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.

Today’s blog post marks a first for the Aggronaut.  In the past I have made mention of various bits of my actual non-digital life, but never actually written about anything on a detailed level regarding what happens in the game of life.  Since this is a new kind of post, I made it a spiffy title.  I will attempt to use it from now on when I make a very reality laden post.

This Laptop’s Gone to Heaven

I realize that a lot of the readers out there have to make the choice between either playing on a laptop, or playing on a dedicated gaming pc, but for the last several years I have had the best of both worlds.  While upstairs in my office, I use my gaming desktop and when downstairs hanging out with my wife I play from a laptop.  It wasn’t until I lost this ability that I realized what a privilege it really was.

It was an ordinary Saturday afternoon several weeks back, I was hanging out downstairs in my comfy chair with my wife catching up on school work when the video froze on my laptop.  I had seen my machine get hot before, but this was positively steamy.  The video on screen looked like one of those checkerboard wipe effects that were so popular during the 80s.  I powered my machine off thinking initially it had just over heated.

Several hours later I tried booting up again only to find no video on the screen, just a combination of white lines on the screen that looked much like a UHF test pattern.  Long story short, the laptop was toast.  After further diagnosis determined that the video was pretty well fried.  Since video is on the motherboard, that meant a new motherboard and for a 3 year old laptop, that was pretty much a non-starter.

Hello Craigslist My Old Friend

Being the cheapskates we are, my wife immediately began looking on craigslist to see what was available.  In the past we have both had phenomenal luck getting good deals on Craigslist.  In fact, three years ago I purchased this laptop from a local individual at a bargain basement price, and it had performed admirably until now.  There was nothing really in our city, so my wife being the craigslist aficionado that she is extended the parameters to include some of the nearby areas.  After some hunting we found a few good deals roughly a 2 hour drive from the house. 

Flake 1: The Veteran

The first deal we found was an Asus G73JH reportedly months old, and $900.  Looking at the specs, it had everything I needed and wanted so we made contact.  Turns out the guy was enlisting in the Army and bouncing around to jump through the various hoops dealing with entrance.  I definitely understood the idea that he really had no control over his time, so I left it in his hands to tell me a time when it would be good to meet up.

We exchanged texts back and forth for about a week, each time he was uncertain of when he could meet.  He finally tried to find a friend that would be willing to meet up with me to sell the laptop.  Problem is, apparently his friends were assholes, since after several days he couldn’t find a single one willing to help him out.  Finally after several days, he said that he honestly didn’t know when he would be back in the area, and it would be better for me to find another option.

I appreciate his situation, but he still gets scored as the first flake of many that I have had to deal with.  I appreciate the fact that he was honest in the end instead of stringing me along for weeks.  However all the time spent dealing with him, cemented my desire to get an ASUS G73 series laptop.  So basically at this point I knew what I was looking for.

Flake 2:  The Meth Head

In the same basic area as the previous posting, there was a new one.  This time it was even better, the same exact laptop as the Veteran, but this time they only wanted $600 for it.  If I was willing to buy it for $900 I absolutely leapt on this one.  This was on a Wednesday, and after a few texts back and forth we agreed to meet up Saturday morning.  I considered this a done deal, and went on with my life, making plans to drive up on the weekend.

Thursday night I got a text about 10:30, saying that someone else had offered them $50 more and they were going with that.  Needless to say this pissed me off more than a little bit.  I was raised with an ethic that when you agreed on something, you had a verbal contract that you were honor bound to fulfill.  On top of that, the fact that they were willing to flake out on me, for only $50 more just added to the frustration. 

A series of texts back and forth, ended up with me giving up on this one.  Each time I would say I would match the offer, and they would text me back saying that the other person had raised theirs.  Basically as I came to realize the Meth head as I have dubbed them, needed as much money as they could get as fast as they could possibly get it.  So whereas I needed to plan my trip, and as such could only really do it on the weekend, the other person bidding against me could be there at 9:00 in the morning.

Basically I figured it was one of two things.  Either they needed to make rent, as it was the first of the month, or they were just an unethical schmuck.  Either way I was basically out of another laptop option.  So back to the drawing board, and back to Craigslist.  You’d think I would have learned my lesson after two of these incidents, but at the suggestion of my wife I dove back into the cesspool once again.

Flake 3:  The Runaway

Early during the process, we found this posting for what would be basically my ultimate laptop.  Solid state main drive, GeForce 460m 1.5 gig video, Bluray drive, etc.  The only thing that kept me away from the positing initially was the fact that it was $1150.  Like always we were trying to get most bang for the buck, but considering that $1150 is pretty much top dollar for Craigslist, I figured surely this one would be legit.

