Despite having a now dead account, I still try and keep touch with my friends who are playing World of Warcraft.  Yesterday evening the buzz was surrounding the new and improved dungeon finder tool.  If you have read any of my recent posts on wow, you know that I consider this tool the “idiot button”, but I figured I would read the details and see if they were addressing any of the problems I had with it.  Below is a snippet that sums up the feature.  Full announcement can be found over on wow insider.

Failing To Understand Motivation

The above description of the new ability sounds great in theory, but it verifies a long held belief of mine.  Blizzard simply does not understand the motivation behind certain classes.  The classes that we are generally missing from the PUG landscape are the ones that require the biggest social responsibility.  It takes a special breed to be willing to take responsibility for other players into your own hands on a regular basis.

In WoW the class that has always been in the shortest supply are the tanks.  The tank is controlling force in any party, sets the pull speed, determines the approach, and for the most part directs the success of a run.  A good tank knows he has to rely on solid healing, expert dps and utility to get through the instance.  However someone has to be the voice of the party and More often than not, in a successful group, that is the tank.

To be a good tank, you need an instinctively protective nature.  You need the desire to protect the other players from harm and press yourself against the onslaught of mobs attacking you.  Doing this means you tend to develop a special bond for your fellow players, and as a result these players tend to ask you into groups on a regular basis.

Sure there are good tanks that are very reward focused, and chase every shiny new bauble available.  However after playing a tank in one form or another for 10 years, I believe a far greater number do it for other reasons.  I personally tank, because I enjoy the feeling of protecting my friends from whatever comes our way.  I enjoy saving the day in an epic fashion, and when you take away the familiarity with your players, much of that enjoyment goes away.

Failing To Understand Their Game

Kadomi touches on this issue in her post, “Call to Fail”, but I will expand further.  As I wrote about in my “Is WoW The WoW-Killer” post, the community of gamers is a much different place than when the game was released.  Long gone are the good natured, easy going players that are willing to work through a problem.  They have been replaced by the “lolurbad”, “faster!” and “big pulls” wrath genre morons.  As a result the tank ends up bearing the brunt of this player abuse. 

Frankly, no amount of carrot is worth the stick that the abrasive players already provide.  Stepping into a pug as a tank, many times is like stepping into a warzone.  The instances themselves are usually relatively simple, dealing with the selfish and socially mal-adjusted are the difficult part.  As the tank, you somehow have to figure out a way to steer this bus of constant frustration across the finish line in a timely manner. 

The simple truth is, if you are a good tank, you don’t have a need to pug.  You have a pool of players that are always willing to run heroics with you.  You become a favorite tour guide, that everyone knows will get them home safely.  Most nights in wow, I logged in to a sea of purple tells, many of which were friends asking me to come tank something for them.  At the end of the day, no amount of loot is worth dealing with the frustrations when you have a stable of “known good” players asking you for help.

This ties back in to what I said earlier, most of your good tanks are not doing it for the “money” so to speak.  Most of us actually like to help our friends.  We like to be contributing members of the guild and server community, and as a result become keystones in whatever environment we are in.  When you have this network of goodwill built up around you, why on earth would you as a player abandon that for an experience you know will lead you to invent new forms of cursing.

Lost Touch

This has been a constant thread I have seen among the various disillusioned players leaving World of Warcraft.  We all feel like Blizzard has abandoned us, the players that helped build its empire.  My grandfather had a saying, and I hope it will make sense to you non-Oklahomans: “You dance with the one that brought you”.  Basically most of the players I know filing out of WoW at this point, are players who like me played from release or near release.

We were the players that brought Blizzard to the throne of gaming it has managed to obtain.  Problem is along the way it forgot why we started playing their games in the first place.  In this facebook era of games, it is too easy to think it is natural to have millions of users to spare.  In doing so however, you forget all the reasons why your game was great in the first place.

I’m thankful to Trion at the moment, because they seem to get it.  After years of playing under Blizzard, Sony Online Entertainment, and Mythic I had come to expect a certain amount of distance between the company and its player base.  I expect them to not really understand why we cared about the game, and why we were playing it.  With Trion, it simply feels different.

In my time since starting Rift, I have seen far more involvement from the company as a whole than ever in my gaming career.  There have been 13 hotfixes and 3 patches, with the game only being out about a month and a half.  In the past I would have judged a game harshly on those numbers, thinking they were having to bandaid the game to keep it going.  Instead Trion launched the most complete product I have ever played, and continues to simply improve the experience with each release.

