Belghast

This weekend I spend a good deal of time in the car while driving up to see my mother-in-law.  This always serves as the launch pad for numerous conversations, one of which was a long winded rant stemmed from disappointment over Rage, but that in itself is better left for another blog post.  My wife lovingly listened in spite of not fully understanding a damned thing I was saying, however at the end she left me with a cogent nugget of advice.  “Sounds like you just might not be the target audience for these games anymore.”

Leave it to my wife, the math teacher, the being of logic… to cut through my rant and say something that makes sense.  Sure enough that little seed sat there the rest of the weekend sprouting. The more I thought on it the more I realized it had become true.  I think much of my growing dissatisfaction with the direction of games is due to this fact, that either through the changes in myself or changes in the market I am no longer the target for what is being built.

Aiming Down the Middle

The problem is the more I thought on it, the less and less certain I was there really was a target audience.  In this current era of the mega game, the current focus seems to be to cram as many features as possible into a game for as many different player bases as possible.  So in trying to create a game that appeals to raiders, casuals, explorers, achievers, role-players, pvpers, griefers, gold-farmers, campers, snipers, and crafters they try and walk a line where none of the groups get upset with the others.  But by the same token, none of them are ever actually happy.

Aiming down the middle gives you the widest swath of market share, but it also creates a thoroughly mediocre and shallow game play experience.  Dark Age of Camelot for example was a game of PVP brilliance at times, but offered some thoroughly mediocre and boring PVE game play.  Everquest II is one of the most detailed and intricate questing and PVE gaming experiences, by has never created any form of PVP worth mentioning. World of Warcraft…  well it has been all over the map, systematically ruining one aspect of the game to improve others at various points during its 7 year run.  Currently you have a mediocre but enjoyable leveling experience, and the only real stand out being the raid experience, but it suffers from the been there done that treadmill.

Trading Geek for Greed

So much focus has been placed over the last few years on widening the market to more than just traditional PC mmo gamers.  As a result there has been a general lowering of the “cost of entry” to the MMO game, reducing the learning curve.  This has had many effects on the community, and average skill level, but namely it has removed a good deal of the “geek” from the game.  Making everything seem a bit more simple, a bit more cookie cutter and in many ways less unique.

Learning how to play an MMO game took an act of effort on the player, it took a commitment to learn.  That was an unwritten commitment to the community, that they would learn how to become a member of it.  It could be overwhelming, and the number of new concepts and jargon mind boggling but as you began to “grok” them it quickly became intoxicating and you craved more knowledge.  Not only did you sell a gamer on your world, but you also sold them on MMOs for life.

Granted I don’t want to return to the era of Everquest, but I think we have gone too far.  I fear that we are replacing what were living breathing worlds, with a disposable experience that is easy to learn but equally easy to forget.  When you ask nothing of the user, it takes nothing for them to leave.  But when you give them something to work for, a path to follow, something they have to figure out on their own that isn’t always handed to them…  I have to think more often than not they will stay.

The Money Equation

One of the biggest disservices to the gamers has been the fact that gaming has shown up on the radar of big business.  It has taken a business that previously was “for gamers, by gamers” and laced it with easy venture capital money with many strings attached, and as a result success has become a zero sum game.  Games like World of Warcraft with it’s once vaunted 12 Million player subscriber base and Call of Duty: Black Ops and its 5 day $650 million dollar sales record have set wholly unrealistic goals for the rest of the industry to live up to.

The game industry would be so much healthier as a whole if there were 13 $50 million dollar games, than one $650 million record breaking game.  The need to chase the big dollars has made the game industry very risk adverse.  Stick to a pattern that works, market it towards the majority, and win.  But the problem is this same business instinct is causing some truly bizarre results.

I’ve been playing Everquest II for the last few months, and by all accounts I would call it a success.  It isn’t WoW, but it is still there and has had a pretty wide following for the last 7 years, that to me is a win in any book.  It has an extremely loyal fan base, almost zealously loyal at times, and are very clearly a niche.  Explain to me then, why on gods green earth they have decided to focus EQNext (EQIII) at the PVP Market?  Everquest 2 is not a pvp game, has never had a viable PVP vehicle, and in general nobody much cares about PVP other than a shortcut to easy loot. 