I sent the user a text message on Friday, and after a brief exchange we set up a time on Tuesday evening to meet up.  The timing was pushed out because the poster was on a business trip, and would be flying in on Monday.  I went on to explain that I had 2 other users flake out on me, and I wanted to make sure that since we had made a deal that it would be a done deal.  Poster said he understood, and far as he was concerned as long as things went as planned on Tuesday it was a done deal.

Here is where things start to go off the rails.  On Sunday evening I got a text back from the poster, saying that he was about to board a 9 hour flight, and was considering not working Monday.  Wanted to know if we could meet up.  Since I had arranged to drive my wife’s vehicle on Tuesday (better for longer trips), I responded back saying that if at all possible I needed to keep it to Tuesday.

This is the last communication we received from the poster.  Each day I texted, trying to verify whether or not the meeting was still good.  I tried to give the poster the benefit of the doubt, there are a lot of things that can happen to keep you from being able to respond.  Tuesday came around, and still no word.  We gave him an hour and a half past the time I normally would have left town to get word to us as to whether or not it was still on.  Since it was a 2 1/2 hour drive, we opted not to go since we were never able to get in touch with the guy.

I tried texting and calling, but to this day I have yet to receive any form of contact back.  Initially my wife and I were concerned that something tragic might have happened.  But since then, the same phone number has posted other items on Craigslist and removed them as well.  Basically this guy is a schmuck, and has been ignoring us.  Who knows why, but currently the laptop is still posted on craigslist, I am guessing the guy was trying to make another deal on the side.

The Compromise

One of the biggest frustrations I have encountered with the Asus g73sw laptop is there are thirty bazillion different configurations and each and every retailer seems to have their own flavor.  Over the course of these weeks of annoyance I have torn apart each and every major online retailer, trying to figure out what each one has over the others.

Best buy for example has one of these that is available in store.  However, it is gimped in many ways including the fact that while most of the g73 configurations can run 1920×1080 the Best Buy flavor can only run 1600×900.  The lower resolution could probably be dealt with, but turns out that to further add to the limitations their models only have 1 gig dedicated to the video card and use a 128bit bus instead of 192bit like the other models.

Then you have issues like Amazon, that for some reason only give you a 1 year warranty, whereas most Asus laptops have a 2 year warranty.  Since navigating the features of the various models, and figuring out where the shortcoming of each has been a massive undertaking a compromise was proposed by my wife.  Locally there was a Gateway p-7811 FX laptop posted for a couple hundred, that was the upgraded big brother of my original p-6831 FX laptop.  While this is not what I wanted for the long term, it did solve the problem of me not having a laptop anymore.

Luckily this fourth person was not a flake, and was an MMO gamer.  Very nice, in fact they attempted to convince me to going back to WoW, and playing on their server.  Funny how ALL wow gamers are instant friends.  Anyways the basic idea is to use the laptop until I get things sorted out in my head as to which model I am planning to order.  Then rebuild the laptop with a fresh OS and pass it off as a hand-me-down to my wife. 

Her laptop is more than a bit dated at this point, and what was a relatively beefy game machine for its time will do all the office applications and web surfing that she will ever need.  I got things up and running yesterday, and after about 2 hours worth of tweaking got the settings at a happy medium of performance and pretty.  Rift looks far better than it did on my previous FX, and I am able once again to enjoy hanging out downstairs and gaming at the same time.

Back to Digital World

This was my first real, reality based post so hopefully no one is running to remove me from their RSS feeds at this point.  I promise we will be returning to Rift news, and gaming features this week.  However since this epic hunt for a laptop has consumed most of my personal processing cycles over the last few weeks I felt it warranted a post.

In Rift news, today the iPhone version of the Rift Mobile authenticator has been released.  I have the software already on my iPhone and will go through the process of binding it to my account this evening.  Having an authenticator again is like a warm blanket of security.  At this point, Rift honestly is one of the most hack proof games out there, and we are already seeing the effects of this. 

The frequency of classical gold farmers has increased massively, and while I still don’t like them, they almost feel quaint and old fashioned compared to the horrific gold hackers we have gotten used to dealing with.  Not saying I am willing to welcome them.  But I would far rather have to deal with farmers in zones, than hackers trying to invade my account through viruses.  The only way we can ever be rid of either is to remove the demand for the virtual currency in the first place.

During the course of the week I have had a number of little bits and baubles that I wanted to share, but didn’t really feel like fit with the thrust of a certain post.  In Rift, if you complete the objectives of a stage in a timely manner you get bonus stages.  I reserve the right to post a long rambling mess at any time the mood fits me, but I think for now I will try and relegate them to my “bonus stage” posts.

