I realize it is super late in the day for me to be doing my normal morning blog post…  but it’s a weekend and I also do not have anyone else here in the house with me to help me gauge what time of the day it is.  Additionally I did a ton of amazing and awesome things last night and this morning… and I can talk about absolutely none of them.  So that leaves me scrambling for things to say that do not break some NDA somewhere.  I know I am not setting this blog post up extremely well.

The Laptop Saga

When last we visited my laptop, it was having intermittent issues with the power cord.  I took the laptop to a repair guy who told me that it was most likely still the power cord… but I had just bought a shit one for cheap from amazon…  which I did.  I went through the trouble and found an OEM power supply from Asus… same model numbers and everything and it arrived on Thursday.

I have to say all day Thursday I was super pumped about going home and being able to game on the couch again.  I get the magical cord out of the box… hook it up… and the same damned thing happens.  So screw you laptop… and screw you guy that told me it was most definitely the cord.  No really I am sure he was just trying to do the least invasive thing first.  Now I have no clue what is up with my laptop… and at this point the repair guy doesn’t think it is just the power socket and would more likely be something motherboard related.

Enter New Laptop

I had been drooling over a laptop that was posted a few weeks back on Craigslist… so when it seemed like a working laptop was not imminent I decided to text the guy.  Sure enough he still had it, and I was able to talk him down in price a bit.  The laptop is a Lenovo Y500 with Dual Geforce 660 video cards in a SLI configuration.  Pretty much everything about the laptop is drool worthy, and it is a massive upgrade to both my desktop upstairs and my previous laptop.

I ran to the bank and was able to get the cash that night, and text the guy…  he said he was busy at the moment but would text me back when we were able to meet up.  We agreed upon a local QuikTrip.  Apparently he had some car trouble and was in the middle of switching out an engine… and it ended up taking far longer than he had expected.  So as a result Thursday night didn’t happen.

The Delaying Game

We had set up to meet Friday night at 4:50 at the same QuikTrip.  QT is pretty much a common craigslist meet up spot, because you can go there are 4 am.. and it will still be extremely busy… with a pretty regular police stopping by factor.  I go there just ahead of the allotted time, and wait…. and wait… watching the highway getting almost excited every time I see a car that matches his description drive by.  At 5:30 I get a series of back and forth texts saying that he is having to work a double shift, because they are super busy.

I fully understand that, stuff happens…  he was supposed to text me back whenever he could meet up.  As of 1:15 the time I am writing this… I have not heard a word.  So at this point I am pretty much assuming that the deal has fallen through.  I am having flashbacks to all the hell I went through trying to get my last laptop off craigslist (I even blogged about it) before finally saying fuck it and ordering it from amazon for full price.  I personally like not having to take the initial value hit, and we buy quite a bit of stuff off craigslist for my wife… but it always seems to go to complete shit when it is something for me.

Hopefully the guy will text back with a firm time to meet up, but at this point I am not really holding my breath.  I have looked online, and I can do pretty much what I did last time and get the same configuration from an online retailer for a bit more.  However I just hate doing that.  It feels like we have a few good purchases again, and it restores my faith in humanity… then when I want something I end up dealing with nothing but flakes.

Rift Re-Launch

I seriously hate thinking of this as a re-launch, but this term keeps getting used over and over recently.  Quite honestly however as a player it does feel like in many ways we are returning to April of 2011 and the launch of the game.  There have been some pretty significant queues on all of the servers.  Deepwood has been running around thirty minutes for Patrons, and Faeblight I have heard is around an hour and a half.  Trion has taken steps to try and alleviate this, however in their traditional “good guy fashion” they have done something to apologize to the players.

Pictured above is me riding one of the new cool mounts they added to the game with the opening of the store.  This normally goes for 1350 gems on the store, and from what I can tell has been selling pretty well.  However as an act of contrition, Trion has given every single patron a unique version of this mount… with a slightly different color pattern as a way of saying that they are sorry for the hassle of queues.  It is this kind of thing that makes me love Trion the company, and why I have stayed subscribed even when I was not actively playing the game.

If there is any company that deserves to be doing well… it is Trion.  I love supporting them because they really feel like they are one of the good guys.  As evidenced by my choice of topic yesterday, I am seeing so many players coming back to the game that I have not seen around since the original launch.  The game itself is in so much better a place than it was back then.  So hopefully a good chunk of these players will still along and chip some money in to support the game.  Based on the reports SWTOR has been doing insanely well since the F2P switch… and based on the first few days it seems like Rift has even more players.

Wrapping Up

Well like I said… so much of what I would want to talk about I cant.  So I really don’t have much else.  I am extremely ready for my wife to get home.  The house feels insanely empty without her.  My office gets super cold during the summer, as it is the first stop on the air exchange path… and has two vents.  I think this makes the cats not want to spend much time here… so without warm fuzzies to keep my company I am really just limited to my friends on mumble.  I am so ready not to be the only person in the house.  I hope you guys have a great weekend.

