1661

A few questions, if I may:

  • Is this game good?
  • What makes it different from WoW?
  • Is there a Qt3 guild?
  • Is there seriously not a demo?
1662

Yes, better character building and dynamic invasions of monsters coming to jack your cities, yes (drop bears / guardian / wolfsbane), ya srsly.

1663
  1. Yes. It starts off gently enough but it can really sink its hooks into you once you get swept away by the dynamic world. The standard quests are… standard. But there is a whole living world around them that adds a lot.
  2. A lot of things beyond the superficial (looks, key mappings). But think of it as a game that cleverly reused the things that worked well in other MMO’s (so you will find familiar features) and added its own touch (Rifts, Invasions, Char Development, Ease of public grouping, …). Think of it also of a MMO that works perfectly at release. And now they can focus on adding more stuff ot the world.
  3. Yes. The members will need to tell you what and where
  4. No. Why would there be in the first month of release of a MMO?

Wendelius

1664

I don’t understand the question. Is it the norm for there to not be one?

Still, I’m interested.

1665

Yes, it is normal for there not to be a free trial. Box sales are a huge amount of income at the start of an MMO and they’d be fools to offer one.

1666

Apologies. I didn’t mean to be obtuse. As JM pointed out, an MMO (the pay to play kind) makes a lot of revenue on those initial box sales from all the people wanting to try it for 30 days at release.

Free trials tend to come later in the life of the game.

Wendelius

1667

Hm, interesting. I guess I never thought about it before.

1668

The open betas most MMOs have are in effect their demos. That they come before launch rather than after, and indeed terminate with launch, makes them a bit different than normal demos, but as noted, initial sales of the client are really important to recouping development costs as I understand it.

FWIW, I am finding Rift quite entertaining. How long it will go for me I have no idea, but I’ve already got my money’s worth from my first 30 days included in the price at least.

1669

The QT3 guild is (like in WoW) , the Drop Bears. We play Defiant on Wolfsbane. It is a PvE server that at times will have a queue but lately they have been pretty short. Just join /dropbears- and ask for an invite. We are somewhat small but growing. Not everyone has invite abilities but keep checking.

I am really enjoying the game- the random events and public group/raids really do add a lot to the game. Yes it is an MMO that does many standard MMO things but there are may improvements and tweaks that I really like.

For example, I just realized that looting 1 body will also loot all the other nearby bodies that you kill-I was very confused about this until I read what it was doing- it is a small thing but a really nice feature.

What I noticed last nite was that it is hard. My DK on WoW is a reasonably geared 85 and frankly there is nothing hard left in the game other than Raids. The entire rest of the world is either well below my in strength or say in a dungeon, the only time we die is if someone makes a mistake, not because it is actually hard. Last nite I had to go into an enclosed town and complete about 5 quests- even with npc’s at my level or one over, I really had to plan my attacks, go slowly and be very aware of my surroundings- I still died a bunch of times but that was a good thing…It has been a long time since I have had to be careful- even the new WoW dailies are basically a stroll in the park with no threat at all.

My highest toon is 17 but I really am enjoying it so far- I rolled a Rogue- Ranger for ranged and the pet, Bard because bards are awesome and they shoot notes of death and can self heal and buff parties and with a Nightblade as my ohshit Soul in case everything else fails.

1670

The beta was the “demo” that hooked me. I guess people that didn’t get in on that just have to take the plunge & hope for the best.

FWIW, I am finding Rift quite entertaining. How long it will go for me I have no idea, but I’ve already got my money’s worth from my first 30 days included in the price at least.

Same here. Even if I suddenly got bored with it tomorrow, it would have been worth the money.

