Ferrel writes about what he sees as a growing trend of "willfully ignorant" players, who "don’t care enough to read, listen, or prepare for anything", but "always want in on groups and raids" despite this lack of preparation. In his view, players who don't accept responsibility for preparing to contribute to groups should go back to soloing.
I don't know that I quite reach the bar for "willfully ignorant". In most MMO's I don't group at all, or only group if specifically asked by a guildie looking to avoid having to bring a PUG member. I'm not afraid to say when I haven't run a zone before (which is often), and I do my best to listen to instructions if they are forthcoming. In general, if the content requires more commitment than that, I probably don't care enough to do it. Perhaps that makes me "willfully indifferent", and I have no problem heeding Ferrel's advice and going back to soloing.
The catch is that developers are watching. Case in point, the very next post on Ferrel's blog talks about how Trion changed Rift dungeon rewards from a model with highly challenging, highly rewarding dungons to less challenging, less rewarding dungeons that are more accessible to the willfully indifferent (and/or ignorant). The same trend is going on in World of Warcraft right now, after the difficulty of the initial content in the latest expansion was higher than the willfully indifferent would tolerate. In non-subscription games like DDO, Turbine can literally see by the numbers who is willing to pay for more solo content and unwilling to pay for more raids.
If the majority of the market truly is making an intentional choice for the path of indifference and away from challenge, the motivated minority may need a better PR strategy than "go back to soloing".
Showing posts with label Rift. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rift. Show all posts
Quotes On Rift Server Transfers
Last week, I posted about how server walls keep people from playing with their friends and create population distribution issues - I suggested in a clarifying comment that the solution might be some form of free, unlimited server transfers to allow players to move to visit their friends.
Today, Trion announced what they're referring to as "free server transfers", and Massively quotes Scott Hartsman in the press release as saying:
So what's really going on here? Let's ask Wilhelm:
Leave it to the clever folks at Trion's marketing department to find a way to spin population redistribution as a revolutionary new feature. That said, I wonder if they may have gone too far this time - the reality is so far from the market-speak that some players may end up feeling burned, especially if they only learn the true nature of the restrictions after unwittingly taking a one-way ticket off their home server.
Today, Trion announced what they're referring to as "free server transfers", and Massively quotes Scott Hartsman in the press release as saying:
"MMOs are all about playing with your friends no matter which server they're on, and that's why we're offering this as a free service to our subscribers."No matter which server they're on, huh, guess that makes sense since MMO's are all about playing with your friends. But what is this fine print about transferring to "select shards"? The FAQ has the answer:
"We want the shard you select to provide the best experience possible. It is important that there remains a balance between Guardian and Defiant players and to that available shards do not become too over populated or unbalanced. For this reason you will only be able to move to specific shards we’ve selected to accept new transfers, please note the shards available for transfer may change over time.So, I can play with my friends so long as we all mutually agree to transfer to another server with no guarantee that we will be allowed to return to our original server. That would be the opposite of being able to play with your friends no matter what server you are on, because transferring would cut you off from the other friends who convinced you to roll on that server in the first place.
So what's really going on here? Let's ask Wilhelm:
"Announcing server mergers is always viewed as bad news.My guess is that doubling your server count in the first week is actually a very bad plan in the traditional server model. The only people who are able to change servers just because they don't like their queue times are the tourists who are arriving with no social ties, who are the most likely to leave their new servers deserted at the 30 day mark. This approach was bound to leave them with some servers that are empty, while others remain too crowded to actually allow the kinds of unrestricted transfers Scott is talking about.
But announcing free server transfers, that is a huge win. Not only will your population take care of your server mergers for you, how and when they want to (some people love to play on nearly deserted servers), but the good publicity makes Rift look like a game you really want to play."
Leave it to the clever folks at Trion's marketing department to find a way to spin population redistribution as a revolutionary new feature. That said, I wonder if they may have gone too far this time - the reality is so far from the market-speak that some players may end up feeling burned, especially if they only learn the true nature of the restrictions after unwittingly taking a one-way ticket off their home server.
Gearing Up For Raids In Single Group Dungeons
I've been writing recently about what I see as a conflict between solo leveling and getting new characters to max level so they can join in group content. Solo players actually want to do the content, while group players find it a dull but time-consuming chore en route to endgame, and I'm starting to feel that both groups are getting the short end of the stick. Reading Ferrel's post about Rift's Expert Dungeon plaque changes in patch 1.2, I'm seeing some strong parallels.
From Ferrel's perspective as a guild leader trying to get his team geared up and ready to raid, decreased dungeon token income is a disaster, as it means that the guild has to spend more time farming content that has long since ceased to be interesting. He assumes that everyone who is farming expert dungeons is doing so for the same reason - to get the gear to be released from this purgatory as quickly as possible.
The reality is that there is a growing segment of the market for whom single group dungeon content is the end of the line. There's a big difference between clicking the automated group finder button at a time of your choosing to farm a 90 minute dungeon and committing days in advance to show up to a scheduled 3-4 hour raid. The old model of high difficulty, high reward dungeons does not serve Trion's long-term interest in retaining this demographic - infrequent players probably won't be able to find groups that can beat the content, and, if they do, they will run out of stuff to farm pretty quickly.
Developers are in a tough spot here. The majority of the content needs to be aimed at the majority of the customers - which means solo and maybe easy group content - because those customers have plenty of options to take their money elsewhere. However, taking the very top end of customers and letting them skip the 95% of content that is below their expertise is a good recipe for having those players run out of things to do exceptionally quickly. The result is what we have now - players forced to do things that they do not enjoy as a pre-requisite for things they would like to do, because that's the way the developers are getting paid.
Somehow, this does not seem like the best longterm plan.
From Ferrel's perspective as a guild leader trying to get his team geared up and ready to raid, decreased dungeon token income is a disaster, as it means that the guild has to spend more time farming content that has long since ceased to be interesting. He assumes that everyone who is farming expert dungeons is doing so for the same reason - to get the gear to be released from this purgatory as quickly as possible.
The reality is that there is a growing segment of the market for whom single group dungeon content is the end of the line. There's a big difference between clicking the automated group finder button at a time of your choosing to farm a 90 minute dungeon and committing days in advance to show up to a scheduled 3-4 hour raid. The old model of high difficulty, high reward dungeons does not serve Trion's long-term interest in retaining this demographic - infrequent players probably won't be able to find groups that can beat the content, and, if they do, they will run out of stuff to farm pretty quickly.
