2041

Because people whose fun is dependant on ruining others’, the kind who flock to FFA PvP games to gank and grief and make life difficult for other players for no other motivation than “the lulz”, the ones to whom the concepts of sportsmanship and a fair fight are strange and alien, are seemingly the majority who’d be interested in a game like that. They’ll gang up on you and they’ll outlevel you, they’ll exploit every loophole, power dynamic and gear/level/skill system in existence to be the biggest asshole they can possibly be, and they’ll profess their superiority over you in loud and obnoxious ways, claiming to feed on your tears and exhorting you to QQ more. The players who -do- want fair fights and who take it upon themselves to police the game to some extent, to protect the newbies and prevent gross imbalances, will be vastly outnumbered, out-sparetime’d, and will eventually dwindle to nothing or near nothing, and the game will be a lawess wasteland of antisocial douchebags complaining that they have nobody to kill.

(I’m not saying you’re one of those, but that’s pretty much been my experience of the kind of players who dominate FFA PvP servers/games.)

2042

My point was to make a game designed around FFA PvP and let the player community decide on sides. Nothing like that really exists in the modern MMO space that is also fun (maybe EVE but I don’t have much experience with that). What you describe usually happens when devs throw us a bone and create a FFA PvP server without any thought about design.

Did you ever play Shadowbane? It wasn’t a lawless wasteland. You were accountable for your kills. A random murder could start a server wide war. Your reputation mattered in that game and I think that is the main difference between SB and the other PvP MMO hacks we see today.

2043

When someone says “RvR” today it translates to “a large, non-instanced, overworld zone with persistent PvP objectives.” ie, WAR “wells.” Granted WAR managed to fuck that all up beyond adequate description, but still, that’s the idea everyone wants in modern MMO PvP. Original Alterac Valley was kind of close to that too.

You’re freakin’ high if you think Trion is “going for the PvP crowd a bit too much.” A solid 90% of the game’s content is PVE, and even that’s a conservative estimate.

PVP: Warfronts. PvP gear. Prestige ranks.
PVE: Everything else.
Newest content patch: 100% PVE.

I’m looking forward to the persistent PvP zone they mentioned (Stillmoor?) being added in the (ideally near) future, but I’m not holding my breath in terms of seeing that anytime soon.

Dungeons make me sleepy too, and really all that dragged me through Heroics in WoW were my friends. But one seems to have flaked on RIFT, (he just got a job, which is great, but he only wants to play bite-sized games like Heroes of Newerth in his off-time now), and the other has had his internet out/shaky for about a week and a half now and I think that’s broken the initial momentum as a result. Plus he’s a Warrior, which (deservedly) got nerfed into the ground. That’s never good for morale.

Project 1999 just released Kunark too, and I’ve been putzing around in that. And I’ve had an EQ2 itch for some reason (there’s a staggering amount of content in that game at this point). I’ve been enjoying RIFT’s world event, grindy as it is, but I’m probably making a mistake focusing on my high-level characters on a server I rolled on just for my friends.

I should probably just bite the bullet, switch over entirely to Sunrest, and (try to) join up with the Sentinels. I’ll have a 20-range, 30-range, and 40-range set of characters left on Regulos in case any of my friends find time to play, but I’m starting to think my solo time should be spent on a server that has a future for me, alone as I may be.

2044

QFT, and that’s why I won’t play on a PvP server. I guess I had too many bad experiences when I played Ultima Online (yeah, that long ago).

2045

Holy crap you’re right; I leveled an alt in Silverwood for the first time since headstart and you’re right, zone chat there seems much worse than the other zones I’ve been in recently. Gah.

2046

Turning off the zone chat in the starter zones is one of the first things I do when starting a new character. The chat adds nothing, and actually detracts from the game.

2047

I have to share this PUG dungeon experience from the other night, it’s too mind-boggling.

We’re in Darkening Deeps, with a tank that is obviously learning the ropes (perhaps “doesn’t know the ropes” would be more appropriate, I’m not sure how much learning was going on).

We get to the werewolf boss, which if you’ve been through you remember has to be melee’d out of the light - ranged attacks and taunts won’t work. After about 5 minutes trying to make sure the tank understood this concept, she still expressed uneasiness about her ability to do this. So we all said “just run up, attack, and keep attacking while walking backwards.” That’s when she said:

“How do I walk backwards?”

blink blink

… ok… so we told her about the magical “s” key. But then she expressed that this was far too complex to be expected to attack and hit the “s” key at the same time. That’s when she asked us:

“how do I re-bind backwards to the ‘1’ key?”