By the way, a word about the community. I came over to Rift with some RL friends as well as some guildmates from WoW, and although most of our toons are in a guild together we’re all strung out along the leveling curve, so we rarely actually run instances together. The game doesn’t have a Looking for Dungeon tool, so you have to manually find party members, which can be mildly annoying. But it’s not too hard; every single class can either tank or heal, (as well as DPS), so it’s not too hard to get a dungeon-viable group going. More importantly, the strangers that I’ve run with have been universally cool, polite, & fun. Everyone’s new to the game, so people aren’t impatient, and there don’t seem to be many brainless 12 year old boys in dungeons. I think the lack of the LFD tool is responsible for that, so I’m thankful they didn’t implement one.

1671

So Defiant (where I am) on my battlegroup lose 90% of the (pug) Warfronts I enter. Yes, I went all empirical and took an actual survey over several days.

It’s incredibly frustrating and has absolutely destroyed our side’s morale, which just makes things worse. We typically have 1 or 2 bots/afkers per game and if the littlest thing goes wrong everybody gives up.

Also, by WF class representation, 75% of the Defiant play Assassins, which just aren’t top-tier in PvP. With Guardian playing Clerics and Warriors, people really really really need to pick the most overpowered souls they can in order to win (in Rogues’ case, Saboteurs).

But no. Assassins. Who do nothing except stealth around the back, blow all their cooldowns to do 50% of a Cleric’s health, who then takes two spells to heal to full. Then their Champion friend comes around and two-shots the Assassin, who sees no problem with this outcome and does the exact same thing again after calling our non-existent healers noobs.

It’s really really bad right now. I’ve got two characters in their early 30s and one in his early 20s and I don’t want to abandon them, but I’m seriously considering jumping ship and rerolling Guardian. Yes, they have much longer queues, yes, I’m probably getting more favor/xp per minute losing every game… but sometimes you just gotta see the chips fly.

This was a public QQ announcement. Thank you for listening.

1672

I’ve seen the opposite on my server…which I’m forgetting the name of. The one where the Wanderers moved to. Guardians are routinely getting steam-rolled. However, there was one day so far where it was the other way around, and the Guardians were just on an epic roll that I rode for awhile. This is in the 10-30 ranges.

1673

No offense, but all I’ve ever seen you do with regards to MMOs is QQ. Why do you bother playing them?

1674

  1. Yes. As mentioned before, it starts off a bit slow but really picks up steam after around level 15…the exact opposite of most modern MMOs.

  2. At first glance, fairly little. WoW is a massive game. But it really plays more like the child of coupling between EQ2 and WAR and not WoW’s baby. The interface, mappings and like are WoW-like, but then again so it pretty much every MMO’s invented since 2005. Questing is WoW circa-2005, PvP is similar to WoW and the instances are pretty damn good.

Where it’s quite different are the RIFTs (which spawn not only Rifts to close - like Public Quests - but full scale invasions) and the Soul System. Imagine instead of having only 3 choices of talent trees per class, you have 8 per class and you can pick 3. And you can have 4 combinations per character of those 8 souls. As such, the options available to you are enormous. I have a dedicated, massive single-target healer. The same character is a melee healer/DPSer. He’s also a ranged anti-caster. And I can swap between the 3 almost at will. And each soul combination is more complicated than any character in WoW - I have far more tools at my disposal.

But furthermore, the game works damn well. It’s beyond solid. So instead of going through a year of bug fixing with a new MMO, we’re already getting features. As such, I don’t expect to see the type of wholesale abandonment of servers aka WAR or AOC because this game doesn’t have those kind of problems. In WAR I was already seeing major player attrition 2 weeks after go live. I’m not seeing that in Rift.

  1. Yeah, there is, but I’m not in it. I prefer the busier, PvP-PR server Sunrest compared to the server Qt3 is on.

  2. There was an open beta a month ago. I don’t expect any kind of Free Trial for quite a few months because the response to this game has been beyond expectation. It’ll come, but you missed the free trial window. And no, it’s not standard for brand new MMOs to have a free trial right after release.