Magic Dust is Gone

I am not sure it is really quantifiable, but something is gone from WoW.  It is like the lid to a box has been opened and whatever magic dust was inside floated away on the wind, and is forever gone.  I left quite obviously to play another game, but many of my friends who are now leaving are just doing so because the game no longer holds whatever special property it once did for them.  Either they got tired of the hamster wheel, or simply stopped caring about the game play entirely.

I still believe this has been a gradual process of bad decisions that have lead us to this point, and this latest change in an attempt to buy off the tanks only supports that.  However I do still feel bad that whatever locomotive is at the head of the train, is most definitely off course.  I have many friends still playing WoW, and many that either do not have the systems or desire to jump to another game if WoW fails.  I honestly do hope someone will step in to balance the listing ship, before it capsizes.

Today is a fairly auspicious day for no real reason other than the fact that my wow account is officially dead now.  I feel like I should tell my characters to rest in peace or something.  I am extremely happy in that it means I can finally rebind the stupid accounts to the physical dongles, file them away in a drawer, and upgrade my stupid iphone.  I have been putting off an operating system upgrade for ages because of the horror stories of getting locked out of the mobile authenticator.  Now I can do so in peace and see if it improves the glitchiness with my stock iOS 4.0.

Have Rift Will Close

Last night went nothing like I expected it to.  I had originally planned on being gone, I had originally planned on traveling to a nearby town to meet a seller from craigslist and buy a laptop.  However since the seller has seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth, and is no longer responding to text or phone call, those plans went out the window.  On a side note, I am honestly hoping that nothing serious has happened, considering the last I heard from the seller he was boarding a plane to come back to Oklahoma.

Since my evening did not follow its normal plan, I decided to hang out and work on daily quests and rifts.  Recently I just have not been in the mood to do anything serious, and by serious I mean instancing.  As a tank, you are responsible for a good bit of the success and failure of any group you are in.  I just have not felt like wearing the leader hat the last few nights, so as a result I have participated in whatever invasions that have come along.

In my search to “catch them all” for the event, I have managed to get the 3 companion pets, and the bauble that makes you look all shade touched.  I’ve gathered about 150 more otherworldly sourcestone towards trinket that makes you look like the necromancer rogue pet, which costs 500.  I figure a few more days of daily quests and closing rifts will let me get all the spiffy limited time doodads.  In all my rifting however I still have yet to see a mount or any of the shadetouched weapon caches.  Here is hoping for a pony before the event closes.

Wrath of Kain

With yesterdays hotfix the level of intensity of the event was increased, and with it seemingly the frequency of major zone invasions.  I had heard rumor these existed, as a few of my guild members were in the server first level 50 major zone invasion last week.  However until last night I had not actually seen one myself.  I was carefully picking my way through my Order of Mathos daily quests when it hit.  Alsbeth was attacking Stillmoor, and we were about to be caught in the balance.

Within a few moments, the zone was lit up like a plaque victim with purple spots, each one pouring out all manner of nastiness.  The Defiant player-base formed up a raid and began working our way through destroying the pillars.  Each pillar, used in the summoning ritual was guarded by a zone boss, of similar difficulty to the normal invasion bosses.  The fact that the invasion had 4 pillars, and therefore at least four bosses was in itself impressive until we started moving across the land.

In our travels closing rifts, we managed to encounter 4 bone dragons, 4 giant constructs, and 4 archlichs.  There might have been more of these world bosses, but these were the ones I managed to see myself.  So that in itself makes a minimum of 20 boss type mobs up in Stillmoor at one time.  Each one of these bosses seemed to be capable of rewarding players with the rare quality Ancient Sourceshards.  With teamwork we managed burn through the rifts, destroy the pillars and shift the event into the next phase.

At this time, the map blew up with footholds, moreso than I have ever seen in a zone before.  While we burned through the invasions that were pouring out of the footholds, a group of players dedicated themselves to holding vigil at Zareph’s Return.  In this event, that was the key location that we had to keep from falling.  After all the fighting we managed to push into phase three, and face the invasion boss Kain.  This went as quickly as all rift bosses seem to, as everyone in the zone dog piled his location.  The reward for completing this epic invasion, was the fabled epic Ancient Sourcestone.

Wrath of Crucia

The wild ride in Stillmoor was over in about thirty minutes and so shortly afterwards I was back to doing my daily quests.  After an hour of chatting with guild and picking through quests, I heard the call go out that a greater invasion was hitting Iron Pine Peaks.  Considering I needed more Ancient Sourcestones, I rode to the nearest porticulum and popped into Whitefall.  It was with some trepidation that I joined the battle in Iron Pine. 