Developers are in a tough spot here. The majority of the content needs to be aimed at the majority of the customers - which means solo and maybe easy group content - because those customers have plenty of options to take their money elsewhere. However, taking the very top end of customers and letting them skip the 95% of content that is below their expertise is a good recipe for having those players run out of things to do exceptionally quickly. The result is what we have now - players forced to do things that they do not enjoy as a pre-requisite for things they would like to do, because that's the way the developers are getting paid.
Somehow, this does not seem like the best longterm plan.
Weekly Dungeon Quest One-Upmanship
One of the dangers of taking a similar feature from a competing game is that your version 1.0 may be up against the original game's 3.0 by the time you get it out the door. Well, whatever else you want to say about Rift, Trion has become one of the fastest studios out there when it comes to fixing this sort of complaint.
The case of the dungeon quests
Case in point, Trion significantly reduced the "plaque" currency awards for its max level expert dungeons shortly after launch. To compensate, they increased the award from the daily dungeon quests - in theory, infrequent players would now have more of a chance to catch up, while players who grind out multiple dungeons per day would take longer.
One of the issues with this approach is that each day's quest is use-it-or-lose-it. If you run only three dungeons per week, but all three are on Saturday because that's your free evening, you only collect the bonus once. If you sign on one evening and you choose to do something else that keeps you from getting around to your daily dungeon run - perhaps helping a friend, visiting a world event, etc - there's no way to "make up" the missed plaque stipend, it's simply an opportunity lost.
The competition over at Blizzard, which has had these types of quests for years, decided to make their token grind a little more friendly by changing the daily dungeon quest into a quest that can be repeated seven times per week (as part of patch 4.1, supposedly hitting WoW servers on Tuesday). By comparison, Trion's emphasis on the daily version felt out-dated. So they're fixing it. By two weeks from now.
The sharp-eyed folks at Rift Junkies caught an interesting detail from a Massively interview on Friday - Rift will now allow you to "bank" up to seven day's worth of quests to complete at your leisure. I prefer this version to WoW's not-yet-released variation, because it is much more flexible in letting you work off your backlog at a reasonable pace.
Improved competition?
Beyond Trion's impressively fast reaction time, I'm hopeful to see this kind of competition in the future. Blizzard has been free in the past to let changes like this take months on end, with routine gaps of six months between patches, because there hasn't been anyone who could be seriously thought of as competition. Everyone else has felt free to let their patch cycles drop to quarterly at best because that's the bar set by the industry leader. While it's still a bit early, it's certainly looking like Trion may make a real run at forcing developers to pick up the pace a bit, which would be a win for players everywhere.
P.S. Unfortunately, like WoW's system, Trion is offering a large currency award to convince players who no longer need Tier 1 Expert dungeons to continue running them daily. I maintain that this is a misguided approach to filling groups that harms the quality of the experience for all concerned, for reasons I've discussed previously.
The case of the dungeon quests
Case in point, Trion significantly reduced the "plaque" currency awards for its max level expert dungeons shortly after launch. To compensate, they increased the award from the daily dungeon quests - in theory, infrequent players would now have more of a chance to catch up, while players who grind out multiple dungeons per day would take longer.
One of the issues with this approach is that each day's quest is use-it-or-lose-it. If you run only three dungeons per week, but all three are on Saturday because that's your free evening, you only collect the bonus once. If you sign on one evening and you choose to do something else that keeps you from getting around to your daily dungeon run - perhaps helping a friend, visiting a world event, etc - there's no way to "make up" the missed plaque stipend, it's simply an opportunity lost.
The competition over at Blizzard, which has had these types of quests for years, decided to make their token grind a little more friendly by changing the daily dungeon quest into a quest that can be repeated seven times per week (as part of patch 4.1, supposedly hitting WoW servers on Tuesday). By comparison, Trion's emphasis on the daily version felt out-dated. So they're fixing it. By two weeks from now.
The sharp-eyed folks at Rift Junkies caught an interesting detail from a Massively interview on Friday - Rift will now allow you to "bank" up to seven day's worth of quests to complete at your leisure. I prefer this version to WoW's not-yet-released variation, because it is much more flexible in letting you work off your backlog at a reasonable pace.
Improved competition?
Beyond Trion's impressively fast reaction time, I'm hopeful to see this kind of competition in the future. Blizzard has been free in the past to let changes like this take months on end, with routine gaps of six months between patches, because there hasn't been anyone who could be seriously thought of as competition. Everyone else has felt free to let their patch cycles drop to quarterly at best because that's the bar set by the industry leader. While it's still a bit early, it's certainly looking like Trion may make a real run at forcing developers to pick up the pace a bit, which would be a win for players everywhere.
P.S. Unfortunately, like WoW's system, Trion is offering a large currency award to convince players who no longer need Tier 1 Expert dungeons to continue running them daily. I maintain that this is a misguided approach to filling groups that harms the quality of the experience for all concerned, for reasons I've discussed previously.
Rift To Get Appearence Armor Slots?
Rift Junkies reports that some sort of cosmetic armor set/wardrobe feature seems to be coming to the game's alpha server.
I sympathize with folks who want the coolest looking gear to be saved for the truly challenging accomplishments. If anything, cosmetics are one of the few places where a developer can save a little something extra to reward the hardcore crowd without keeping the best portions of the game locked away from the majority of its customers. Also, as Ferrel noted a bit ago, it's very easy for developers to take cosmetic slots as an invitation for cash store abuse... and/or bleeping chainsaws if these Aion shots Chris posted really aren't a belated April Fool's thing.
That said, the demand for this feature is significant and growing. Developers can shake their heads at players for demanding it (as Scott Jennings does, to comic effect), but I do genuinely view LOTRO and EQ2's cosmetic systems as big assets to the respective games - even gear that I have no intention of using can become an exciting reward if it happens to be just what I needed for my latest coordinated outfit. This feature also makes me more willing to grind out seasonal or world events for cosmetic outfits, where in WoW these items will just take up space in my bank since I can't ever wear them without losing massive amounts of stats.
If Rift really is aboard the cosmetic train, we're probably never going to see another major MMO try to do without this type of system in the future. On the plus side, this may solve the case of the missing extraplanar pants.