Why on earth would you alienate your already loyal fan base by targeting the new game at a market they do not care about?  The answer is simple and dumb.  They don’t have the PVP market, and on some moronic level they feel they can do what no one has done yet. They feel they can manage to create a game that is equally compelling to the modern PVP gamer and to the PVE gamer.  Even though WoW is hemorrhaging users still, it still has more users than any other MMO, and they still feel they have to compete with it.

Myth of the One True Game

One of the things that needs to die for us to get past this rut in gaming is the myth of the wow killer.  Right now World of Warcraft is definitely on the downward slope of relevancy, much as I have seen all the other once great games go through.  But those great old games never actually die, they just get stuffed off somewhere on life support.  What we need right now is games like World of Warcraft, Rift, The Old Republic, The Secret World, and Guild Wars 2 to each gain a comfortable and sustainable share of the MMO gaming market.  Sure ultimately someone will be on top, but for the health of the gaming market there needs to be less of a difference than there has been to date.

I still don’t think in this generation we are going to see much innovation in the realm of the AAA MMO title.  They are still going to firmly be rooted in the past, with Secret World and Guild Wars 2 being the notable “Great Hopes” at breaking the mold.  However I think that if we can reach a state of market share equilibrium we will finally start to see some indie development in the MMO sector.  I think the first few might be simplistic Minecraft style derivatives, but they will come eventually.  Especially with the plans Notch has for the Adventure update, I feel Minecraft itself will actually become more “Indie MMO” over time.  The MMO genre got its roots in the MUD, and I think it might just return that way.

I think Indie games and the ease of digital publication are ultimately going to be what pulls us out of the stagnation.  Sure not every game will end up a success and sell millions, but many will serve as examples and showcase the talents of the next generation of developers and designers.  Others will server to prove that yes, that plan that has been sitting on the shelf for years really could work on a larger scale and turn into the next blockbuster.  While I love playing those AAA titles (like Dragon Age II currently), I am also out there supporting those great Indie devs like Dusty Monk (I need to devote some blog space to Atomic City Adventures: The Case of the Black Dragon, it’s really fun ).  I really do think it is the Indie games that will change the dynamic.

I has been roughly three months since my last post.  With Ariad starting up his posts I figure it is high time that I get over my writers block and begin anew as well.  Thing is for me, it hasn’t truly been writers block.  There is a post I feel like I need to make, but I have been looking for every opportunity not to.  I guess, in part since I have become friendly with several of the Trion staffers, the post I feel like I need to make almost feels like a betrayal.

Maybe It Is A Bit You

It feels weird to go from completely bonkers gung ho about a game, to just having no desire to play it.  But that pretty much describes my transition from playing and actively writing about Rift, to just not logging in and eventually cancelling my account.  The problem is, for the longest time I didn’t quite understand why I no longer wanted to play.  It felt like there was something missing, that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

In my guild we had this cycle happening, that I none of us really understood.  We started the game with between thirty and forty players, so the future indeed seemed bright.  But as each new player managed to top the hill and hit 50, they all seemed to slowly begin tapering off their playtime.  So much so that eventually they just started disappearing all together.  As the months went on, it became harder and harder to maintain an active grouping force due to folks just dropping off into the ether.

At that point I was still doing pretty good, I had t1 geared my first 50 and was well on my way to my second 50.  It was on my way to the third, that finally it started to hit me.  Having done these zones 5 or more times, considering the time spent in beta… I just could not force myself to push through it a third time.  All the while, I am not really understanding what is going on, only that my desire to play at all is waning.  There were many a night that I logged in, and ran around Meridian for an hour or so before finally logging out for the evening, not actually doing anything.