Last week, as I said some of my guild had participated in a major invasion, that happened to be in this zone.  Problem is, that night the invasion took over four hours to finish.  I looked at the clock, knowing I had roughly two hours of playtime left, and jumped into the fray hoping for the best.  The main issue with the IPP invasion, is that for some reason when it reaches phase two, the number of air rifts that spawn in the zone are at a minimum.  In addition to this, there is one known rift location in the far north of the zone that never seems to count towards the quest completion totals.

Knowing ahead that we more than likely were in for the long haul, it changed the way we approached the event.  Myself, Caspian, and a healer that was in zone Aran, quickly organized the raid into three basic goals.  The idea was that to hold out as long as we could, we needed to stop invasions from spawning.  In order to do this we needed to kill all of the rifts as they spawned as well as destroy all of the footholds.

Caspian charged off with a group that focused on closing the rifts, Aran lead up the defense of the Chancel of Labors, and I broke off with a small team and began systematically destroying each of the footholds in a sweeping pattern.  Within an hour we had whittled down things to where the majority of spawn points were down.  Each time an air rift would spawn, coordinates would be linked to the raidchat and a party would barrel off in that direction, quickly dispatching it. It became a waiting game. 

Since we closed down most of the possible spawn points, it meant that the few remaining spawners were constantly streaming mobs out to attack us.  Caspian and I had both gathered force at Whitefall in an attempt to salvage the town, but we both noticed that a massive invasion wave was heading straight for the Chancel.  Over time the defenders that were there, had splintered off to attack other things in the zone, and our map was indicating that a fairly skeletal crew of “purple dots” remained.  Over mumble, in a last minute decision we broke for the porticulum, thinking it might be our only chance to help save the wardstone.

We sprang from the portal, rounded the Chancel and had just enough time to charge an onslaught of enemies that were streaming down the path.  Each of us in our tank specs, furiously tanked at the wall of death.  It felt exactly like one of those action films, when the reinforcements arrive just at the right moment to turn the tide of the battle.  Caspian and I were those reinforcements, we were getting to turn the tide.  This outrageous assault on the Chancel continued for another thirty minutes to an hour as we turned away wave after wave of attackers.

Epic Defense

The event in Iron Pine Peaks was over three hours of constant fighting.  During this time I gained over 6000 planarite, and countless other doodads in the process.  I have to say this is precisely why I love Rift so much.  What would have otherwise been a down night, was turned into an epic fight against good and evil.  We didn’t spend time in an instance, or get amazing loot.  Instead we the players fought back and defended our allies as the world raided us.

The biggest thing for me at the end of the night as far as gains however was the fact that I managed to secure two of the precious ancient sourcestones.  With these I purchased two of the epic greater essences from the rare planar vendors in Stillmoor and Shimmersand.  They both proc amazingly often, and I am extremely thrilled to have them.  More importantly I have an epic tale to tell you all, about the journey.  I have said it before, Rift feels like a game that is more about the journey than the destination. 

At the end of the night it only cost me twenty gold, and my sanity.

At the time of posting this it has yet to roll out to the North American servers, but our European friends got it at 3:00 BST.  Hopefully by this evening these will be deployed to the North American servers as well.  Overall there are not a huge number of changes happening, a few tweaks here and there.  The most important tweak however, and I think many other players will agree is that the Dye Vendor is reported to be returning from his recent vacation.

Pretty Pretty Princess

Funny how finally playing a game with armor dyes has made us all addicted to them.  The talk in the general channels is nonstop questions and or jokes about the dye vendor.  I myself have had a pair of boots desperately in need of a dye job for several days.  One of our guild tanks has resorted to using a hideous color scheme compiled with the easily obtainable apothecary dyes.  I wonder if the color palette of seafoam green and magenta offends the mobs so much that it increases his aggro.

Two-Tailed Cats Be Gone

A controversial change coming down in the patch is the removal of Valmera mounts from Defiant players who were crafty enough to stealth run into the vendor inside of Sanctum.  Since this was not necessarily an exploit, it simply involved stealthing into enemy territory, I can see the frustration for the players this is effecting.  But in reality it is somewhat unfair to give defiant players an additional mount, regardless of the effort they went to gain it.  On the positive side, as the notes say the cost of the mounts are being refunded.

Trophies of Death

So one of the side effects of not having a true “rifthead” yet is you never really know if you just fail miserably at figuring out a quest, or if it is honest to god bugged.  There have been several of us stuck on the “The Saga of the Endless: Trophies of Death” quest step for weeks, never really figuring out what we needed to do to progress through it.  I am so relieved to find out that apparently it was in fact bugged and has been fixed.  Maybe I can continue climbing the ladder. 