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| LOTRO's outfit panel, back in the old days |
That said, the demand for this feature is significant and growing. Developers can shake their heads at players for demanding it (as Scott Jennings does, to comic effect), but I do genuinely view LOTRO and EQ2's cosmetic systems as big assets to the respective games - even gear that I have no intention of using can become an exciting reward if it happens to be just what I needed for my latest coordinated outfit. This feature also makes me more willing to grind out seasonal or world events for cosmetic outfits, where in WoW these items will just take up space in my bank since I can't ever wear them without losing massive amounts of stats.
If Rift really is aboard the cosmetic train, we're probably never going to see another major MMO try to do without this type of system in the future. On the plus side, this may solve the case of the missing extraplanar pants.
Soloable Core Story, Group-Based Epilogue/Finale
Over the past few days, I spent some time in LOTRO completing the newly soloable Volume 2 Epic quests. With this set of changes, LOTRO has completed a shift in its storytelling style in which the game's core story is open to all players via soloing, while group content is presented in optional epilogues or side-quests.
Revamping the content...
In more traditional MMO fashion, the story quests of Volumes 1 and 2 were designed with the intent of luring solo players into group content in order to see the unfolding story. Unfortunately, for reasons I've decried at length, this approach didn't really work because the solo and group player demographics just don't match up.
Starting with the Mirkwood expansion and the final Book of Volume 2, Turbine presented the epic storyline as soloable content, with a group epilogue that allows players to go back and tackle foes that the solo players could not conquer alone. They also announced a change, implemented a few months later, which would revise the Volume 1 content from the launch game to allow players to complete the content without the need for groups of players that simply could no longer be found. At the time, I wrote that it looked like Turbine was going to be using this approach going forward.
It took over a year after that to finish the job, but last month's patch finally gave the non-soloable portions of Volume 2 (Books 4-6 and Book 8) the solo treatment. The new Volume 3 quests that have been released since then have also been solo content, with a new optional side storyline leading players into the newly introduced group dungeons from the latest patch.
...to fit the audience?
Lord of the Rings Online is not a game that has had an overabundance of development resources; their decision to spend that limited time on removing the need to group for the game's core story strongly implies what those of us without access to the internal numbers can only assume from anecdotal evidence - that the audience for the game was simply not using the most crucial content because they were unwilling or unable to group to do so. Moreover, the decision to continue this process book by book for over a year until the work could be completed implies that they liked the results they saw with the earliest changes.
The MMO market in general, and LOTRO in particular now that it offers a non-monthly-fee option, is not what it used to be. Like it or not, the majority of paying customers are not interested in committing to raiding schedules that more closely resemble a job than a game. The longer this goes on, the less willing the market is going to be to tolerate being told that they don't get to see the central story of the game they're paying for.
This trend hit LOTRO first and hardest because it has always been a slower paced game that is more likely to appeal to a laid back solo player than a highly dedicated group player (who would quickly run out of content). That said, the competition is starting to respond in a similar, albeit less drastic, way to the same problem. If you look at the quests in the new zones of World of Warcraft's Cataclysm expansion, or in the newly-launched Rift, you will see an increasing push for exactly the same kind of storytelling - self-sufficient soloable zone storylines with the option to return for group content later.
In some ways, it feels like MMO storytelling is shifting to be less like chapters of a book and more like episodes of a TV show - the new storylines appear meant to stand on their own merits, rather than merely setting up the real story for the few who beat the toughest dungeons. Time will tell whether this compromise will prove satisfactory.
Revamping the content...
In more traditional MMO fashion, the story quests of Volumes 1 and 2 were designed with the intent of luring solo players into group content in order to see the unfolding story. Unfortunately, for reasons I've decried at length, this approach didn't really work because the solo and group player demographics just don't match up.
Starting with the Mirkwood expansion and the final Book of Volume 2, Turbine presented the epic storyline as soloable content, with a group epilogue that allows players to go back and tackle foes that the solo players could not conquer alone. They also announced a change, implemented a few months later, which would revise the Volume 1 content from the launch game to allow players to complete the content without the need for groups of players that simply could no longer be found. At the time, I wrote that it looked like Turbine was going to be using this approach going forward.
It took over a year after that to finish the job, but last month's patch finally gave the non-soloable portions of Volume 2 (Books 4-6 and Book 8) the solo treatment. The new Volume 3 quests that have been released since then have also been solo content, with a new optional side storyline leading players into the newly introduced group dungeons from the latest patch.
...to fit the audience?
Lord of the Rings Online is not a game that has had an overabundance of development resources; their decision to spend that limited time on removing the need to group for the game's core story strongly implies what those of us without access to the internal numbers can only assume from anecdotal evidence - that the audience for the game was simply not using the most crucial content because they were unwilling or unable to group to do so. Moreover, the decision to continue this process book by book for over a year until the work could be completed implies that they liked the results they saw with the earliest changes.
The MMO market in general, and LOTRO in particular now that it offers a non-monthly-fee option, is not what it used to be. Like it or not, the majority of paying customers are not interested in committing to raiding schedules that more closely resemble a job than a game. The longer this goes on, the less willing the market is going to be to tolerate being told that they don't get to see the central story of the game they're paying for.
This trend hit LOTRO first and hardest because it has always been a slower paced game that is more likely to appeal to a laid back solo player than a highly dedicated group player (who would quickly run out of content). That said, the competition is starting to respond in a similar, albeit less drastic, way to the same problem. If you look at the quests in the new zones of World of Warcraft's Cataclysm expansion, or in the newly-launched Rift, you will see an increasing push for exactly the same kind of storytelling - self-sufficient soloable zone storylines with the option to return for group content later.
In some ways, it feels like MMO storytelling is shifting to be less like chapters of a book and more like episodes of a TV show - the new storylines appear meant to stand on their own merits, rather than merely setting up the real story for the few who beat the toughest dungeons. Time will tell whether this compromise will prove satisfactory.
Discordant Lore
Something in Tipa's writeup of the Rift world event issues stuck me as odd and potentially concerning for the game in the long term. No, it wasn't the 8-hour queues that caused players to miss the 30 minute one-time-only event, though these were predictable given the design and perhaps not the most prudent choice to showcase Trion's heavily hyped dynamic world technology. The passage from Tipa's post that made me scratch my head reads:
This detail seems odd given how much effort Trion has put into depicting these two factions as diametrically opposed.
Divergent Paths
I don't know whether other games have taken this approach, but Trion opted to have two separate lore leads for the game's two factions. (The guys at Rift Watchers interviewed the two of them a while back if you're curious.)
