Entertaining (RIFT, FW)

Hope everyone had a nice weekend, mine was pretty laid back and entertaining, besides a brief migraine. I poked into RIFT, briefly, and saw the new coin lock system has been implemented. I expect many people have already heard about all the hacking of RIFT accounts. Mine was fine, the main reason I logged in was just to check.

To top it all off a player was the one to catch the security breach, joking that he could log into a gm account to prove it. So, Trion swoops in, follows up and saves the day. Saves the day? How about being on top of things to begin with? Harsh, I know.

Now that is an appearance outfit!

On a better note I hit 31, almost halfway to 32 now, in Forsaken World. Yay! I don't feel very far behind, I think they highest player is only in their mid 40's, currently. I am still enjoying the game a lot. Its got bit of a learning curve, getting to know how things work and how to make money. With there being two types of currencies, one to players and one to NPCs, it can get confusing. It's not something to cry over though.

While I do wish the game had player housing, I suppose I would just end up 'playing house' too much and slack off on leveling. There is so much to do in the game, plenty of daily quests for: Faction, coin, xp instances, guilds, tradeskills and so on.

Hitting 30 granted us the ability to buy mounts, except we're too broke and a tad shy of having enough faction. Before long we might sink some into the CS for mounts. Holding off, for now. We also gained access to some cool pets and soon, at 35, we will be able to tame more neat pets.

When we can, Dire and I, we make sure to do the Gods Trial instance. If you use a double xp scroll, well, it's amazing xp. It's also a great place to level pets, they gain xp at a crazy rate. This instance has one boss and if you have a sub-par group if can drag on but it's not too bad. Just sort of dull but the great xp makes up for it!

We've had some good groups and lacking groups. Sometimes people are just plain stupid or ignorant. That's just how it is with MMOs. Sometimes I'll just call them out, other times I just ignore them. It's nothing horrible though, mostly just ignorance. It's not like the random WoW groups of people blatantly being stupid and rude just because they can. Sometimes you will get a great group of people and the group is so enjoyable. I really like the instances, it's a breath of fresh air compared to what I have been doing for the last few months. The instances are fun, simple but not stupidly easy and nice rewards are to be had. They are not too time consuming, something I really embrace.

There are also many daily events (hit the U key to access the window pictured above), if you catch them at the right time you can net some really nice rewards. While I am not big on the idea of stuff being available only certain times of the day, they are available, most of the time, twice a day on different days. I try to do a few a day, even one if I can.

I even managed to snag some free zen for the cash shop. On the home page, under billing, there is an offer wall to earn zen. Some of these sites are total scams, I got nothing for many of them. Others award right away and others take 1-2 days. It can be time consuming with the hit and miss rate and it's not something I'd do all the time. I did want to see how much I could rack up and I got enough to get a statue (sell for gold) and a lovely appearance outfit, I had to have it!

The game isn't perfect. It is quite laid back and enjoyable though. Some people hate click to move games- use WASD, I do. I also click, at times, sometimes it is a nice change. The autoroute system is just great, run a quick afk or tab out while running to that quest turn in. I absolutely love it. Sometimes it runs me into walls though! There are things like characters bugging out and not being able to invite or receive invites. When this happens, you can click on the friend's name in the friend (F to open) list and click update. Seems to work every time. There are other annoying little things but I try to look past them. Overall the game is a really great game for being FTP, it's very smooth and polished and better than many subscription based games. Content isn't blocked off and throwing a few bucks into the game, here and there, funds something you enjoy. You're not mindlessly grinding on mobs either, questing is centric in this game.

I'm pretty happy these days with my MMO choices, who would have thought going to a free to play game would be what is keeping me so entertained.

-kaozz