The Missing Fluff

The game is an amazingly fun rollercoaster ride the first time or two, but as I sat at level 50 with nothing that I wanted to do, something Ariad said hit me like a ton of bricks.  He was one of the first to taper off and eventually leave the game, and I will do my best to paraphrase what we talked about.  Essentially he said that one of his biggest problems with the world is that everything exists for a reason.  At first this comment didn’t make much sense, but as I sat at 50 bored… it finally did.

In most games, there are elements of the game that exist there, just to be there.  There are empty buildings in towns, there are art elements you can hover over that say interesting things, books in dungeons, etc that exist just to add flavor to the world.  In Rift, as the player you get a feel that nothing was added to the world that is not directly tied to some quest.  Essentially the game is this great lean core of mechanics, but it is missing the fluffy padding that adds atmosphere and gives players a reason to fall in love with something other than the game play.

The storyline of the game is very well written, and I’ve become friends with some of the lore writers in this process.  They do a phenomenal job providing the connective tissue that holds the world together.  The problem is, the world just doesn’t feel alive.  Sure there is dynamic content in the form of Rifts, but none of the cities FEEL like cities.  Neither Meridian or Sanctum feel like they could actually support life.  They both feel like Military outposts more than actual living, breathing cities.  The scale of the world I guess, just feels off in some way.

Maybe It Really Is Me

One of the other things at work here is that I personally have changed as a player, from the beginnings of Rift beta.  When I started playing Rift, I was the leader of a 600 character guild and an active raider.  Rift literally was everything I ever said I wanted in a game.  Had it been released two years ago, before I had become horribly bitter and jaded towards raiding, then I think I would be gobbling it up left and right.

The problem is this, that me leaving WoW was a much bigger change in my life than I ever expected.  Imagine being the core support for a large guild, and them needing something from you each and every night you chose to play, which in my case was literally every night.  Imagine holding up a bridge, being friend, councilor, advisor, and mentor for 6 1/2 long years of constant interaction.  Imagine logging in each and every night to 10-20 tells, each of them wanting something different.  Then all the sudden, imagine it all going away and leaving nothing but blissful peace.

As much as I gradually morphed from a casual player, to a serious raider, I have changed back almost completely.  In Rift, much of the pay off at the end of the day is the massive amount of raid content.  Problem is, if you don’t care about raiding, all of this carefully tiered content quickly looks like yet another grind you have to suffer through.  This was multiplied by the fact that two separate times that I can remember, the cost of all of the tiered gear was increased by a large percentage. 

So flat out, for someone who was slow gearing, it is much harder to get ready for raiding than it was those first few months.  As we began dipping our toes in raiding, it became evident quickly that simply put we did not have the gear levels necessary.  Biggest issue was that with everyone tapering off their playtime and only being around for raids, there was no time to run the instances needed to improve the overall gear level.

Same As It Ever Was

I was in the camp of players who warned against the inclusion of a dungeon tool.  If you have read any of my blog posts in the past, I tie the death of WoW back to the creation of the dungeon finder.  It was the single act that destroyed server communities.  I went into Trion’s decision to create a dungeon finder with an open mind, thinking that the Rift community thus far had been better than WoW and surely "we" could use it responsibly.  The problem is, we were all wrong.

In those first weeks after release, as folks topped out the level 50 channel became an active hot bed of conversation and grouping.  Within a few minutes you were able to assemble a t1 or t2 expert with players actively looking.  I am sure the experience for folks unwilling to go through the legwork of actually doing the forming is different, but quickly our guild built a steady group of regulars from other similar guilds.  Folks knew each other and had a long list of folks to substitute in if someone needed to go and the community as a whole flourished.

When the dungeon tool went in, for the first few weeks everything was pretty good.  At this point I was gearing up my rogue, and had both a bard and marksman spec actively playing whichever role the group needed of me.  In tier 1s, everything was great, and folks were willing to work together.  However when I made the transition to Tier 2 instances, the world around me changed.  I started seeing some of my old enemies from WoW, "the elitist" and "the rage quit" on a nightly basis.  I went from being able to run instances in an hour and a half to spending 4 hours in a tier 2 and never actually finishing it.