The good news is that each side has a very distinct identity, with a person whose job it is to pull for them and make sure that their story is as cool as the other guys'. The bad news is that the lore sometimes feels disjointed, even more so than you would expect of what two warring factions would think of each other. From the earliest levels, Defiant content portrays Guardians as vicious short-sighted zealots, while Guardian lore depicts Defiants as reckless amoral maniacs. Even the game's opening cinematic shows a Guardian who is apparently willing to risk letting the Plane of Life have a foothold of Telara if it helps him beat a pair of Defiants.
All of which is well and good I suppose (assuming that people don't get too mean on Twitter, as Pete observed) until the minor issue arises that these two divergent stories are nominally occurring in the same world. There isn't really enough dev time out there to make separate raid content for both factions. However, if this and future content is going to emphasize the common threat of Regulos, Trion risks blending the factions, much as Blizzard has done with the Alliance and Horde (who also continue to coincidentally fight and kill the exact same foes, despite a cosmetic effort to reinvigorate the faction conflict in Cataclysm).
If this is indeed the trend, I wonder whether Trion will regret their approach to building faction identity.
"They respawned again, and then one last time, now with the leader of the Defiant faction there as well. They chatted for awhile, Alsbeth had some threats, the Guardian leader had the Vigil in the form of divine angels save the Defiant leader from Alsbeth’s attack. They moved on her; Alsbeth fled into the River of Souls, and the event was done."
This detail seems odd given how much effort Trion has put into depicting these two factions as diametrically opposed.
Divergent Paths
I don't know whether other games have taken this approach, but Trion opted to have two separate lore leads for the game's two factions. (The guys at Rift Watchers interviewed the two of them a while back if you're curious.)
The good news is that each side has a very distinct identity, with a person whose job it is to pull for them and make sure that their story is as cool as the other guys'. The bad news is that the lore sometimes feels disjointed, even more so than you would expect of what two warring factions would think of each other. From the earliest levels, Defiant content portrays Guardians as vicious short-sighted zealots, while Guardian lore depicts Defiants as reckless amoral maniacs. Even the game's opening cinematic shows a Guardian who is apparently willing to risk letting the Plane of Life have a foothold of Telara if it helps him beat a pair of Defiants.
All of which is well and good I suppose (assuming that people don't get too mean on Twitter, as Pete observed) until the minor issue arises that these two divergent stories are nominally occurring in the same world. There isn't really enough dev time out there to make separate raid content for both factions. However, if this and future content is going to emphasize the common threat of Regulos, Trion risks blending the factions, much as Blizzard has done with the Alliance and Horde (who also continue to coincidentally fight and kill the exact same foes, despite a cosmetic effort to reinvigorate the faction conflict in Cataclysm).
If this is indeed the trend, I wonder whether Trion will regret their approach to building faction identity.
Tank Solution: Larger Groups, More DPS Slots?
Tank motivation is a pretty popular topic in the wake of Blizzard's latest bright idea, so here's a quick drive-by musing for folks, so here's a drive-by discussion point.
Rohan suggests that distributing the responsibility of the tanking (and healing) roles among multiple players might lessen the pressure and therefore make players more willing to tank. He suggests that 2 tanks, 2 healers and 2 DPS might work. Chris@Game By Night's experience with public rift groups suggests otherwise, as players would rather wipe and fail than switch over to healing, even when most classes have passive healing options that play almost identically to DPS.
What if we went in the opposite direction? The current holy trinity calls for 1 tank, 1 healer, and 3-4 DPS, but it seems that far more than 60% of players only want to DPS. If you're not going to blow up the entire holy trinity/aggro concept (which no current aggro-based game can do in a patch), and you can't convince players to move over to the tank category, why not change the numbers to match how players actually behave? Perhaps 1 tank, 2 healers, and 7 DPS would reflect the actual preferences of the population.
There are problems to overcome. That said, pretty much all of these games already offer a raiding format that is about twice as large as the default group but only utilities a single tank - if anything, this would lessen the degree to which single group content fosters 2-4 times more tanks than there are slots for in raids.
Thoughts?
Rohan suggests that distributing the responsibility of the tanking (and healing) roles among multiple players might lessen the pressure and therefore make players more willing to tank. He suggests that 2 tanks, 2 healers and 2 DPS might work. Chris@Game By Night's experience with public rift groups suggests otherwise, as players would rather wipe and fail than switch over to healing, even when most classes have passive healing options that play almost identically to DPS.
What if we went in the opposite direction? The current holy trinity calls for 1 tank, 1 healer, and 3-4 DPS, but it seems that far more than 60% of players only want to DPS. If you're not going to blow up the entire holy trinity/aggro concept (which no current aggro-based game can do in a patch), and you can't convince players to move over to the tank category, why not change the numbers to match how players actually behave? Perhaps 1 tank, 2 healers, and 7 DPS would reflect the actual preferences of the population.
There are problems to overcome. That said, pretty much all of these games already offer a raiding format that is about twice as large as the default group but only utilities a single tank - if anything, this would lessen the degree to which single group content fosters 2-4 times more tanks than there are slots for in raids.
Thoughts?
Rift Elf Panties For Psychochild
Previously, in the comments at Psychochild's place:
My original theory appears to be incorrect - if I remove my character's pants altogether, her underwear is a different color. I suppose it's possible that they wanted the crotch colored black metallic and were going to add legs later but forgot. At the moment, though, it looks like the leggings have indeed vanished into some extraplanar space.
Of course, maybe this is all Ferrel's fault. Going back to old school DND and EQ1 rules, where Clerics get to wear plate armor, he argues that "Clerics do not wear chain mail unless it is under plate." Maybe Trion decided to listen to him, cause it sure looks like you could get those "leggings" under some plate. If you don't mind the chafing anyway.
Green Armadillo wrote: I'd like to believe that my Cleric's current armor is bugged and missing its texture, because it sure looks like she's just wearing panties.
Psychochild wrote:
Oh, my. I assume you're in plate? Got a screenshot to shame the artists with?
Of course, maybe this is all Ferrel's fault. Going back to old school DND and EQ1 rules, where Clerics get to wear plate armor, he argues that "Clerics do not wear chain mail unless it is under plate." Maybe Trion decided to listen to him, cause it sure looks like you could get those "leggings" under some plate. If you don't mind the chafing anyway.
Rift Fails Public Group Accountability?
Five evenings ago, I was riding my collector's edition turtle across Scarwood Reach when I came across two players, a lumbering non-hostile robot, and the Rift public content UI. I'd never seen this UI appear without something to kill right next to it, so I stopped to read the text. I had just figured out that it was an NPC escort quest when the window closed up and the loot icon flashed on top of my screen. The robot had reached his destination, and my presence for the final seconds had flagged me as a participant.