One of the players on my server has the title Timelord, which comes late in the series.  Being a massive Doctor Who junkie, I must have this title regardless of the mental costs.  I just really really hope that it does not involve staring into the Untempered Schism.  I have bad enough headaches as is to risk ending up with that infernal drumming sound in my head at all times.

Hotfix Notes

official patch notes here

Over the course of the last several weeks this blog has all but become devoted to Rift, at least in it’s content matter.  One of the pieces you probably can’t glean however is that I have been approaching rift much differently than I did World of Warcraft.  In WoW, I was the leader of large guild, and raided multiple times a week on a schedule.  We fell in the casual raid category, but as a leader type I still pushed a good deal more than I should have to make sure things were getting done.

Slowing Down

When I cancelled my account I had 3 85s, 4 80s, and 7 between 60-80.  I prided myself on getting a character leveled and ready to raid in a minimal of time.  When I leveled my shaman to 80, it was fully epic geared and ICC10 ready within 5 days.  So to say I played with a focus and drive is a bit of an understatement.  Leaving WoW, and coming into Rift, made me realize how much of this process was my way of trying to make a game I no longer enjoyed fun again.

So as I entered Telara, I have taken a much more slow paced view of the world.  While I still hit the cap within 6 days played time, it was a much more gradual pace than what I was capable of.  The same has held true with dungeons.  Recently we have been running more than our share of experts both for gear drops and plaques.  While they have been fun, lately the pace we frequency of running them has started to remind me a bit too much of the countless hours I spent mashing my face against heroics for the guild.

I am nearing a complete set of tier 1 gear, with only my gloves lacking.  So after our initial push, I plan on taking a step back and moving more slowly.  The focus on experts has detracted from the other things I really enjoy in the game.  One of my favorite things is defending a town against an invasion.  For some reason it feels so epic, to stave off wave after wave of mobs trying to take over our territory.

One of the things I had to contend with in WoW was the barrage of tells I received the moment I logged in.  Recently with the focus on running experts, it has felt a bit like that again.  I log into questions of “what are we running tonight?”, “When will the Aussies be on?” and “how long do we wait before we pug this?”.  With the recent influx of newly 50s this should take some of this pressure off, but regardless I need to start saying no for my own sake.  WoW became a second job for me, and I refuse to let that happen in Rift.

The Skewed List

In my travels today I stumbled across an article on mmorpg.com entitled, Rift: 5 Things Rift Does Wrong.  While one point I mostly agree with, and another point I couldn’t care less about, there are three bullet points that I feel the author missed the boat on.  Now granted, just like this blog is most of the time, the author clearly states these are his opinions.

“Lifeless Questing”

The author is far from the first person to make this statement.  The Author sums up his point best in this statement “I find it a little disheartening that questing in Rift amounts to basically: go to hub, get a bunch of quests, go to bright yellow circle, kill things, return to hub when objectives are met. “.  Rift questing is very traditional, I will give them that.  Thing is, for a good number of mmo players, this is what we want.

Over the last few expansions one of the things I have detested about wow, is the fact that so many quests have turned into mini-games.  I don’t want to climb up a tree and throw bear cubs onto a trampoline, nor do I want to pilot a harvester and play a Super Mario like platform game as I try to climb a mountain.  What I want are well written quests with storyline that matters, and clearly defined objectives.  On top of that, I would really love to have clear visualization that is correct, so that I know where I should be going for this quest.

These two things ensure that if I am in the mood to read quests and really get into the storyline, then I can. The storyline in Rift is extremely well written and engaging, and when I am in the mood for it this is who I prefer to play.  However if I want to go on auto-pilot and quest for maximum experience, I can do that as well because the minimap tools clearly guide me to my objectives.  Nothing frustrates me more than being forced to play some poorly designed minigame, when all I really wanted was to go here and kill X things.

Granted, I come from an earlier time in MMO history, and much of my roots and practices are still there.  When I am purposefully trying to level, I find myself grinding quests the same way I used to grind through mobs.  However, with the slower pace I have taken in this game I have found myself enjoying the content along the way.  This game doesn’t hold your hand as much as other games, and to find some of the cooler things you have to get off the beaten path and go exploring.  There are so many quests you will never find, just by following the golden path.

“Stale Solo Play”

I guess I really don’t understand what the author means here when he says the solo play is stale and boring.  Really comes to the point of what exactly he is calling solo play.  To me, anything you can do as a single player without pre-planning, in an impromptu fashion is by nature…  solo play.  So while he spends more time harping on the fact that he doesn’t enjoy the questing system, I really don’t see him explaining why soloing is specifically boring.