From what I have heard from guild members still active in the game, with the inclusion of cross server queues to the dungeon finder it has gotten worse.  All of the things that made running dungeons in WoW a frustrating experience are apparently now in Rift.  The power pulling egotistical tanks, the dps that cannot keep up and the dps that calls everyone that doesn’t meet their standards a failure.  I was on mumble the night the tool went in and heard tales of the very first group a guild member tried complaining at him to "pull big" just like they always did in Warcraft.  My ultimate fear is, that once again the dungeon tool has wrecked what was an amazing community.

I Still Have Faith

I am sure this probably seems like a flash back to the way I talked about WoW when I left, but honestly I feel like I am parting on good terms with the game.  The prime difference is, by the time I left WoW I had lost any measure of faith that Blizzard had a clue what they were doing, a trend that has continue on since then.  With Trion however, I have all the faith in the world as the company, part of the reason why I delayed this post is I did not want to contribute to any bad press about the game for the longest time.  Problem is, I have been deadlocked and unable to write much of anything until I got this one off my chest.

Trion has done so much right with Rift, and have an amazing group of people behind it.  I’ve come to know a good number of them, and each and every one really cares about the end product and is actively fighting to make it better for all of the players.  Erick "Zann" Adams for example is one of the absolute hardest working Community Managers I have ever seen.   LM Lockhart and Nicholas McDowell have done an amazing job reaching out to the community, and keeping the lore pot stirred to whip up interest.  Never before have I seen the level of interaction with the bloggers and social media that I have from Trion.

All of this said, I have all the faith in the world that they will figure out what exactly is missing from the game eventually, and add that final spark.  It makes it all the more bittersweet for me when I realize that I just don’t want to play it anymore.  I gave the game six months, and my subscription will be running out soon.  I wish them all the luck in the world on the game.  It was an amazing ride to 50, but there just wasn’t enough there to hold me after I reached the top of the hill.  With all the plans for player housing on the radar, and the new zones, I feel like it might push them over this hump and bring the much needed fluff to the game.

Moving On

I figure at some point in the future, I will fire the game back up and give it a spin.  It still has more right going for it than it has wrong, and those games I tend to remember fondly are the ones I end up going back to time and again.  This is evidenced by the fact that I am back playing Everquest II, a game I beta tested, and have played 4 different times since release.  Since I realized it was the fluff that I was craving, I went to the fluffiest game on the market as a counter reaction.

I am honestly having a blast.  I tested the game from early in beta, and when it came time for release the majority of my friends were going to WoW, so that is where I went as well.  However being an Everquest player for three years, made me a huge fan of the world of Norrath.  It has always felt more alive and vibrant that just about any other game setting.  In the past however when I played it, it was a side game while I was also playing WoW.  I would enjoy myself, but sooner or later the rigor of leading a guild would catch up to me.  Time and time again I would begin feeling like I was shirking my duties to my friends and guild mates.

This is the first time for me to play the game with nothing else siphoning away my time.  As a result I am probably having more fun with it than I have in the past.  My main is now level 71 and I am really enjoying Mistmoore Catacombs at the moment.  Expect to see a good number more posts about that game going forward.  I will probably also be reskinning the site to be something a bit more game neutral.  I am still playing a good bit of Minecraft, so I toyed around with the idea of trying to create the "Tales of the Aggronaut" logo in Minecraft for flair. 

Now that I have all this off my chest, I hope I can go back to regular writing.

These are a bit late being posted, came out initially on 6/10/2011 but I wanted to get them up nonetheless.  These are 1.3 PTS notes merged from all of the individual class forum posts. Some pretty major changes, and as a result gnashing of teeth all around the forums.  Time will tell how the changes actually shake out, but this seems to be the starting place.

The last few weeks I have been pretty lax with my daily blog post.  My friend Ariad has managed to churn out some posts to fill the void, but in the end I have just been slacking due to some fairly significant deadlines.  I’ve also noticed that when I have been incubating a large post, I seem to get thrown into a minor writers block.  In the past these are marked by the days I have posted patch notes and nothing much else.  However in the post E3 / Pre 1.3 lead up, there isn’t a lot I have felt like reacting to.  After several weeks, I am finally posting this topic.