I had just accidentally completed a quest for a four-digit chunk of exp and a blue sourceshard. I don't think I've logged into my main character since.
Victory Through Attendence
In hindsight, reflecting on this one incident brings into focus something that I've been trying to put into words for over a week now. The problem with Rift's cooperative public content system is not merely that you get tired of seeing the same events destroy your quest hub yet again (though that does start to happen). The problem is that in many cases I'm left feeling like victory or defeat would have happened regardless of my participation, and I just happened to be along for the ride and the loot.
Now that I'm running with a dedicated healing spec, I can state objectively that this impression shouldn't be true - there have been several encounters where, judging from the amount of damage the tank was taking and the amount I personally was healing them for, the group would probably have wiped without my actions. Then again, in that case they would have respawned and eventually more people would have shown up to heal the team to victory. Moreover, even when it is actually true that my presence decided the encounter, it does not feel that way when I'm one of two dozen players spamming away at a mass of players and mobs. When I'm solo or in a smaller group, I can tell how well (or poorly) I did, but in a massive public raid my contribution disappears into a sea of numbers.
Outlook
The bigger issue is that the public content is my reason to play the game (or possibly not as of next week). Yes, there is solo content, it is reasonably polished, and the soul system lets me all-but re-roll on every trip to my class trainer without having to start over at level 1. Yes, there is group content, though I haven't been able to do much of it because of time constraints. Yes, there's PVP, which I should probably try at some point. But the thing that Rift does that none of the numerous other games I could be playing instead does not is public content.
Rift is still easily the best MMO launch in the last four years, and it will almost certainly be the fourth MMO that I cap a character in. As of right now, though, my outlook on Rift is that I should probably give Trion a few more months to iterate.
I had just accidentally completed a quest for a four-digit chunk of exp and a blue sourceshard. I don't think I've logged into my main character since.
Victory Through Attendence
In hindsight, reflecting on this one incident brings into focus something that I've been trying to put into words for over a week now. The problem with Rift's cooperative public content system is not merely that you get tired of seeing the same events destroy your quest hub yet again (though that does start to happen). The problem is that in many cases I'm left feeling like victory or defeat would have happened regardless of my participation, and I just happened to be along for the ride and the loot.
Now that I'm running with a dedicated healing spec, I can state objectively that this impression shouldn't be true - there have been several encounters where, judging from the amount of damage the tank was taking and the amount I personally was healing them for, the group would probably have wiped without my actions. Then again, in that case they would have respawned and eventually more people would have shown up to heal the team to victory. Moreover, even when it is actually true that my presence decided the encounter, it does not feel that way when I'm one of two dozen players spamming away at a mass of players and mobs. When I'm solo or in a smaller group, I can tell how well (or poorly) I did, but in a massive public raid my contribution disappears into a sea of numbers.
Outlook
The bigger issue is that the public content is my reason to play the game (or possibly not as of next week). Yes, there is solo content, it is reasonably polished, and the soul system lets me all-but re-roll on every trip to my class trainer without having to start over at level 1. Yes, there is group content, though I haven't been able to do much of it because of time constraints. Yes, there's PVP, which I should probably try at some point. But the thing that Rift does that none of the numerous other games I could be playing instead does not is public content.
Rift is still easily the best MMO launch in the last four years, and it will almost certainly be the fourth MMO that I cap a character in. As of right now, though, my outlook on Rift is that I should probably give Trion a few more months to iterate.
Whose Role Is It Anyway?
Based on my Twitter feed, my Cleric has leveled as:
As Ferrel and Starseeker discuss, this type of role-switching is the defining feature of Rift's soul system. It has its cons as well as its pros, but you have only yourself to blame if you get bored with your first character.
- 1-14: Justicar/Druid/Sentinel (self-healing melee, theoretically tank-capable)
- 15: Warden (healing over time build for rifts)
- 16-21: Shaman/Druid/0 pt Warden (melee DPS with a focus on reactive attacks and healing pet)
- 22: Inquisitor/10 pt Justicar (caster DPS with passive self healing)
- 23-33: Druid/10+ Justicar (melee DPS with ranged abilities and either a healing or a melee pet)
- 31-33: Purifier/2+ pt Sentinel/8 pt Cabalist (single target healer with damage wards, cabalist splash gives a quick damage combo that regenerates a nice chunk of mana)
As Ferrel and Starseeker discuss, this type of role-switching is the defining feature of Rift's soul system. It has its cons as well as its pros, but you have only yourself to blame if you get bored with your first character.
Spot That Stealth Pig!
Welcome to Spot That Stealth Pig, with your host, Seloxia!
Let's meet our first contestant, a Bloodhavoc Goblin!
Now, goblin, can you SPOT THAT STEALTH PIG?!
Oh noes, the Goblin has done it! Seloxia, tell him what he's won!
That's right, a pair of daggers, right between the shoulder blades! Thank you for playing, Bloodhavoc Goblin!
Promotional consideration paid for not rolling on an RP server so that the name "Stealth Pig" is vaguely acceptable, and the soul system for allowing players to roll up a stealth class with a tanking pet for infinite backstabs.
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| The Pig |
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| Different Goblin used for better screenshot. |
Promotional consideration paid for not rolling on an RP server so that the name "Stealth Pig" is vaguely acceptable, and the soul system for allowing players to roll up a stealth class with a tanking pet for infinite backstabs.
Rift At 30, 15, and 15
My main hit level 30 in Rift over the weekend, and I've also got a pair of alts at level 15 with crafting skills in the 120-range. As a result, I'm starting to get into the real "meat" of the game, with some things I like and some I find concerning.
Solo Difficulty
On my extremely durable Cleric, I'm very satisfied with the difficulty of solo content. I don't die that often, but I do end up pushed to the limits of what I have at my disposal to stay up. The only downside is that a lot of the difficulty comes from mobs respawning on top of you while you're clearing an area out, which really hurts my squishier alts.
(The mage in particular feels like a bad deal - you lose a lot of versatility and a lot of durability in exchange for a bunch of different ways to do ranged DPS, but it doesn't feel like the sheer levels of damage are that much greater.)
Also, the exp curve has been pretty much perfect for my playstyle - I dinged 30 on the very last quest in Scarlet Gorge, and I was always within a level or so of the quests I was working on. (I could see this being more of a problem if you were also doing PVP and dungeons for loot.)