One of the things I was thinking about last night… is how much has changed in Rift since its release.  I know I spend a good deal of my time explaining things to my friends that are just starting the game, but last night I had a friend come back to the game after not playing since shortly after release.  There has been a lot of changes in that time, an almost staggering amount.  I thought I would take a few minutes this morning and outline some of the ones I find important, or think are easily missed.

Rift Mobile Client

This one is often missed, and Trion itself does a fairly lousy job of promoting it.  Basically there are two applications tied to Rift… the mobile authenticator and then the mobile client.  What the client gives you is access to guild chat, direct player messaging, a handy invasion tracker and the most important feature… the “Lootables” scratcher cards. 

There are three types of cards available by default…  Planar Invasion shown above that rewards planar currency, Crafty Critters that rewards random crafting materials, and Shinies! that well… gives you a chance to win random artifacts from all the sets.  Occasionally there will be a fourth card that is tied to whatever world event happens to be going on, and will reward seasonal event currency.  The cards accrue once every hour, for a maximum of 6 cards stacked up at any time.  I tend to log in sometime during the morning and sometime during the evening and play all six cards at the same time.

IPhone Client Download – Android Client Download

 

Planar Goods Vendors

Now that you a stash of planar currency that you have won from the lootables game… you should probably visit your nearby neighborhood Planar Goods and Rare Planar Goods vendors.  These will be located in all Mathosian leveling zones and sell a variety of goods for that hard earned Planar Currency.  The Rare Planar Goods vendor will sell several pieces of level appropriate gear, and the Planar Goods vendors tend to focus on Planar Essenses.  If you end up with an excess if purple quality currency, there is even a way to convert it to planarite by buying planar caches.  I find the combination of the lootables app and the planar goods vendors an excellent way to keep a character outfitted as you level.

Planar goods vendor listing from Rifthead

Instant Adventures

One of the most interesting features of the game is the ability to jump into essentially a group quest from anywhere in the world.  When you make it to Meridian, you get the option to enter Instant Adventures through a quest giver, however you can jump into them at any point prior to that by clicking the |> symbol on the menu bar and choosing Instant Adventures.  Essentially you can think of them as quest rifts…  in that it is a rolling group activity where you are asked to complete group objectives.  Every so many rounds you will be presented with a boss of sorts, that gives you a shot at planar gear caches.  The Adventure will continue on indefinitely… teleporting you to different areas of the map.  It is the perfect “I want to do something” activity, because you can hop on the adventure train and leave whenever you get tired or bored or decide you want to do something else.  A word of warning… you end up leveling extremely quickly through Instant Adventures.

Cross Server Chat

At some point along the line they opened up the lines of Cross Server communication.  You can talk to players on other servers by addressing them by this pattern  <Username>@<ServerName> so to talk to me, that is Belghast@Deepwood for example.  Additionally you can add people on other servers to your friends list, and see when they are on and in what zone they happen to be in.  Additionally you can join server channels for other servers by typing /join <channelname>@<servername>.

Cross Server Everything

This opened up some new possibilities… and they didn’t just stop with communication.  Basically you can do almost anything cross server these days.  The unofficial Cross Server event channels are CrossRaids@Faeblight and CrossEvents@Faeblight by joining these you can get in on action going on with any server.  If you join up with a cross server group, you can right click your portrait and choose “Teleport to Instance” and this will not so intuitively…  teleport you to the server the event is going on with.  This allows you to freely group with any player on any server at any time.  When you are done with whatever activity you are doing, you can right click your portrait and choose “Leave Instance” to get back to your own server.

Chronicles

At some point over the last two years since launch, they added in a new kind of small group based activity called Chronicles.  Essentially a Chronicle is a 1-2 player version of a raid encounter, designed to give you minimal loot, but let you experience the storyline told through each of the raids without the need for a large raid group.  There is a daily chronicle quest in Meridian, and doing it rewards dungeon currency.  More importantly it is a nice casual activity designed for two friends to complete.  They are pretty quick to complete and offer minimal trash mobs, and you get to fight the various boss encounters of the dungeon… but with far more forgiving mechanics.

Conquest

Conquest is essentially three way faction based PVP in the style of Dark Age of Camelot.  You are teleported into a map with multiple objectives, and you need to seize and hold as many as you can for your chosen faction.  The factions themselves are completely arbitrary, and you will likely end up playing multiples of them as the game tries to auto balance.  This was brought in with the “Faction as Fiction” patch, allowing you to freely group Defiant and Guardians together.  It seems to be on roughly an hour timer, so most avid players queue for this before starting their daily quests.

