from World of Warcraft, but looking back I am not sure how someone can really improve on the system.  I think to bring things into perspective we should examine where we have come from.

“Hunt For the Quest” Era

Granted, the screenshot I have chosen to illustrate this cannot really be deemed as “early in the era”, but it represents a time that I like to refer to as the “Hunt For the Quest” era.  During this time, questing consisted of a random process of trying to canvas every new town you came to looking for those precious few NPCs that actually responded to you.  More often than not, a quest was dumped in your log as you went through a mostly non-interactive set of text. 

The vast majority of these games lacked any real quest tracking system, and instead listed a generic journal showing which quests you were on with very arcane directions as to how to complete each one.  Much of the “gameplay” actually involved trying to interpret what the heck the quest authors meant in their tips. 

Ultimately, players got stuck frequently and ended up relying on websites such as GameFaqs to figure out exactly how to do that one step of the quest that was holding up their progress.  In the dark days before the internet, it involved relying on your friends just hoping they had figured out whatever step you were stuck on.  Guidebooks existed, but in general no one I knew actually purchased these, and at worse case next time you were at a bookstore you thumbed through the copy on the shelf just long enough to find your answer.

Everquest – Most Ironically Titled Game Ever

With the birth of the MMO genre, not much really changed.  If anything, quests became even harder to find as you roamed through a world populated with massive numbers of NPCs, few of which offered anything interesting.  As the title above states, Everquest was probably the most ironic title for that game.  Questing took an act of congress to do successfully because it involved a cryptic series of text prompts to actually trigger said quests. 

Here is an example of a quest text…

If you are catching on to the pattern, initiating a quest involved saying whatever text was contained within [ brackets ].  This would trigger another line of text and so on until ultimately you needed to collect something.  This snippet of text for example was initiated when an item was handed in to the NPC.  Problem is there was no real way of telling which NPCs would accept an item and give you a quest, nor was it entirely certain that if you handed an item in you wouldn’t simply lose it.

The Dark Age Arrives

Dark Age of Camelot took this construct and made it one step better.  Everquest encapsulated the keyword used to trigger the quest in [ brackets ] but DAoC made the “revolutionary” jump of hot linking.  So instead of having to type /say Rutabaga, you could simply click [rutabaga] in the chat window.  While this may not seem like much, it was freakin cutting edge stuff at the time.  Unfortunately you still had to roam around the camp randomly right clicking on NPCs until you found the quest givers, but at least once you found one the steps that followed went a little smoother.

Dawn of the Exclamation

Questing for the most part continued in this fashion for years.  We accepted the frustration that it gave us, but dealt with it.  The end result however was that the majority of players simply ground their way through the levels by running dungeons or hunting various “camps” until there was a significant reason to actually try and track down a quest.  These reasons were often doled out by the various MMO help sites available like Allakhazam.

The first major advancement in questing since Everquest came with when the first screenshots of World of Warcraft were leaked to the public.  You can tie alot of innovations back to WoW, but it is funny that I think the most lasting of them is the act of sticking an icon over the heads of quest NPCs to clearly identify them.  Our little friend to the right side here, has literally changed the MMO gaming world.

Now instead of running around town humping NPCs until they gave us a quest starter, we were able to see from a distance whether or not there were quests for us to do.  This was a big deal, and for the first time in a fantasy MMO questing actually played a key role in the game play.  As players we came to expect that as we move through content, there was a constant flow of quests to keep ups propelling forward.  For years folks had wanted something other than killing mobs to do in MMOs and it had arrived.

Assimilation of the Idea

Quickly every MMO on the market adopted this method for identifying quests.  Above is a quick cut and paste job showing all the various implementations.  While some have clearly tried to set themselves apart by making the icons look more unique, the fundamentals are the same.  Go into a town, look for a recognizable icon and go off and do the quests.  The era of quest grinding had arrived.  No longer were you forced to kill an endless string of mobs for no good reason, now you had NPCs to go tell you where to hunt and for how long.

I resisted this era for a long time.  Having cut my teeth on EQ and DAoC, I still preferred to take out monsters with a blind and unfocused rage.  However, in WoW and other games I noticed that if you completed the quests, you could level far faster than through killing monsters alone.  In addition to this you had all these wonderful bits of story along the way to make you feel attached to the game world.

Thing is however, that no matter what game you played, the process was essentially the same.  While a lot of todays players seem to find this boring, and un-original.  I find it the natural progression of the system.  Each crop of games, has managed to tweak the system to fit into whatever design they wanted.  Questing has arrived at this point, because each game that has come before it added something new to the genre.

So with Rift, we have this rich UI that is far better than any previous game shipped with.  It is the synthesis of years of gradual change, and represents the best of all the ideas to date.  You have great story telling, clear objectives, and nice visualization to complete them.  Problem is, players seem to be tired of this system that has been in place in one form or another for the better part of a decade.

Other Systems in Play

I return to the question, that if this system is now tired and boring… what exactly would you replace it with?  The only other tried and true parallel in the PC gaming world is that of the dialog tree quest.  The above example is from Fallout 3, but these are the bread and butter of the ever popular Bioware games.  The user is presented a prompt and then given a list of choices to pick from as the answer.  Often times the choices are determined by the players faction, skill and level.