The Dynamic Game
Like most non-instanced content I've seen in other games, Rifts and zone invasions are a lot of fun when precisely the right numbers of players show up. Soloing a minor rift is fun, and beating a major rift with 3 people is a lot of fun when all the pieces fall into place. Less fun is having 6-8 DPS show up, wiping, and having the public group scatter rather than stick around to see if anyone can switch into a tanking and/or healing role that could win the fight with the players at hand. Finally, as I discussed yesterday, scaling for really large groups sometimes seems to result in an extremely lengthy but non-threatening fight.
In general, I stop to fight any rift or invasion that I run into, and I generally try to join each zone-wide invasion event at least once to see the sights. If I do get a repeat, though (I think the Werebeast in Gloamwood spawned five times while I was working on the zone), my willingness to drop everything and ride all the way across the zone for a few dozen planarite drops rapidly. Likewise, it gets a bit old when you have to fight off an invasion to respawn your quest hub, you go off to complete the next few quests, and return to find the place destroyed and camped by mobs yet again.
Crafting
I posted about crafting last week, and I've made modest progress since then. One thing that's striking about the system is that you really don't need a lot of raw materials to get crafting skill points - you can make an item for a guaranteed skill point and then salvage it, getting a third to half of the materials back. My level 30 character has been able to harvest enough stuff to feed two separate crafting alts, both of whom are now crafting level 30-ish gear.
The catch is that obtaining recipes can be more challenging. Either you need reputation with local adventuring factions - obviously, my alts don't have this at low levels - or you need to do daily quests for tokens. Worse, the daily quests offered are based on your crafting skill, meaning that you can lose access to them if you gain too many points. If you're near a cut-off between tiers, you're better off NOT gaining that next point until you have enough materials to gain 10-20 points, so you can open up a new work order to replace the one you're losing access to.
Outlook
The next few levels should be interesting, as I unlock 32-point root abilities and then have a bit more flexibility to pick up mid-range stuff in a secondary soul. I also haven't tried any PVP or dungeons yet, so that's another area that I can hack away at going forward. Finally, there is another faction to try, and apparently two leveling paths from 36-50. There's definitely a lot of stuff left to do in the game.
That said, the rift content is the thing that this game has and the others I could be playing right now do not. So far, it's been hit or miss, and the real hits have come at times when there are fewer people around in my level bracket (e.g. because I stopped to level a pair of crafting alts while everyone else leveled past my main). Right now, I expect that I will pay some additional money for some additional time in Telara, but I'm not running out to buy the six-month plan.
On my extremely durable Cleric, I'm very satisfied with the difficulty of solo content. I don't die that often, but I do end up pushed to the limits of what I have at my disposal to stay up. The only downside is that a lot of the difficulty comes from mobs respawning on top of you while you're clearing an area out, which really hurts my squishier alts.
(The mage in particular feels like a bad deal - you lose a lot of versatility and a lot of durability in exchange for a bunch of different ways to do ranged DPS, but it doesn't feel like the sheer levels of damage are that much greater.)
Also, the exp curve has been pretty much perfect for my playstyle - I dinged 30 on the very last quest in Scarlet Gorge, and I was always within a level or so of the quests I was working on. (I could see this being more of a problem if you were also doing PVP and dungeons for loot.)
The Dynamic Game
Like most non-instanced content I've seen in other games, Rifts and zone invasions are a lot of fun when precisely the right numbers of players show up. Soloing a minor rift is fun, and beating a major rift with 3 people is a lot of fun when all the pieces fall into place. Less fun is having 6-8 DPS show up, wiping, and having the public group scatter rather than stick around to see if anyone can switch into a tanking and/or healing role that could win the fight with the players at hand. Finally, as I discussed yesterday, scaling for really large groups sometimes seems to result in an extremely lengthy but non-threatening fight.
In general, I stop to fight any rift or invasion that I run into, and I generally try to join each zone-wide invasion event at least once to see the sights. If I do get a repeat, though (I think the Werebeast in Gloamwood spawned five times while I was working on the zone), my willingness to drop everything and ride all the way across the zone for a few dozen planarite drops rapidly. Likewise, it gets a bit old when you have to fight off an invasion to respawn your quest hub, you go off to complete the next few quests, and return to find the place destroyed and camped by mobs yet again.
Crafting
I posted about crafting last week, and I've made modest progress since then. One thing that's striking about the system is that you really don't need a lot of raw materials to get crafting skill points - you can make an item for a guaranteed skill point and then salvage it, getting a third to half of the materials back. My level 30 character has been able to harvest enough stuff to feed two separate crafting alts, both of whom are now crafting level 30-ish gear.
The catch is that obtaining recipes can be more challenging. Either you need reputation with local adventuring factions - obviously, my alts don't have this at low levels - or you need to do daily quests for tokens. Worse, the daily quests offered are based on your crafting skill, meaning that you can lose access to them if you gain too many points. If you're near a cut-off between tiers, you're better off NOT gaining that next point until you have enough materials to gain 10-20 points, so you can open up a new work order to replace the one you're losing access to.
Outlook
The next few levels should be interesting, as I unlock 32-point root abilities and then have a bit more flexibility to pick up mid-range stuff in a secondary soul. I also haven't tried any PVP or dungeons yet, so that's another area that I can hack away at going forward. Finally, there is another faction to try, and apparently two leveling paths from 36-50. There's definitely a lot of stuff left to do in the game.
That said, the rift content is the thing that this game has and the others I could be playing right now do not. So far, it's been hit or miss, and the real hits have come at times when there are fewer people around in my level bracket (e.g. because I stopped to level a pair of crafting alts while everyone else leveled past my main). Right now, I expect that I will pay some additional money for some additional time in Telara, but I'm not running out to buy the six-month plan.
Passive Healing And Rift Scaling
Rift's dynamic content attempts to scale mob difficulty to the number of players present. However, even beyond the relatively simple events of the game's earliest zones, I'm finding that things are simply easier with more people.
I'm wondering if part of the problem is passive DPS healing. Mobs can and do get dramatically more health if they spawn in a crowded area, to account for the larger crowds beating on them. Though they do also get a damage bonus, there's an upper limit on this effect, because the health of any individual player in the group does NOT scale with the numbers present - if the mob does 20 times more damage when too many players show up, they'll start killing people in a single hit.
