Today I would like to take a moment and talk a little bit about PvP. If it’s something that you have generally shied away from in the past, then even better, as this post really pertains to you. What you need to know upfront is that the time for truly soaking up some of the most enjoyable PvP in Rift is…
Rift is in its infancy. It has been birthed into the world and is just now learning to take its first steps amidst the expectations of a passionate and somewhat jaded gaming community. This is a time of excitement and discovery for those playing the game, as we take our first journeys into a brave new world. When a new MMO launches, it enters a unique state that will never exist again in its entire life-cycle. Everything is new and everyone is on a more even footing than they will be months and years after the game launches. This makes PvP not only a prime opportunity, but a joyous one as well. The level disparity will not hinder newer players the way it will in years to come.
We are all noobs in Rift right now.
We are all learning and endeavoring to unearth the game’s secrets. We don’t understand all of the game’s intricacies the way we will down the road, which all adds up to PvP that is far less frustrating for most players, since so much is undiscovered and fresh. Once an MMO has lived a while and stretched its legs, the average level of the playerbase gets higher and everyone becomes much more comfortable with what works and what doesn’t. PvP becomes more cutthroat and the min/maxing of talents and stats will start to take over. The importance of gear begins to supersede the value of skill, and PvP slowly draws itself into a more niche crowd within the game’s subscriber base.
I have seen this happen with MMOs time and again over the years.
PvP becomes more and more daunting for newer players with each update and expansion that launches. In my experience, the launch of a new MMO can lead to some of the most hilarious and rewarding times for PvP that can exist in the genre. So the simple reality of Rift’s situation is this…PvP will never be more accessible to the average player than it is at this very moment. So if you have been on the fence on whether or not to roll on one of Rift’s PvP servers, then let me make it easier for you. Strike while the iron is hot, my friends! There will never be a better time to enjoy open-world PvP in Rift than during its first few months. I have already seen several large battles take place with varying results, and this will only increase in the days ahead as the guild’s slowly get themselves more organized.
So strap on your pads and get out there!!! The blood is flowing and the opportunity is nigh!! Just remember one thing…
And Rift now has its first max level character, level 50, in less than three days. lol The guy belongs to a guild called Fraghaus.
So congratulations are in order…huzzah and all that stuff!!!! Though I really don’t wish to think of the combination of factors that came together in order to make this type of thing happen. Leveling to max that fast should carry a warning label of some kind. Side effects could include no sleep, no life, malnutrition, constipation, irritable bowel syndrome, broken relationships, and…I don’t know…herpes maybe. But yes, good show!!!
I kid, I kid. Well, at least in part anyway.
But let me ask you guys something. Does anyone remember back in the good old days when reaching max level required around 2,000 hours to be logged on your character? (EQ) Now we’re doing it in less than three days. I suppose you could call that progress, though there has to be some sort of middle ground in there somewhere. I don’t miss the tedium of those EQ days, please understand. But I do sort of miss the mystery and sense of exploration that existed back then…the sweeping, brutal, and epic journey of leveling that once met so much and now means so very little by comparison.
Tonight, coming to you live from the end of the Rift Headstart queues, we give you nightwreath…blogger, gamer, and geek. We think he’s the fourth one from the right somewhere near the back of the fence. But to be honest it’s difficult to tell at this point.
Well, another late night off work and another queue to sit in…though I don’t know if I will be able to wait this one out since I have to be back at work earlier than usual tomorrow. After thinking about all of this for a moment…you know it could always be worse. People didn’t always follow the practice of forming lines in an orderly fashion. Though something tells me that if all of these gamers would actually be standing in line waiting to play Rift, orderly would not be the first word used to describe it. But back to the point, let’s allow Vork, from the web series “The Guild”, to provide us with some historical perspective regarding the history of the line. The key part here is from 1:27-1:59
So there you go. I’m currently sitting at position 399 on my server’s queue, but that’s much better than being involved in something where chaos rules the day, rather than assigning all of us a position and forcing us to wait our turn. The thing that…
You have gotten better at Queue Sitting! (73)
Oh nice, always a welcome sight to see a skill-up. As I was saying, the thing that really makes me laugh about all of this is that my Rift Guild has created a ventrilo channel named Stuck in the Queue Channel. It’s ranks continue to grow by the minute, and right now it’s the third most populated channel on the entire server. But we gamers are a stubborn lot, don’t kid yourselves. Once a MMO gamer gets stuck in queue we immediately throw ourselves into the gamer’s mentality. This basically means that if it’s earthly possible for us to make a competition out of something, we damn well are gonna do just that.