Faction As Fiction

Since I just mentioned this… and it is a pretty massive change in the game…  I thought I should make its own bullet point.  Defiant and Guardians are no longer diametrically opposed to one another…  you can now freely communicate, group, and join guilds with either faction.  This was a massive improvement, because to me faction walls always feel super artificial and just get in the way of my enjoyment of any game.  Previously Guardians and Defiants would work together by the use of /say to communicate… but this just made it all work better.  You are still restricted in the ability to go into guardian or defiant held areas like Sanctum and Meridian… however you can have both factions in the same guild.

Addons

These were not there at release and it took quite a bit for them to be added in, so I thought I would say a quick word or two.  Rift has pretty solid add-on support but they do it in a way slightly different than World of Warcraft does them.  Essentially you can make an add-on do almost anything, but it has to be an additive process… you cannot overwrite any core game functionality with your own features.  The prime example is Imhothars Bags… it gives you a Bagnon style single bag interface, but instead of overriding what your default bags look like… it simply creates a brand new window.  This admittedly takes some getting used to.

Some addons I use regularly are…

• King Boss Mods – yup you guessed it… this is the DBM for Rift essentially
• Rift Meter – simple single player dps meter… only shows your own damage output for diagnostic use
• RareDar – alerts you when you might be near the spawn point of a rare mob
• BananAH – this is the quintessential auction house mod, makes posting items much easier
• CarnageBook – shows you which carnage quests you are missing for a given zone

Server Transfers

Having trouble finding the right server?  Unlike other games… Rift allows the player to change servers freely.  The restrictions are that you have to be level 15 to change servers, and that you can only do it once per character every seven days.  However these restrictions are pretty loose considering the value this gives players.  If they decide a specific server community is not to their liking… or if a guild dries up and they want to go play with some other friends…  this is completely doable and doable for free.

Crafting From Bank

This one was huge for me when it went in.  Essentially when you are crafting, it will give you access to all materials that are in your bank.  So you can stock pile materials in your bank, and craft up items as needed.  This will save most players a lot of bag space as they are roaming around the world.  My only wish is that someday they might segregate the crafting bank off and make it account wide… and do some kind of deposit construct from anywhere in the world.

Auto Sort Bags

This was another huge one for me when I noticed it existed.  If you look in the image above, there is a little icon that has been added to the right-hand side of your bags.  This basically will sort your bags filling your last bag first, and sort your items by item type.  So it will sort all your gear together, crafting materials together, and other categories together.  This makes life so much better, and there is a similar feature added to banks allowing you to sort your bank bags as well.

Searchable Bags

Also in the above image you notice there is now an icon to the left-hand side of your currency window with a little magnifying glass.  This allows you to search items in your bags for a specific string.  You can also access this by hitting the default windows search hotkey Control+F.  The currency window becomes the search box, and any item that does not match the pattern you have typed in gets greyed out in your inventory, making whatever you are looking for nice and bright.

Wrapping Up

I need to get on the road, but I think these are most of the major items that have changed since patch that at least were extremely important to me.  I hope players that are new to Rift and players that are returning to Rift find them useful.  I hope you all have a great day and a great weekend.  I am extremely thankful that the week is almost over.

This is one of those mornings that I don’t really know what to write for the intro.  I am blaming it on feeling groggy and the excess amount of asthma medication I have been taking to get over this rough spot.  I ended up having to go into work after all yesterday, since there were events happening that I had to deal with personally.  I managed to get through most of the day by taking a double breathing treatment and just dealing.  Ironically it was going to lunch that killed me…  we went to a new BBQ joint around the corner… and I did not factor in the “bbq smoke” factor. 

F2P Done Right

If you have been playing Rift for awhile, then yesterday was like Christmas morning.  Upon logging into the game yesterday I was greeted with so many patron benefits.  There was this huge graphic ticking down all of the loyalty points I had received and an odd burst of onscreen confetti.  Essentially I was roughly halfway through the purple tier of loyalty, and therefor got all the rewards leading up to that.  Additionally I had roughly 32,000 gems waiting on me to spend.  I was like a kid in the candy store looking through all the possibilities that I could purchase.

Essentially it seems like almost everything that required a significant platinum outlay is now purchasable with gems.  This includes wardrobe slots, extra souls, extra bank vault tabs, 2 new extra bag slots, mounts of all speeds, dimension goodies, wardrobes and equipment.  Just through loyalty bonuses, it seems as though I got two extra roles, as I now have my 5th and 6th role available.  One of the coolest rewards that I have yet to get permanently gives your player portrait the circle of red thorns that denotes an elite mob.  Trion has put in so much work on making this something really awesome for all players.