How Randomness Ruined Crafting For Me and Rift Revived It

I know that is a big subheading, but over the last few weeks I have come to realize a few things about crafting in general.  I have always respected crafting in MMOs but in general I have never been one to hang out at the forge as it were.  It has been a fun diversion, a nice break in the adventuring action at times, but never really something I sought out.  I think a good deal of this is the way that WoW and other games have treated crafting in general.

Crafting has always fascinated me.  The ability to gather up seemingly unrelated bits and through an interface bind them together into something new and usable by my characters.  There almost seems to be an arcane thrill to it, and your serious crafters carry with them an aura of sage respect.  Many folks look to crafting as a profit center for them, but for me it has always been either a nice way to augment my characters gear list, or simply something I can do to make myself useful for the guild as a whole.

The Basics

Above is an image from the game Minecraft.  This pretty much shows the kind of crafting that first enthralled me.  I could not find a really good image of the Everquest crafting system, but for the most part Minecraft is a good facsimile.  EQ featured a system that I can only think of as crafting off the rails.  Later crafting systems became stratified, with certain classes and recipe books, but in the beginning it was just you some gathered materials and a machine.

Fishing was pretty straight forward, and I think everyone in Everquest spent some time on the docks fishing for fun and profit.  However for me at least, the serious crafting came far later.  It was not until I started getting random ore drops from the Orcs in Crushbone that I started to wonder exactly what I could do with them.  Thing is in Everquest, there was no instruction manual.  You never knew whether an item was just there to be sold, or if it could be repurposed in some amazing way to craft something for you.

The crafters in the game, had not only managed to raise some numeric skill, but also figured out and memorized a vast number of patterns in their head.  Later on Allakhazam took a good bit of this trial and error out of the equation as players began to share resources.  However it was still up to you to gather up all the needed materials, and remember how to combine them once you got back in game.

The biggest problem with crafting in Everquest however was that it was an extremely expensive and or time consuming venture.  Materials were either purchased from players or vendors, or farmed in dungeons.  This was not a fast process at all, and the weight of ore made it so you could not carry much of it at any given time.  As a result we would spend hours in zones like Beholders Maze farming the mudmen for hours on end, trying to get enough ore to turn into metal to begin to craft anything at all.

The Big Shift

The biggest problem with Everquest was the acquisition of materials.  The first big shift in crafting was the creation of the “resource node”.  The first game I can remember playing that had unique resource harvesting nodes was Horizons: Empire of Istaria.  Almost as insanely difficult to find as the Everquest shot, was one of Horizons, now renamed Istaria: Chronicles of the Gifted.  The above shot shows a basic resource area, with little bits of rock scattered around the land.

While the game itself had many shortcomings, it had an amazing crafting system.  In addition to resource nodes, Horizons also introduced the concept of crafter only gear, that increased your skill and the ability to carry crafting items.  It also introduced a system of sleds, that you could load up with resources and then drag like a cart back to town.

In addition there were numerous “public works” projects, like building towns and bridges that opened up new content areas to the players.  The big problem however is, crafting was extremely tedious.  You spent literal hours harvesting materials in the field, then dragging it back to town to craft components, then additional hours spent applying them to the projects.  Building bridges for example, took literal weeks of players crafting nonstop to create.  While the game play was very unique, and intricate, it was also a bit dull.

The Mini Game

While extremely detailed, crafting in Horizons quickly became a chore and after the first few times doing anything it really lacked much fun.  With the release of Everquest II, I honestly feel the developers were trying to take this concept and make it fun.  As a result they introduced what I can only call the crafting mini-game.

On the right is an image of an item being crafted in Everquest II.  As you started crafting you reached certain milestones, each producing a slightly different version of what you were attempting.  Each step you managed to reach, produced a higher quality item.  If the item was part of a multi-step process, it ultimately determined the maximum quality of the final product.