So that queue is almost viewed as an opponent to the typical MMO gamer, and God help us, we will wait that S.O.B. out until we finally conquer him in the end…even if it means we stay up half the night and go to work looking like a zombie the next day. But we will not falter and we will not fail. The sad part is that some of us will finally log into the game and end up just like poor old Yoda said we would.
On the 9th day God created marriage…on the 10th day he created raiding…and on the 11th day he created divorce knowing fully well that each of those follows the other.
Scotty!!!! More power, Scotty!!! They can hear the Rift servers groaning from the frigid lands of Alaska all the way to the Republic of Equatorial Kundu!!!! <— not a real place
So if you’re anything like me, you eagerly rushed home from work today with mouths foaming and bodies awaiting the inevitable nerdgasm that was about to ensue once you logged into Rift for the first time during Headstart. But instead, with a cold shoulder rivaling that of even the most vile ex-girlfriend/boyfriend, Rift treated you to something far different. You then found your anticipation crushed by the dreaded Headstart blues…I mean queues. Some people are even reporting waits as long as three or four hours. Yikes!
My current timer is sitting at about four hours at the moment and not budging, so who knows if I will even get to play tonight. Sadly I worked from 1-9pm, so I didn’t get the opportunity to jump in and reserve any names before work. I also knew better than to try and take the day off, as wisdom and time have taught me that this isn’t exactly a good idea for the launch or Headstart of an MMO. To nobody’s surprise, many gamers are stuck taking out their nerdrage on the forums, declaring this to be the “worst launch ever” and asking for their money back.
For those people I have only this to say…learn some friggin patience.
Seriously, I know the queues suck. Do you think I am any happier to be sitting here watching the little queue numbers go by, twiddling my thumbs in the process? Of course not! And I must say, adding a bunch of new servers isn’t always the best way to respond to this sort of thing. Just ask Mythic how adding tons of new server worked out. Sometimes it’s just better to let some more people in, thereby increasing the server capacity and risking a little more lag in the process. At least with that method, you don’t run the risk of creating new servers that end up woefully underpopulated in six months.
But regardless, this too shall pass, folks. Managing the hectic mess that is the launch of a new MMO is horrendously difficult at best. Developers who go through this should be granted some sort of honorary certificate stating that they have lived to see the truth of Chaos Theory in action. Queues are to be expected during times like this, that’s just the way it is. Though if it really does take hours and hours for some people to log in then Trion really needs to look at upping the server capacity for now. But if anyone needs me in the meantime, I can be found sitting in front of my computer attempting to emulate this guy…
Update: I was in queue from about 9:45pm – 1:00am and found my patience tested. Thankfully, I withstood the desire to perform seppuku while waiting. As an added bonus, the character names I wanted were not taken so all went well there. The people I am really feeling for are the ones who were stuck in queue like I was, got disconnected after being in there for 2-3 hours, then logged back in only to be stuck at the bottom of the queue again. Ouch.
Now if only I could temporarily change my blog’s background to something like this…
Poor old Ingvar…doomed to countless amounts of farming by a bunch of bunny hopping, foaming at the mouth MMO addicts. But getting back to the point here. If I could just change my background to that picture then I could say to hell with the long-winded post about where I’ve been, what I’ve played, and why I have suddenly decided to return, as that image would tell you all you needed to know about my status. But that just wouldn’t be my style, now would it?
So yes indeed, my interesting gaming compatriots…I’m back. Would someone please que the bloody inspirational music? It’s awful quiet in here.
Now that’s more like it, thanks Mr. Jablonsky. So out of the depths of Middle Earth I am come, or at least the earth part is within the vicinity of accurate. Nevertheless, I am going to make the naive assumption that kicking the tires around here will be just like riding a bike again. And though I highly doubt I will reach the heady days of early 2010 as far as post count goes (my keyboard has already filed an injunction against me for the times when smoke was frequently spotted funneling out between the keys). I do hope that I’ll at least be seen here at headquarters with a little more regularity. But fear not in any case, dear readers. My intentions are full of rainbows and win.
