Author: Ravious

Is Rift a success? Yes, I am a happy customer. The end. Print that for a box top and smoke it, Trion. Everything else from their return-on-investment to some silly “3-monther” yardstick is irrelevant. Yet, the story doesn’t fully end because this is a subscription game, and I have to determine whether it’s a success every single month. I will never say I am going to subscribe until the servers go dark. Therefore, Rift is instantly a success, and it will never be a success.

The MMO community carries a weird sense of measure for a successful game. It’s like there is some pressure for the game to be timeless that seems found nowhere else in the video game world. People are buying a new Pokemon this month, which is the exact same game every iteration. What about the $60 console games with 10 hours of gameplay before the credits roll? I own games on Steam I have never even played! Yet somehow it matters if Rift is timeless now?

It must be some weird artifact of the bygone days, you know before World of Warcraft ruined “community,” to be benchmarking the game’s life at launch. I certainly am not looking for an indefinite home, especially in a subscription-based game. I am looking for a sweet-vacation spot. When I hit sunny Acapulco, my fun is definitely not inhibited by worries that the town is going to go donkey turds in five years. It surprises me that people are viewing their MMO time that way. Hopefully they are still enjoying the game regardless of what their magic eight-ball is telling them

–Ravious
so let it be written, so it shall be done

Last night was the kickoff event for my Rift guild, Gaiscioch. We congregated at the entrance of Silverwood (from the tutorial zone), and rode through Silverwood on to Sanctum to help people pick up the porticulum warps. Along the way we ran over any extraplanar forces. Then we headed to the Defiant side, where we helped stop a water invasion, and then turned on the godless mongrels just outside of Meridian. Being that most of our 150+ person event was below level 25, the soulless guards of Meridian were able to single-handedly wade through the Defiant tombstones and stop our ascent. I had to say I don’t think I have had this much fun in an MMO since my first big RvR event a few years ago.

Continue reading [Rift] Breaking Through

No, that’s not an accidental typo. The English prefix “em,” along with it’s sister “en,” means “to make into.” So, empower is to make something with power. Subsequently “emmobilized” would mean to “to get people in action for action, like war.” In Rift, every time a rift event drops, the players around mobilize. In a zone-wide invasion event, it seems sometimes that the whole zone answers the call to repel the planar intruders. Except, “emmobilize” is not a word.  “Immobilize” is. In much of my time in Rift’s Head Start, I have felt immobilized despite all internal intentions to the contrary. I have hope that soon the clouds will clear.

Continue reading [Rift] Emmobilized

Blogger compatriot and Rift guildie, Moxie, over at her blog Battle Priestess has posted our guild’s 22 week server event list. The great thing about these events is that they are inclusive to our whole Rift server, Faeblight. Granted the first couple of weeks are going to be a tad more Guardian oriented due to their location, but once we hit contested zones and invade the dirty-heathen Defiant zones, it will be a server wide event. All are welcome to join in the fun.

The Gaiscioch Family is not new to these community-organized events having been instrumental in keeping a Warhammer Online server alive with a very popular Battle for Badlands event. They have been doing these awesome events since Dark Age of Camelot. I am also excited to see how the automatic system and Rift GMs will respond to such a focused server event. We know that Rift GMs have the ability to call down the in-game Events themselves, and I hope they do so during the community-driven events.

Good luck to all those starting today with the Rift early access. If you are still looking for a server, Faeblight is going to be a happening place on both sides.

–Ravious
hi ho the dairy oh