As the player crafted an item, they would encounter various events that would impede their progress.  If you look below in the window you see the event “Loss of Concentration”.  Each crafting profession gave the player a set of new abilities for their action bar, each with an icon  that would correspond with a certain kind of event.  To counter “Loss of Concentration”, the player would mash the corresponding button on their hotbar.

While in some ways this made crafting seem a bit more like an epic struggle versus your materials… the realization was that ANY time you wanted to create even the most simple item, you had to deal with this interface.  Items never “grayed out” and became truly trivial.  There was always a chance of getting something that you couldn’t use from the process.  Over time they streamlined the process to reduce the number of useless items that got created in the process, and removed many of the 5 or 6 part processes to craft an item.  However it still retained the sluggishness of knowing, any time you needed to craft something for a guild member you were committing yourself to 10-20 minutes worth of slogging through the crafting mini-game.

Dumbing it Down

The release of WoW was game changing on all levels, and crafting was no different.  Prior to WoW the trend with crafting seemed to be to make it more and more intricate, giving players the option to make crafting their primary game play experience.  WoW went completely the different direction.  Everything about the crafting process was streamlined compared to its predecessors.

WoW kept the resource gathering system that was node based, but managed to greatly streamline the item creation process.  Sure there were very painful leveling experiences that involved lots of odd items (leatherworking I am looking at you), but for the most part the process was straight forward. 

You chose a gathering profession, and a crafting profession that complimented each other.  Gathering collected the items, and crafting spit out the finished items.  As the game moved on the leveling of these professions became even more streamlined.  However from day one, wow leaned on a crutch that would ultimately become the source of all of my frustration with the system.

Randomness Sucks

For some reason, Blizzard developers LOVE random chance.  If this were used primarily for those nice to have items, it wouldn’t be so bad, however every major crafting recipe relied solely on random chance.  Instead of making resources hard to get to, or drop off difficult to kill monsters, they placed a random loot game into the equation.  This was seen in the need to find the holy grail ore node like Khorium or Titanium, or the need to skin and herb for those annoyingly rare Arctic Fur, and Fel Lotus (or any Lotus for that matter).

There are many ramifications with a system like this.  Firstly, the rare must have items become ridiculously inflated in price in all of the markets.  This was especially noticeable with the rare Lotus drops, due to the fact that every raid on the server needed multiple each week to craft flasks.  Secondly there is a social cost to the random element, especially with the rare ore spawn.  Players will do anything and everything in their power to beat others to these spawns. 

The policy of fastest fingers win, ultimate leads to frustration on the whole.  Ultimately, I had reached a point where I really had no interest in crafting.  It was something I did, because ultimately as a raider I felt like I needed the various crafter only bonuses.  However once max level, I rarely did any crafting for fun.  Doing the daily quests, just seemed like skull drudgery due to the massive contention for resources.

The other major point of frustration with the WoW crafting system is actually two fold.  Firstly crafting has always been something you could do while leveling to augment your gear, and ultimately lead to a more enjoyable leveling process.  Problem was, that in general, past the first 75 levels of a trade skill, the items you could craft were greatly under your usable level range.  On top of this, there was the annoyance that very rarely could you ever craft a complete set of armor for any given range.  You could get one or two pieces, but never a full suit like most other games had.

Restoring My Faith

Due to the amount of loathing that I had built up towards crafting in general, I never really messed with it much during the first few betas of Rift.  Honestly it wasn’t until guild members started talking about being able to create weapons they couldn’t equip for several levels, that it peaked my interest.  So when I finally managed to start crafting during the head start, I was amazed at how enjoyable I found the process.

There have been complaints from those used to the more complex systems, that Rift crafting is too simple.  However for me, coming from the streamlined system of WoW, I appreciated that fact.  As I began leveling, I was impressed with the ease of resource gathering, and the ability to craft full sets of gear for any particular level range.  In addition, like my guild members talked about, I was able to craft items that I would grow into as I leveled rather than those that were of no real use to me.  This alone fixed several of my annoyances with crafting systems in general.