The Store

One of the changes that I was not fully expecting is the fact that every single vendor UI in the game has been updated.  This has several sweeping effects on the gameplay in general, almost all of which for the better.  The screenshot above shows one of the recipe vendors in Meridian.  You will notice there is now a built in preview window so that simply clicking on an item previews its appearance.  Additionally if the item can be purchased with multiple currencies…  platinum, special currency or store gems the prices are all listed out separately.

The big change I was not expecting is the fact that you can open this store pretty much anywhere in the world, and purchase almost any faction specific item.  If the item requires a specific faction, it will be listed as well.  I have never been able to remember which vendor sold which item, especially when it comes to the various faction locked dimension baubles.  This gives you one extremely powerful, searchable and filterable UI for accessing all of these vendors.  Additionally this also means that you can purchase your raid and dungeon mark gear from anywhere in the world… including inside of that dungeon.

The thing that has overwhelmed me is the concept of just how much stuff is now up on the store.  In the wardrobes section for example…  there are literally several hundred outfits to choose from, including some new premium outfits.  Essentially it seems that pretty much any graphical appearance that exists out in the world somewhere… can be purchased through the store.  The other thing I noticed is that you don’t have to buy just completed outfits…  if you farmed your little arse off to get some appearance but were missing the boots…  you can just pick up said boots.

The Pricing

So far the pricing model seems more than fair to players.  I want to say last night I saw that $20 bought you roughly 3200 gems.  So many of the items I actually wanted were well under 1000 gems.  This included 150% speed mounts, large dimensions, almost all of the wardrobes.  The bank vaults and two inventory tabs were fairly expensive but still within the 1000 gem range.  The one intriguing item to me was the trade skill slot unlocks.  Apparently you can now have up to 9 trades kills on a single character and it is 1200 roughly per unlock. 

I’ve essentially blown through all the gems that they gave me for extended loyalty, but I managed to get so many things that I felt I never could have.  I am horrible at farming currency in MMOs… it is just not a thing I enjoy doing at all.  I have a love/hate relationship with daily quests, and I have never been one to touch the auction house other than to purchase items.  The concept of acquiring money through any way other than the random and constant killing of monsters just feels tedious as fuck to me.  So as a result I always felt like I lacked the cash in game to do the things I really wanted to do.

Last night changed all that…  with the freebie currency I

• Purchased the Moonshade Pools Dimension
• Picked up several random Dimension Items Packs
• Picked up two Large Houses for the Dimension
• Bought the spiffy black gothic wardrobe outfit
• Upgraded my mount to 150%
• Bought the two extra bag slots
• Bought most of the new bank vault tabs
• Bought 3 new wardrobe slots
• Bought an assortment of the Deeps boxes
• Bought 2 Trade skill slots so I could add on Weapon-smithing and Foraging
• Various sundry other little things…

I feel like I got massive amounts of quality of life things for the gems, things that I had always wanted but never had the platinum to pick up.  Essentially every thing I saw last night felt extremely reasonable price wise.  There are no $20 dollar pets or horses there… even the most expensive mounts would have been maybe $10 in gems.  This combined with all the nifty loyalty perks… like a 1 hour timer teleport to Tempest Bay made last night an extremely exciting night for me.

Patron Queues

The negative side effect of all this goodness.. is the fact that it has brought back queues for Rift with a vengeance.  Patrons aka subscribers cut to the front of the line… but on most servers there was still a significant queue for Patrons.  On Deepwood we had a roughly 20 minute patron queue, but on Faeblight they were up to an hour and a half at one point according to friends.  This is going to frustrate a large number of players, so I hope there is something they can do to alleviate the server load at least temporarily. 

I think it is awesome that pretty much everyone is coming back.  I have friends who had no interest in the game previously, patching back up their game clients to log in and check it out.  The real test will be whether or not the players stay.  Rift is one of those games that I would absolutely love… if I had a stable group of friends that wanted to play it.  Since our release guild fell apart as folks got bored with the game… I have essentially been flitting back and forth between guilds trying to find a new home.  The group I am with now is super nice, but it just isn’t the same as playing with the Stalwarts.  Fifteen years of assorted friendships cannot be replaced that quickly with new ones.

I feel like these changes however have lit a new fire under players to come back to Rift.  There is so much good happening in the game right now, so many amazing systems to play with.  I am overwhelmed by just how good the store implementation is.  I was expecting Trion to dip their toes in the water, but instead they turned on the fire hose.  The real challenge will be whether or not they can keep adding new and interesting reasons for people to spend money to the already significant catalog of items.

Wrapping Up

I need to wrap up and get on in to work.  I hope you all have an amazing day out there… and if you find yourself checking in on Rift, make sure to add Belghast@Deepwood and Belgrave@Deepwood to your friends lists.  I know I will be spending quite a bit of time in game in the coming weeks, and those tend to be the two characters I play the most.  I have a lot of friends starting up or getting back into the game, so here is hoping we can get some grouping going.