Meanwhile, Rift has several types of theoretically DPS characters who also generate passive healing as they attack. As more and more players show up, it seems like the raid gets more and more healing just because people have built this capability into their solo builds. As I've leveled through the zone events in Gloamwood and Scarlet Gorge, I'm noticing that even big AOE attacks don't do much to the raid's health meters because they're immediately topped off by a flurry of small green numbers.
In principle, it is good that zone bosses can take a while to kill - players who were on the other end of the zone to complete invasion objectives when the boss spawned should have time to reach the final showdown before the boss dies. I'm just saying that spending 10-15 minutes DPS'ing a boss who doesn't appear to be able to actually threaten any players can get old.
I'm wondering if part of the problem is passive DPS healing. Mobs can and do get dramatically more health if they spawn in a crowded area, to account for the larger crowds beating on them. Though they do also get a damage bonus, there's an upper limit on this effect, because the health of any individual player in the group does NOT scale with the numbers present - if the mob does 20 times more damage when too many players show up, they'll start killing people in a single hit.
Meanwhile, Rift has several types of theoretically DPS characters who also generate passive healing as they attack. As more and more players show up, it seems like the raid gets more and more healing just because people have built this capability into their solo builds. As I've leveled through the zone events in Gloamwood and Scarlet Gorge, I'm noticing that even big AOE attacks don't do much to the raid's health meters because they're immediately topped off by a flurry of small green numbers.
In principle, it is good that zone bosses can take a while to kill - players who were on the other end of the zone to complete invasion objectives when the boss spawned should have time to reach the final showdown before the boss dies. I'm just saying that spending 10-15 minutes DPS'ing a boss who doesn't appear to be able to actually threaten any players can get old.
Bowling With Ferrel And Friends
Yesterday, a group of Guardians from Byriel US made a run at the Ancient Wardstones of Scarlet Gorge. The team included Ferrel of Epic Slant and his guild, Iniquity (my home in Telara), along with Massively's Karen Bryan and her guild, Revelry and Honor. It was a great example of what I called MMO Bowling earlier this week, not knowing that I'd be along for such a ride just a day later.
My High Elf Cleric (Telhamat) is currently level 25, which is on the low end for quests in the zone, and I'd never set foot in the place before. This also meant that I did not have the teleport point, so I had to ride in from Gloamwood and blunder around a zone with higher level mobs and a fully greyed-out map, looking for the raid. This turned out to be good preparation for the actual event.
There are supposedly 9 wardstones in the zone, which will summon a raid boss once per day if the same faction controls all of them. We did not really know where most of these locations were. As a result, we had a raid team of about three dozen Guardians running amok back and forth across the zone, trying to wall jump our way up cliffs (Rift is much more permissive on this front than most MMO's I've played), and possibly inadvertently wiping out one or more Defiant quest hubs that we mistakenly believed were mobs guarding a wardstone. (I assume that is how most of us ended up flagged for PVP.)
Overall, we killed a couple mobs here and there, I stopped to loot the occasional harvesting node while our leaders tried to figure out wardstone locations on YouTube, and we probably gave the local Defiant population a decent scare. (Things would probably have gotten more hairy on a PVP server, but I'm guessing that you have to make more of an affirmative effort to make a nuisance of yourself before the other faction actually mounts significant resistance in a mid-level zone on a PVE server.) We never did find the final wardstone, and we're not sure if that's because we couldn't locate it or because it does not spawn if the boss has already been killed that day (there was no in-game indication either way on this point).
Despite this seeming lack of win, I had a good time and got to uncover the map of the zone amidst the good-natured mayhem. Judging from the reactions on vent, it sounded like everyone else had the same experience. Perhaps the zone event could have been designed more transparently, but it was a perfectly good activity for an evening with the guild.
Rift Progression Curve Notes
My Rift Cleric hit level 24 over the weekend, but I've side-tracked a bit working on some alts (a level 12 Mage with Outfitter and a brand new level 7 Rogue). A few observations:
- After seeing how Blizzard did Cataclysm, I'm really glad to have the exp curve set in a way that allows me to do stuff like Rifts without outleveling the zone I'm in. I might skip the last hub or two of Gloamwood when I get that far, but that's more because the zone somehow hasn't caught my attention - it's pretty, but I've seen dark and gloomy many times before.
- As I noted in my first launch impressions, getting all the souls for a class in the extremely low levels feels like an odd progression choice. By the mid 20's, my pure soul builds are already nearing the top "branches" of their soul trees. There are still a few more abilities to be gained from the "roots" (and many abilities scale with the total points spent in that soul, up to 51 if you go back and take everything including the stuff you didn't want the first time).
The good news is that I can now look at a 10-12 point base in another tree without doing too much damage to my intended main focus, so this opens up options, but it is starting to feel like progress is slowing down. - Of all the Cleric builds I've tried, the 20+ Shaman/10 Justicar build seems to be the most effective. I don't have much for ranged, which can be a problem in Rifts with bouncing aggro, but I do good damage and I can solo a single elite mob (or multiple non-elites) through self-healing. On the downside, it's starting to bore me because it's getting a bit easy (which is part of why I'm trying the other classes suddenly).
Crafting For NPC's In Rift
In Rift's case, though, there were so many stacks of soft leather on my local auction house that it was a borderline call whether to risk the deposit fee for the chance at selling marginally over vendor price. So, I took my mage alt and turned them into an outfitter.
Basics of Rift Crafting
Outfitters, like EQ2 Tailors, do cloth and leather armor, along with bags. Cloth drops from humanoids and leather is skinned from mobs using butchering (also sometimes yields bones, which I haven't needed yet). This leaves you with an empty third slot, which I'm using for mining on the alt, while my main remains a triple gatherer. (Runecrafting, Rift's equivalent of WoW's enchanting profession, is another common choice since it does not require a gathering profession.)
Once you get the materials, the actual making of items is like we have in WoW or LOTRO - stand by the tool (e.g. a loom), click the button, watch the progress bar. There are optional enhancement items, which drop from rifts, and are used to add an additional stat to the item you're crafting. Crafting the base item cannot fail, but the attempt to add the enhancement might - if this happens, the enhancement item is destroyed but you do not lose the other materials, so you'll always be able to make the base gear if you run out of enhancement items or give up.
Sinking the skillup items
Interestingly, Rift offers two ways to dispose of the crafted items you make for skill points.
First, my outfitter can salvage armor, including stuff I just crafted, for some crafting materials (and a special "salvaged cloth/leather" that is used in some side recipes).