To me this game is one of the more solo friendly games to come along in a long time. Why is this?  Simple… the public grouping dynamic.  On our server it is generally considered rude if you are running in private group mode, so for the most part players are open to the public.  So this allows you as a solo player to quickly merge and mesh with additional players that are completing things you couldn’t normally do by yourself.

So much of my time spent doing rifts is entered into in a solo fashion.  I ride out into a zone, and make my way to a rift near the porticulum town.  From there I enter into a public group, and start moving from rift to rift freely all the while, participating in a group dynamic while still playing on your time, your schedule.  Because of this same “open” dynamic, when you are off questing you are far more likely to find assistance when you encounter a road block on a quest than if you were truly alone in the world.

“Checklist Crafting”

This is one I have heard a lot over the years.  Crafting should be more intricate, or crafting should be more involved.  Problem is, these are awesome things in theory but nobody actually wants to play a game with one of those systems.  Everquest II had a cool system, for about the first five minutes I played it, after that the novelty quickly wore off when I realized I would never be able to just sit down, and craft a bunch of items quickly for my friends. 

For me crafting holds a special place in MMOs.  As an adventurer type, I go off exploring the world, and come back to town with a bag full of collected bits.  Crafting gives me a moment of downtime, from the action of questing, rifting, dungeons, and raids.  A time for me to set up a bunch of things to “build”, and go afk and get something to drink.  This downtime, gives me a much needed pause button from the game, and also lets me get some cool stuff made in the process.

I am at the very most a casual crafter, but honestly I would imagine serious crafters are even less for a more involved system.  If you are a serious crafter, chances are you play the auction house with your wares.  Doing so means you farm up a good number of mats, multiple times a week, and batch create your items to be sold.  If you have to sit there at the keyboard and mash buttons to get your stock replenished, you are just creating a new grind for players.  While you might think otherwise, fire and forget it crafting really is a good thing for an mmo.

The other complaint that always comes up, and this was slightly eluded to in the post is that crafted items in Rift are the same as dropped items.  Hardcore crafters for some reason feel that their items should be better than everyone else’s.  I have seen this time and time again in games, and I am assuming this is so that a dedicated crafter can maintain a monopoly on the best gear.  Thing is, these games are about epic adventure, not setting up trade cartels.  If you really want to become a master artisan that corners the economy, you might want to look into other games.

Things I Don’t Disagree With

“PVP Balance”

Firstly the author makes a point about PVP balance being off due to the massive number of soul choices.  I can completely see his point on this one, and were this something I cared about I would probably agree with him.  Thing is, I would almost as soon player versus player combat not exist in MMOs at all.  Generally in every game, one of two things happens.  Either the PVP balancing screws up PVE enjoyment, or PVE playability jacks up PVP fairness.  It is a balancing act that no game has ever gotten right, and honestly I wish to god they would simply quit trying.  PVP is something best left for other genres in my opinion, like first person shooters.

“Just Two Leveling Paths”

While I don’t necessarily think it is an Achilles heel, the fact that there is only one Defiant starting zone and one Guardian starting zone pretty much guarantees that by your second or third time leveling though, everything will be very stale.  It has it’s pluses and negatives honestly.  I have always liked the fact that each of us as players has the same shared experience.  There is no night elf leveling experience, or dwarf leveling experience, only the shared faction experience.

However as I am leveled my rogue through Freemarch, and now Stonefield, the ground definitely feels well trodden.  I hope given time they will add additional starter experiences, but ultimately you have to look at it this way.  With the diverse functionality of Rift, there is no reason why a player would ever need more than four characters per faction.  Were I to consider leveling 8-10 characters like in wow, I would probably cut myself.  But leveling four characters, over the same quests is really no different than having to level characters up to the new cap each time an expansion comes out.

In Northrend, with 6 80s, I can promise that things felt just as well done each time I moved a character to Dragonblight, even trying to alternate between Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord.  The only game I have played in recent memory that truly gave me an insane number of leveling paths, was Everquest II.  However we didn’t reach that point until several expansions out the door.  At launch, basically you were given the same kind of either Freeport or Qeynos experience as Rift.  I would be far more disheartened if I had seen poorly designed content, rather than limited starter options.

Divergent Post

I know this post today is a little divergent from what you guys are used to seeing from me since the focus on rift.  Every so often I will read something and want to comment on it, and this blog has long been my format for these comments.  Expect to see more informational posts, but at the same time expect to see more editorial commentary as well.