Foul Cascade Shortcut

I have been trying to find a good way to work this in for a week now but having zero luck.  Once you hit 50, one of the things you will inevitably do is run experts.  One of the easier and more rewarding of these tier 1 experts is Foul Cascade.  As a Defiant player, getting to this instance is a thorn in our side as it involves running north through guardian infested territory from the Scarwood Lift porticulum.

While making the run for what felt like the hundredth time I decided there had to be an easier way.  In other games, players would get banned for “wall hacking” their way across zone lines.  But in Rift, Trion actually rewards this behavior since when you get up to the top of mountains, there are always cool things to see.  At the very least there is usually a wealth of artifacts along the way.

Above is my recording, using the in game /record system, of the route I take between Chancel of Labors in Iron Pine Peaks and the Foul Cascade instance.  Of note, I got confused while running across the lake as to where the road met up, and got dismounted.  Also of note, when you get to the Gloamwood / Scarlet Gorge zoneline, I drop down off my fast mount to my slow mount for a significant reason. 

If you are moving at fast mount speeds it is way too easy to drop down too far at once, and end up killing yourself.  Luckily, if you happen to do this, there is a soul forge at the bottom of the hill, at the same level as Foul Cascade so the run back is extremely short.  Honestly you would do just as well to simply dismount and hop down by foot, than to even mess with a mount.

I know there are other paths, but this one is pretty quick and relatively simple.  Would be interested to know any other shortcuts to either Foul Cascade or other instances that my readers have.  I know Caspian, one of my guildmates has a path that he runs to Foul Cascade somehow from Moonshae Highlands, but I do not know the specifics of it.  However according to him, this path involves no mobs in between, so that would cut down on the getting dismounted factor.

Nerd 202

One of my blogger and twitter friends, Kadomi branched out on a new venture this week.  She is making the scary transition from blogging about WoW, to blogging about geek life in general.  Just like her wow blog, Tank Like A Girl, the posts are well written and always interesting.  Initially I thought this meant she would be leaving the other blog behind, but since then she has updated posts on the wow site as well.  If you do not have Tank Like a Girl and Live Like a Nerd in your RSS feed, you should add them.  Both are extremely good reads, and I hope that she continues to have great success as a blogger.

Week Without WYSBPR

I realize it has been a long time now since I have posted an episode in the “Why You Should Be Playing Rift” series.  I have a few things still in mind, but in general at this point, players are either hooked on the game or well stratified in their opinion that WoW is the only game on the planet.  It has come to the time where I trim back some of my evangelism and start just reporting MMO news, and my own brand of commentary.

I think before all is said and done I would like to have a nice even 10 episodes in the series, so expect to see more things.  However the post I have been working on in the background, is somewhat the reverse of “Why You Should Be Playing Rift”.  The idea is to create a post outlining all the questions players can ask themselves, to determine if Rift is wrong for them.

Since release we have had a handful of players return to wow, because the game just didn’t scratch whatever itch they needed scratched.  For some the game play in Rift was too difficult, for others they missed the 3D chat room that WoW had become for them, and as a result missed too many of their friends still playing WoW.  Rift is by no means the “one ring to rule them all”, it expects a lot more of its player base than wow has since the burning crusade era.  As a result, this game just is not the right game for certain personalities and player styles.

There should be some cool things in the weeks ahead.  I have been shocked at how quickly this blog has revived and regained readership.  All along I thought I was just burnt out with blogging, when I went on hiatus from the Aggronaut.  Turns out, the game I was playing just did not make me excited enough to write anymore.  Now that I have pushed that game aside, I feel like I have a world of ideas swimming in my head.  Hopefully I continue to have success, but I just wanted to thank the readers.  I am slowly beginning to believe that I actually do have an audience.

Just wanted to get these up really quick.  These have not rolled out on North American servers as of yet, but if they follow the pattern recently they will be up at 8 AM PDT.  As of this morning we had already received the launcher patch associated with these changes.

New Items Arrive

As promised by Trion, the rumored “hundreds of new items” have apparently arrived.  These are supposedly sprinkled throughout the Tier 1 and Tier 2 dungeon bosses beefing up their loot tables.  I have no word as to whether or not these will be limited time drops, of if these are permanent changes to the loot table.  Either way I plan on making it another weekend of grinding away at expert dungeons.

Nameplate Options

One of the big problems I have with the game is the current nameplate system.  I will expound on this later in a future post, but it looks like we are at least getting some options.  There are now apparently two sliders in the interface options that allow you to control the size of player and NPC nameplates separately.  I just hope this makes them easier to see, and pick out from the sea of mobs.

Full Patch Notes

you can find the official patch notes here.