Second, there is a daily quest for each tier of crafting, where you turn in some number of a basic crafted item in exchange for small amounts of exp and special tokens that are used at recipe vendors in your capital city. These crafting quests appear to be the only way to earn these tokens, and the higher level recipes cost hundreds of them, so dedicated crafters are going to want to do these as often as possible.
In principle, this should create a natural sink of these materials out of the economy. (In fact, that might be the problem with the soft leather - the outfitter dailies don't use any of it.) You might even be able to craft these items for skill points and sell them on the auction house (if you don't want the tokens for yourself) to high level crafters who want to get their tokens quickly.
Unfortunately, I don't see a huge reason why it's important for me to do my own crafting. It's useful to have a low level outfitter on my account just so my future alts (well, 1-2 more since I now already have two of the four callings) can ship their cloth over in exchange for bags. That convenience aside, it doesn't look like there are self-only perks or significant amounts of crafter-only content (as in EQ2). I'm not convinced that it's worth the trouble compared to farming for the auction house.
Building Blocks For Classes
For example, six points in the Elementalist tree gives a fledgling mage a tanking pet, a damage shield, and an ability that basically removes out of combat mana regen downtime by draining your charge bar (built up as you cast spells, sort of like a Warrior's rage bar in other games). You can stick these types of capabilities into your character like building blocks, ensuring that you have the basics that you need to play before advancing into a tree that you really wanted to focus on.
The results can be remarkable. I was not so impressed with the caster Clerics initially. Then I respecced and added some points in the Justicar soul. Justicars get low levels of self healing to begin with, but investing 10 points enhances that baseline self-healing to significant levels. Suddenly, my caster priest was noticeably more durable than any caster I've ever played before, combining medium-heavy armor with significant amounts of self-healing just from my DPS spells.
Rift is not the only game to offer customization options. Building a multi-class DDO character feels slightly similar - for example, many players start their characters with a level of rogue to pick up some sneak attack damage, the "use magic device" skill for self-healing, and some other goodies. However, respecing that DDO character later is rare or costly (in the cash shop). Rift characters can pick up their second role basically immediately, and my cleric has her third slot (out of four) by the early 20's. Respecs are completely free until level 14, and seem cheap thereafter (with the cost scaling as you level, a sensible plan that still wasn't in WoW when last I checked).
All that said, I am leveling the mage now in part because I want to see whether it even makes sense to do so. In addition to having the most healing options in the game, my Cleric can melee, cast DPS spells, and even off-tank. By contrast, the mage gets only a single healing soul (which may or may not be the best choice for certain purposes) and is compensated with a variety of ways to nuke and buff/debuff. Does one character really need half a dozen different variations on DPS casting, especially when many will include a common core of skills (like the six points in Elementalist)? I don't know the answer, but I'm working on it.
Lessons From Launch Queues
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| Rift Server Status Page, 9:15 PM EST, March 2nd 2011 |
Chris has a post up on Rift Watchers comparing the game's queues, and addition of servers, to other game launches. I was present for the launches of WoW and Warhammer, and can attest to the fact that they did indeed feature queues. Blizzard, Mythic, and Trion all chose to launch with conservative numbers of servers and plans to expand rapidly if demand called for it. The jury remains out on Rift, but I maintain that this tactic is a mistake.
The problem is that players who plan to show up in these games with their guilds are going to pick their server from the list that's available the night before launch, not the expanded list that's available after the queues hit. The players who are able to change their server plans when they see a launch day queue are probably showing up on their own.
This means that the game's most dedicated players are going to end up stuck on a server with queues that may not get any better anytime soon. Back in 2004, my guild opted to remain on one of the original 40 WoW servers, and we paid for that call many times over with multi-hour queues that persisted on and off for around three years.
Meanwhile, the servers that are added later fill up with players who have no social ties, making them more likely to change servers again or even leave the game outright (as Mythic discovered with Warhammer). Either way, I'd argue that having to double the number of servers after the fact is far more damaging than launching with a few servers too many.
LOTRO aside
The one launch that seems to have gotten this question right is LOTRO. The game had eleven servers during its open beta/headstart period, and it did not add or remove a single server until the free to play relaunch in 2010 (which added three new servers to the mix). I was horrified when Turbine announced that they were not adding any new servers for the official retail launch, but they had gotten very reliable pre-order numbers and were able to make the correct call.
(The way the LOTRO headstart worked was that you could keep your characters from open beta, but ONLY if you pre-ordered by launch day. By contrast, Trion's open beta was wiped before the headstart, so I'm guessing that players opted to wait for the final servers to arrive before submitting their pre-orders.)
Rift At 20
Overall, I'm impressed with the game. I have not encountered any obvious bugs or server issues. I am waffling on whether to use the low quality rendering option, but a commenter correctly discerned that this is actually my fault - the CPU speed on my laptop is below the stated minimum specs of the game (1.73 GHz, with a requirement of 2.0). I didn't even think to check those numbers because they're usually set laughably low - WoW at its launch minimum specs would have been a painful experience - and Trion gets points in my book for putting the bar at a point where the game actually runs in a state that you'd be willing to play it.
One thing that is a bit disappointing is the realization that the zone I've already cleared is my only option for future Guardian alts. Yes, the experience will play differently on future characters because of different numbers of invasions, rifts, etc. Yes, it's vitally important that players not get scattered between so many zones that there aren't enough people around to do open world content (a major problem Warhammer faced). Even so, I've already seen some of the zone-wide events multiple times, and I'm already shrugging when the giant Satyr with the AOE squirrel-morph ability attacks Argent Glade yet again. I'd ordinarily keep my alts on the same server/faction, but going to the other side is tempting simply for variety.
(One actual functional complaint about zone invasions - it's not always easy to tell which of the invasions and rifts in the zone are part of the bigger event, and which are ongoing random incidents. This kind of matters because I'm assuming that you only get contribution towards the purple Rift currency if the stuff you're fighting is actually part of the zone event.)
That said, replay value only matters because I'm looking forward to at least one re-roll to see how the other callings live. This speaks to the high quality game that Trion has put together. I also feel that I'd like to see whether/how the higher level dynamic content is different from the entry level stuff. So far, most of the invasions and rifts that I've seen is relatively tank-and-spank (especially with large enough numbers of players present), and I'm looking forward to seeing how it plays out at higher levels.
Regardless, I'm definitely looking forward to at least one trip through Telara. That may seem like a low bar, but it's actually a major accomplishment compared to what other games have managed for launch.
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