1675

Sorry to interrupt your QQ with logic, but:

  1. Your experience in any given warfront isn’t going to be different for either side because the classes are the same. I’m a Guard and if I go in without guildies (aka in a PUG), we’re likely to get rolled. I probably lose 4 out of 5 BG matches that way and I might break even on the other three warfronts. Usually, I get the hell beaten out of me. If I go with guildies, we have a pretty reasonable chance of winning. So if you’re joining solo, you’re going to get rolled. If you’re going with guildies and still getting rolled, find a better guild. ;)

  2. Guardians generally have less of a wait, not more. There’s more Defiant than Guards on most servers, so Defiant usually have to wait longer to get into a Warfront.

  3. AFKers are a problem right now. That doesn’t change for either side.

  4. Those rogues on your side are the bane of my existence as a level 50 Cleric.

  5. There are relatively few healers left in PvP because people are already tired of getting stun-locked, mana drained, polymorphed, silenced and going down too easily. Also, healing contribution isn’t as it should be and healers get fewer points at the end of a Warfront. Therefore even folks like myself who prefer to heal tend to go DPS in warfronts. That doesn’t change by switching sides either.

1676

This may have been posted and may be a bit basic for many but there were a couple of things I found here that I didn’t actually know

Rift 101:

http://rift.zam.com/wiki/Rift_101-Player’s_Advice%28Rift%29

1677

FTFY etc. More people please!

1678

Thanks a bunch! That had a bunch of stuff I didn’t know.

1679

you are quite wrong regarding the differences per faction BA. Sure both sides have access to the same classes, but in our cluster (and on our server specifically) there are far more non-rogues on Guardian side than Defiant. Most WF’s I join are 4 on 8 in favor of guardians with defiants having no healers and guardians having almost half healers. Doesn’t matter if you’re ‘stun locked’ when you have 2-3 friends all healing you up during it.

Also learn to use the pvp soul in WF’s, it’s extremely helpful.

I really do wish they would fix it so you can’t be mana drained during squirrel, it’s pretty stupid. That and placing sab charges on people that are squirreled or incapacitated without it breaking the cc. ugh!

I will give you that clerics are the only class that doesn’t have an amazing ‘wtfjusthitme’ soul (champ/sab/pyro) but they are still far from easy to kill. Get stunned? Break out of it and now you can out heal it if you’re 1v1. Not 1v1? Then you messed up and aren’t where you should be or with whom you should be.

1680

I think you missed the part where I said “my battlegroup.” So when you read my response, please keep in mind this applies to my battlegroup.

1.) Logically, yes. In practice, class representation is totally out of whack. I can’t adequately explain why Guardians play Champions and Healing Clerics and why Defiant play Assassins and DPS Clerics, but they do.

2.) Defiant queues are instant, Guardian queues in the low/mid-range are ~5 minutes at peak, and apparently as bad as an hour+ at 50. Does this represent population? Maybe, maybe not. It may have more to do with the constant losing and Defiant just giving up on WFs.

3.) If it really is as much as a problem per capita for the Guardians, it sure doesn’t seem to have as dramatic an effect as it does on us. However, I personally think the culture of pessimism on Defiant in my BG breeds more AFKers than normal.

4.) Well I’m glad they have some use eventually, lol.

5.) Top 5 healing is typically 4 Guardians and 1 Defiant. Guardians heal, we don’t. I think the month-long losing streak has something to do with this: Guardian healers don’t get CC’d to death, which makes the job less frustrating, which means more healers in WFs, which means more wins. In my experience across several games, it’s all about who has more healing at any given moment.

And, quite frankly, unless you CC a healer to death, you’re just not going to kill him. The checks and balances on healing are, unfortunately for healers, the most frustrating potential that can happen in PvP: losing control of your character.

It’s also just faster (and a better idea) to “kill” their mana bars.

I dunno. To piss you off?

Jay kay brah. I like the game, I just hate losing all the time. Also there are some pretty glaring bugs in the combat system that are causing things to be very out of whack. For instance, one point into several armor-reduction Talents (typically something tame like 1% armor piercing) is actually causing the affected abilities to ignore all armor.

Here’s a number-crunching thread on the subject, though I’m sure linking that will rage you. Oh well!