Now I know what most of you are probably thinking right now. Nightwreath, you incessant windbag, why the hell should we care whether you’re back or not? The answer to that question is simple and contains no misrepresentation or innuendo whatsoever.
You shouldn’t give a rat’s ass.
But just in case a few of you might be reading this and have allowed yourselves to become intoxicated enough to care…then why don’t we begin with a summation of my life over this past year. It will be brief, I promise you. The tale goes a little something like this…
Hello again. Welcome back! It’s a little scary out there, isn’t it? We’re talking about places where angels fear to tread, that kind of thing. So why don’t we just stay here for a while instead? The weather is much more forgiving in these parts anyway, and I have it on good authority that we’ll have access to cookies if we keep our voices down. But now we’ve got the boring crap out of the way, right? That alone tells me that it’s time to move on to more substantial things. So let’s talk MMOs.
Yes, those dastardly time-sinks continue to be a part of my life whether I like it or not. Usually that counts as a positive, but if I get any grayer in the hairline as an MMO-Vet I fear that I might completely loose the ability to enjoy them at all. That’s a scary prospect in and of itself, but in some ways I think I’ve just played too many MMOs to be truly awestruck by them anymore. I still enjoy them immensely, please don’t misunderstand me. But I do find that the overall experience has become somewhat diluted for me as the flow of time has pushed the genre forward.
That’s not to say that I’m one of those cranky old cooks who thinks that MMOs should be just like they were in the old days. But I do recognize that something is missing within the core of these games right now, but placing your finger on the point and then trying to talk about it with people is much like trying to hold a civil, intelligent discussion on the topic of politics. About three minutes into the conversation something like this always happens…
So what am I playing right now, anyway? The answer to that query would be somewhat surprising, given my history. But I currently do not hold any MMO subscriptions at all. I’ve gone cold turkey. Over the past year I have seen much happen over the MMO landscape. I watched Warhammer Online slowly devolve with a heavy sense of regret, I had some good fun with the Cataclysm expansion, and popped my head in a few other places here and there. But all of that has brought me to the point where I am now, just an MMO gamer with no place to hang is hat.
As for WAR, it’s a game that I will always love and hold dear to my heart, but I have finally reached a point where I can no longer convince myself that it’s worth my subscription in its current form. I’m not going to get into the what, where, when, and why…as I think there are plenty of great WAR bloggers out there who can give you a sense of why the game is stuck in a rut. Perhaps that will change someday, but for now WAR and I have reluctantly parted ways. I wish Mythic all the best in their future endeavors, and I hope they know that I’ll always be cheering for them no matter what course they take. *cough – DAOC 2 – cough*
As for WoW, I greatly enjoyed hopping back on my Warlock for Cataclysm and also found the new 1-60 questing to be quite fantastic in many ways. But once I hit 85 and with the prospect of a raid schedule looming, I decided to take a step back before I got overly committed. I have plenty of responsibilities in RL as it is, and I just wasn’t sure that a raiding schedule was going to make any of that easier on me. What I really wanted was just a place to level, explore, and hopefully find a little PvP while I was at it.
So where does that leave me now? Funny you should ask, but given that if you’re reading this blog then you’re probably an MMO player…and if you’re an MMO player and you look at the current date, then you’ll most likely know what’s drifting out there just on the edge of the horizon. Though I see many different positives and negatives regarding it, the beta has been far too polished and smooth for me to say no at this point. My gaming instincts quickly took hold of me and I pre-ordered the Digital Collector’s Edition before you could say the word spineless.
Yes my fellow gamers, I am here to declare that I will be playing Rift beginning on February 24th (headstart). For the lone person here who has no idea what I’m talking about, allow me to explain. Rift is a new MMO due to release on March 1st, with those of us who pre-ordered getting the opportunity to play it slightly ahead of that date. (Feb 24th) As to Rift’s core identity as an MMO, I’ll let the folks at Trion Worlds (the developers of the game) fill you in.
Much like before, I will be here to report and comment on my various adventures both within Telara and elsewhere. So I hope that some of you will pop in from time to time and enjoy reading about them. I won’t be blogging nearly as much as I did back in the day, but I’ll do my best to carve out some time when I can. It’s good to be back, though, that I can say without hesitation.
nightwreath