Problem is, for seasoned PC gaming veterans this system is just as well trodden as the quest giver system.  We have literally played dozens of games at this point where we navigated our way through the text options.  Regardless of how well written these systems are, there is never an answer to the prompt that is exactly how you would want to respond.  You are basically left with the renegade/evil response, the goody two-shoes response, or the aloof neutral response.

Hope For The Future

This is the kind of system that it seems like Bioware will be bringing to the MMO genre with The Old Republic.  it will be interesting to see how it plays out, but like I said for me at least this is already the “old way” of doing things.  The problem again is, how would you build a better breadbox?  What can really be done that hasn’t already been done before.

Right now I simply cannot imagine a better system than the one that keeps getting labeled as “un-imaginative”.  Sure we all know how it works at this point, and we can blindly do the quests without thinking.  But to me at least, there is comfort in the familiarity.  I know what to expect in the quests, I already walk into the room knowing the language that will be spoken.

WoW has tried to evolve the quest construct for years, but for the most part in doing so they have created a series of mini-games that he player has to deal with.  I would far rather have “kill ten rats” than pilot this annoying vehicle around the zone, and bomb various objectives.  That is just me however, I have always enjoyed the generic construct of the kill task.

My Actions Should Matter

I will admit that I would love for there to be some weight in my decisions in an MMO.  I would like to know that if I choose the good path, various NPCs will react to me differently.  One of the most frustrating and annoying moments in Cataclysm came in Twilight Highlands.  In Wrath you spend hundreds of quests working for the Red Dragon flight, and as a result you end up interacting a good deal with Alexstraza directly.  So it was almost game breaking for me to encounter her in Twilight Highlands, and for her to not even mention the fact that you did dozens of quests for her flight.  Don’t we at least get a handshake and a nod out of the deal?

I would like to play a game without the faction wall, where we as players choose our alignments, and the choices we make have massive ramifications on the entire game.  In Dragon Age: Origins you join the Grey Wardens, and from that moment forward every NPC in the game has a reaction based on that fact.  Imagine a world where various social organizations are vying for control, and each has a specific slant on the world.  In the case of Rift, along with Defiant and Guardian, we should be able to join the various dragon cults if we so chose, or the various organizations set aside to fight them.

Wrapping Up

Ultimately for me, Rift is an evolved system, that has taken in all the best elements of the other games I have played to date.  While it is not ground breaking, it takes all these “best of” elements I wanted from other places and places it squarely in the same system.  Problem is for many players these elements just feel old themselves.  I would like to see some evolution in the system, a leap forward as big as the exclamation point was, however I did not go into Rift expecting it.  I came here expecting best of breed game play, and in that it has delivered plenty.

Over the last week I have managed to gather enough shards to purchase the three pets, the shade touched doodad, and the trinket that turns me into a rogue skeleton.  Basically I have managed to get everything I wanted from the event other than the mount.  As a result, I have spent the last few nights mostly outside of Rift, to take a bit of a break.

Minecraft has been an obsession for a long time now.  At it’s core the game is basically Legos on crack, and you would have to be living under a rock at this point to have not at least heard of the game that has exploded like a creeper over the last year.  I wrote a review for the gaming blog Polygamerous some time ago titled “Minecraft:  Better Than The Hype”.  I figure this is as good as any to do a post with a gratuitous amount of screenshots.

Starting Out Alone

Like everyone I started with Minecraft Single player.  I learned to hide in fear from the barrage of skeletons and zombies, and scurry out during the daylight to gather everything I needed to keep going.  One of my friends, calls me the “game pusher”, and true to the name it was not long before I had started hooking various friends on the game as well.  So alone in our own private worlds we built, meeting up on Ventrilo to swap stories.

One friend in particular, Rylacus, and I started swapping screenshots of our creations.  It became a tradition to have new shots of what we were working on ready to talk about as we waited around on voice before raids.  Problem is, other than swapping worlds, there was no way for us to actually build together.  I had toyed around with a private server, but my connection simply was too weak to support it.

Enter the Stalwart Server

A good friend of ours, Valkkon, had hosted his own websites and utilities on a leased connection.  With very minor bits of persuading, he installed and set up a new server for us.  Ry and I abandoned our single player empires and pushed our way out onto a new frontier.  Above is a zoomed in image of the area that Rylacus, his Son, his Daughter and I share.  In addition to this area there are between 20 and 30 other players with their own areas.

Being able to build together has been a blast.  For the most part each of us has our own territory, but the most interesting thing has been the way each of us have chosen to link into the others areas.  For example on the above map you can see a number of paths leading off of the main city area.  This gives the server a very ‘Sim City” feeling, in that each player controls their own settlement.

Founding of Belgarde

Some of the players have focused on individual buildings.  We have towers, castles, pyramids, cottages and caves of all shapes and sizes.  However I wanted something different, I wanted to build an entire town.  I named my town Belgarde, and set out trying to build the seat of power of the Stalwart family.  I kept to the House Stalwart color scheme, since I spent 6 1/2 years with that, and green is my favorite color.  You can also see a large number of the “Stalwart Crosses” used throughout the buildings.