…

After the resulting and not-unexpected wipe, I think one of the other folks in the group put it best when he said, “Oh crap my car just exploded, got to go” and then he logged off.

It was pretty surreal.

2048

I blame WoW.

2049

How the… I mean, who… what?

2050

“How do I walk backwards?”

I don’t think that can ever be topped.

2051

“How do I walk backwards?”

I don’t think that can ever be topped.

2052

My first thought upon reading it:

“I’m not an ambi-turner”.

2053

This is why you keep bads away from everything but dps.

2054

Netiquette fix these type of problems.

AFK is not just a acronim… is a way to tell others you will be away from the keyboard.
Similarly, if you know you are going to break from the game soon, you warn others. Or you break, but returns… apologize and quit. Basically: talk.

On most games is easy to tell if a person is AFK, pseudo-AFK or perma-AFK. You get warnings wen people is the last of the group, and suffer a few pseudo-AFK moments. But you can always ask, to get more gist about whats going on. MMORPG games are group games, you are supposed to look how the others play, understand the philosophy beind these people.

Really,… I don’t play MMO’s much, I get bored by these type of games, and Is not hard to me to tell if a person is pseudo-AFK or perma-AFK.

2055

Has anybody used this site? Will it just give me a key I can plug into my trion account?

Also, can I register the game on steam with that same key? (so to redownload later I can just use steam)

edit: oh it’s the same price on amazon. Same questions apply though.

2056

I bought it on amazon, and steam won’t recognize the product key. Oh well. (I bought the digital download version)

I actually bought 2 copies, and it was a little annoying that I had to do separate transactions for each. I couldn’t add it to my shopping cart.

2057

They are doing another free play weekend, let me know if anyone needs a code.

2058

if you want the steam overlay just create a shortcut to the exe in the steam library. The overlay works with it just fine.
I had a situation where I had to reinstall Rift and did it outside of steam, added the second rift to the library and it works great.
Course if I forget and use the standard shortcut instead of the steam I still get no overlay.

2059

I have a build question-- I am working on a Cleric ranged build and I always like to have a bit of healing in a soul for soloing as well as helping out a bit in a group- so going for straight dps/ranged I am going to test Inquisitor/Cabalist.

Now I added Sentinel for some heals but … Inquisitor seems to have some nice self-heals built into it… so maybe I am wasting points in Sentinel.

So, question to those using Inquisitor- how well do those self-heals work? Are they enough to keep me going or should I still dump a couple in sentinel just to feel I have a bit more to work with?

2060

I have leveled with Inquisitor/Purifier, and think it’s a fine build - I tried Sentinel in Beta and you don’t get a whole lot without dumping a bunch of points into Sent. And the initial heal you get is ok (instant/8 sec cooldown) but the Purifier heal you can get (1.5 second cast/no cooldown) is better - not to mention that you get an awesome shield with Purifier for 0 points.

When you put 2 points into the talent that makes Vex heal you, you’re pretty golden. As described a number of times above, once you get Fanaticism, your technique is pretty much:

  • find a bunch of mobs. Vex them all
  • Sanction Heretic one of them for the heck of it
  • Pop Fanaticism
  • Soul drain
  • Shield if you need to
  • Circle of Oblivion (before I had that I did the Cabalist bolt - Shadow’s Touch).
  • Re-Vex if anyone is still alive.

You can do this indefinitely (or maybe once in a while do an Aggressive Renewal to get mana back).

So the short answer is: you don’t need a bunch of healing.

As for whether that’s group friendy - I have participated in many groups with this spec, and even with 1 measley heal, I have been able to jump in as emergency healer in Rifts and dungeons when our main healer has died. And it’s worked! I wouldn’t recommend it as a healing spec, but in a pinch you can do it (however to be fair, when this occurs, you end up spam casting the heal with maybe time for a Vex or Sanction Heretic once in a while, because the heal is fairly wimpy).

I was messing around with an Inquisitor/Sent built for use in a dungeon (I needed to have Cleansing abilities) and I came up with this build which worked for my purposes, and only loses Dark Water from my normal rotation. Plus you’ve got three heals (including one group heal, which is a mana hog).

But for soloing, put 2 points into Contempt and you’re good 90% of the time!