However, the big fix was still to come.  As I was harvesting copper nodes, I noticed I got a quest item: Unusual Ore.  When I took it into town, the Mining trainer gave me a quest to gather up 10 tin bars  and 10 copper bars.  Upon turning in, the trainer gave me a recipe for crafting bronze bars.  Instead of relying on random chance, all of the rare crafting materials in the game are similar to Bronze Bars, being an “alloy” of two existing items.  This pretty much knocks down my other major problem with the WoW system, it removes most of the randomness on a daily basis.

Universal Currency

One of the other nice systems that rift introduced was a universal crafting currency.  Artisan’s Marks are gained from doing work orders in the crafting center of your faction’s capitol city.  These are then used to purchase various “nice to have” patterns, especially the ones that use the rare materials.  You can level from 1-300 in any of the crafting professions without ever using these patterns, however they unlock often times higher quality items.

Having a universal crafting currency was a massive step in the right direction.  In WoW it became extremely frustrating that there was a unique currency for each profession, that could only be gained by doing daily quests.  With a universal currency, you can pick and choose which professions patterns to purchase.  On my rogue I am doing 2 rune crafting and 2 outfitter quests a day, but as a result I am saving up the currency to buy those expensive outfitter patterns. 

Where the system becomes counter intuitive however, is with the crafting Plaques.  Basically crafting plaques undo a lot of the good of having the universal system.  When you complete master level work orders, you have a random chance of gaining a plaque for your specific trade skill.  These plaques are used to purchase the most sought after epic quality patterns.  There is no construct in game that allows you to trade one flavor of plaque for another.  It seems to me, that Trion would have gone with a single crafting plaque currency rather than tying things down again to specific professions.

Ultimate System

As a whole, I can’t really call the Rift system the ultimate crafting system, but for my purposes it works.  Crafting for me is something that I like to use as downtime.  I go out adventuring in the world, gathering materials, and then go back to town and craft a few things up.  It acts as a much needed pause in the action, before going out again to kill more baddies.  However I have heard from others that they really miss the level of intricacy from systems like Everquest II. 

Problem is I am not sure where the happy medium would lay.  Adding complexity also adds to the amount of time that a player is forced to sit at the crafting machine.  For most of us this is not really a win situation.  In EQ2 I loathed having to craft anything for a guild member, because not only did it mean porting back to a central location, but also tying up a good amount of time that I could be off doing cool stuff.  With rift, I am always game to knock out whatever is needed, because I know that once the materials are pooled I can do a combine in a matter of seconds and be on my way.

I hope given time, additional patterns can be added that are more complex that will help give the craft-centric players more of a sense of ownership in the process.  As a whole, there really are not that many plaque patterns to gather.  I know on my armor crafter I have already purchased everything available, and simply do the dailies for money and the hope that eventually new patterns will be introduced.  However were the plaques trade-able I would be gladly handing them off to guild members to help them complete their sets.

Quality of Items

My other complaint is the fact that without dungeon drops, you cannot create high end gear at all.  In other games, I am used to those rare item patterns being equivalent to the first tier of dungeon/raid gear.  Problem is, that in Rift the epic crafted items are as a whole below Tier 1 dungeon level.  The player funnels all these resources into an item, and quickly finds out that it will be replaced the first time they run an expert dungeon. 

As a result, one of the big complaints is that none of the gear crafters can create is really valuable and worth selling.  Personally I have never used crafting as a profit center in games, but I can definitely see this as a problem.  Crafted epics as a result are becoming the stock and trade for secondary characters, and thoroughly useless to mains.  I am hoping that one of the patches manages to buff these up to at least Tier 1 level, giving them a slightly longer shelf life and worth more.

Long Ramble

I realize this post is extremely long, far longer than most of mine.  However I wanted to dig into the various systems before arriving at Rifts.  I like most of what I see in the Rifts crafting, and it has like the subtext said revived my interest in crafting as a whole.  I almost always have a stockpile of materials in my bank, and that is something I never could have said back in previous incarnations.  I can definitely see some weaknesses here and there, and some things I don’t like, but overall I think it managed to strike a “happy medium”.  Also anyone who actually managed to make it to the end of this post has some serious fortitude.