The general idea was to try and replicate buildings that would actually be needed to support a town.  To keep my citizens safe from monsters, I encased my town in a giant wall.  The above image is the wall that started it all.  I call this the “lava gate”, and it leads to the courtyard that is shared between myself and the area of Rylacus.  The original inspiration was the wall between Hillsbrad and Arathi Highlands in World of Warcraft.  While this wall is no way as big, I feel it has a similar feel.  The addition of the lava was mostly there as additional lighting.

Some Additional Shots of Belgarde

Temples of the Elements

Early on, one of the structures that Rylacus first built was this obsidian and lava structure.  Since Ry has an affinity for using lava various creative ways, we dubbed this first structure the “Lava Temple”.  Over time of calling it this, the idea of an elemental fire temple started to set in.  Across the courtyard from it I decided to build the polar opposite.  I had a blank wall that needed filling, in our quest to make sure every corner of our realm was safe from monster spawns.

The above two images are the main water temple entrance, and what I have begun to call the “water shrine” on the backside of the main temple.  Since the lava temple was build out of obsidian and lava, I chose to build this out of the color palette opposites in sandstone, lapis lazuli and water.  The water shrine area has a reservoir, which I tried to juxtapose with the lava area on the side.  As I describe it, I am wondering if I maybe over thought things, but nonetheless the lapis and water mixture make it feel like there is flowing streams of water through out the structure.

The Wind Temple

Zoom ahead to last night, I decided that I should continue the theme and build a wind and earth themed temple to add in to the mix.  Problem with wind, is there is no real block in the game that represents it well.  As a compromise I decided to rely on large amounts of glass, to make a see-through structure.  What I wound up building is a tall spiral staircase surrounding a column of glowstone, leading up to a round glass and glowstone structure on top.  Just to add visual distinction, I decided to stream some water down from it to give the feeling of a rain cloud.  I think the jury is out on whether or not it worked.

The Earth Temple

To do the Earth Temple, I decided to build it across the boardwalk from the wind temple.  This mirrors the placement of the lava and water temples in another area.  I started by burrowing out a path that leads down into the earth.  From the beginning, I decided that I need to build this as a dug out structure since this is supposed to represent the terra-firma.  I went with sandstone, glowstone, and dirt for a color palette.  In the center of the structure is a lava shrine, tying the structure back to it’s aligned element of fire.  I like this end result here far more than I do with wind temple.  In the future I plan on burrowing additional chambers out from within the temple structure.

The Smugglers Hold

When I was building the boardwalk area I discovered a natural cave system.  The cave structure went from under the boardwalks, out to my wall traveling underneath it and coming out on the other side.  Rylacus and I had avoided this tunnel system and close one end off just to keep from having to deal with it.  In the back of my mind, I always wanted to go do something cool with it.  Above is an image of the entrance to what I am dubbing the Smugglers Hold.

In theory since Belgarde is a heavily protected structure, there is more than likely going to be a thriving black market that smuggles things in from the outside.  As a result, this enterprise would need a way of doing this easily.  Above is an image of the storehouse, which is the main chamber of the structure.  The walls are lines with storage for the various items being smuggled in or out of the city.

The storehouse leads its way to a second dock outside of the city walls.  My theory is that items would arrive here and make their way into the tunnel structure to be distributed and sold in the bazaar in the city.  Items being smuggled out of the city, would be stored in the chests on the dock until transit arrived to take them on to other lands.  One of my other friends, Shadoes built this pirate cove off the coast of my city, so this all fits in well thematically with that.

To carry this theme even further I decided to experiment with sponge and build a searoad to secretly connect the outer dock, and Shadoes pirate cove.  Working with sponge has been extremely interesting.  When you place a sponge block, it will remove a 5×5 block of water with the sponge at the center.  I leaned on my go to glowstone, to provide the lighting.  From above it gives this cool effect of a stip of light deep down in the water.

I completed the path, and connected up to the pirate cove, creating a path that now connects Shadoes area into the hidden tunnel structure.  Since the smugglers need a hideout, I built a shiplike structure on the bottom of the ocean, that connects up to the searoad.  In the basement is another storage room where the very precious contraband would be stored.

I’ve Shown You Mine, Let’s See Yours

Now I have shown you my insane little world crafted inside of Minecraft.  Funny thing is, on the Stalwart server there are a dozen other players that have equally intricate and story rich worlds they have built up for themselves.  We all exist in this general tapestry, all add up to a shared narrative of the server.  While I don’t play Minecraft nearly as much as I once did when it was fresh, it is still my go to game when I need a break from someone else’s world.  I get to escape into one I have built up for myself, one I have control over.

Minecraft is one of those games, that is only as good as you make it.  Just like building with Legos, you can make this world be anything you want it to be.  Personally, I chose to craft an epic realm that protects its citizens from the roving zombie hordes.  But I have seen players build space ships, sports arenas, and just interesting sculptures.  If you have not experienced Minecraft yet, I sincerely suggest you pay the ludicrously small price and join the legion that fears the hiss of the creeper.

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.