How much does RIFT actually cost?

Free to play (F2P) games are all the rage, but the F2P MMO, RIFT is unusual in that it's basically still a subscription game masquerading as a F2P game. So... how much does it cost? About the same as WoW is the short answer.

The long answer is that you pay nothing to get started, but access to much of the new content for higher levels requires some degree of purchase. Fortunately (and craftily) there's the equivalent of a boxed set that gets you all of the important bits up to, but not including the most recent expansion: RIFT Essentials Edition. For  $50, this gets you everything that you really can't play on the same level without (additional skill trees, an extra calling (class) and two  additional gear slots among other goodies). Once you have that, you should probably play the game for a while and see how you feel. Becoming a subscribing "patron" gets you some nifties, but nothing that's essential. Then there's the most recent expansion ($40) which usually buys you the extra features, levels and content of the expansion.

So, for the complete functionality of the game, once the new expansion, Starfall Prophesy comes out, you would pay a total of $90. The ongoing patron subscription really doesn't add much to that,  but if you wanted to do that, it would be an additional $11/mo. if you buy the annual version.

It's cheap entertainment at that price (especially when compared to going out to movies or dinner) but it's certainly not the free game that they might tease in their ads.

Looking in on World of Warcraft

It's not a good time for MMOs. The PC gaming market, which has always been the core of the MMO world, has become the toy of Steam, and that's not likely to change terribly soon (unless Humble Bundle opens their own game service...), but MMOs are still out there. RIFT is just coming out of a period of re-tooling and will likely have a second expansion in not terribly long; EverQuest Next and Elder Scrolls Online have been announced to much fanfare; and, of course, WoW keeps chugging along.

World of Warcraft 2009-present
Source: WoW Insider

But WoW isn't what it used to be. Its subscriber numbers have gone from a peak of 12 million to less than 8 million in just 2.5 years. So, you would think that they'd be looking at what's changed and trying to move back toward the state that brought in those 12 million? Um... well, about that...

I stopped in to MMO Champion, today, a WoW news site that I used to frequent when I played. I saw, there, all of the same arguments that the Blizzard community managers and devs were having with the community back when I played. "Squishing" the itemization so that damage numbers don't overflow the database; response to claims that the game is being "dumbed down"; and the ever-popular cry of aging games, "why can't I just have vanilla back?"

RIFT: Free to Play first impressions

RIFT Free-to-Play launch page

I tried out RIFT on my far-too-old living-room entertainment center laptop last night in order to see how free-to-play was. I was kind of blown away, but there were negatives too, so let's get into it!

First off, in case you haven't followed it: RIFT, a popular second-tier MMO with a peak of an order of 1-2m users has gone free-to-play. I think that this is largely a result of their having lost user-base after the first rush of new users during their first expansion, Storm Legion... I'll cover why that was in another post. Free-to-play isn't the end of RIFT, though, if last night is any measure!

RIFT plays a lot like early WoW, before it got all of its sharp corners filed off. This is both good and bad. The game is far more dynamic than WoW, and presents the player with many more choices in terms of character development and play style. However, it also leaves casual players at the bottom of a deeper chasm of learning curve than the modern "just make it simple" MMO. As such, RIFT is much more of an MMO fan's MMO, and if you haven't played MMOs before, you might check out one of the simpler ones first (like Guild Wars or Star Wars... WoW is an option, but it's high-end grind is a bit too daunting in terms of time commitment for most new players right now).

Anyway, so RIFT is free-to-play; what does that mean? It means that you can log in (sort of... paying customers or "patrons" get priority if the server population is too high during peak hours), create a character, and do just about anything in the game, just like a paying customer. Paying customers get some bonuses like extra goodies, resurrection is a bit more convenient, etc.

Ingress: Google's augmented reality MMO

Ingress logo

+Ingress is Google's new augmented reality game that's currently in beta. It brings together a few things: first off, it's Android-only at the moment and has a strong preference for players and developers communicating via Google+. This is an obvious play for increased adoption of both platforms.

That aside, however, Ingress is the first MMO that I've played where the first step is, "go outside," and as you play the game you get a definite sense that Google isn't kidding about that. The game won't allow you to set your phone in location debugging mode (I suppose if I loaded a custom Android image, I could defeat that, but realistically it would be self-defeating) and they choose locations that are artistic or historical for elements of the game.

Has Blizzard given up on WoW?

Perhaps I'm spoiled by a shockingly productive development and design team on Rift, but I was stunned today when I read the patch notes for the upcoming 5.0 patch that's going to land for WoW. This is the first patch since 4.3 which introduced a bunch of new features including a new raid, 3 new 5-man dungeons and the Raid Finder feature. That was a good, solid content patch. Then, eight months later, you would think that they'd have something new to throw to the players while they wait for the September patch, no? Yep... a world event involving Theramore.

Rift Mage: Having fun with uitily

In Rift, I play in a guild called Ascended of Corthana on the Faeblight shard. We're a casual raiding guild that had some pretty severe numbers problems right around the time that Infernal Dawn came out. We've fixed that, and after we merged in another, similar guild we're now back on track and raiding ID while still clearing the last few bosses of HK for farm loot.

But our raiding Mage count is still very low, and as Mage class lead, I've had to bring the heavy utility to raids so that we don't end up with none. Obviously, I have to have a support (Archon) spec so that I can buff the raid if need be, but fights like every ID boss thus far in our progression along with HK bosses that I still farm from time to time like Prime and Prince require pretty specialized Mages for specific utility roles.

I've long had multiple specs to handle all of these, but now that utility is starting to become the primary thing that I bring to raids, I've been trying to consolidate. To that end, I now have two basic utility builds:

Rift: And now an expansion

Storm Legion logo
(c) Trion Worlds

Just a quick note on Rift: it seems like yesterday that I posted an article talking about how Rift was blowing the doors off content expectations, producing more new content than anyone else had in just one short year. Well, they continue to set the bar high for patches, but have raised it for the upcoming expansion. The expansion, which is now known to be called Storm Legion, is set to come out this fall. This is a smart move. Trion is counting on some people being a bit disappointed by the other offerings like Mists of Pandaria and Guild Wars 2, and they want to be the one to scoop the refugees as they did with Star Wars.

Rift: More content? Seriously?!

MMO Report visits Trion, makers of Rift

Rift is blowing my mind. I just went back over what we've gotten for new content since June. It's... well, it's a bit daunting, really. And now they're coming out with a new 20-man raid with 2 of the major lore characters (the dragons Maelforge and Laethys) for guilds to wipe on... er, do battle with!

So, just to recap, here's what we've seen since June of 2011:

• Twisted artifacts (ground spawn goodies visible with a specially purchased ability)
• The Hammerknell 20-man raid with 11 bosses introduces tier-2 raiding
• PvP rifts
• Instant adventures: a queue for ongoing world event quests
• Drowned Halls 10-man raid
• Variant warfronts introduced
• Ember Isle zone introduced with ongoing invasions to fight and its own periodic zone events with improved rewards

Rift Mage: Archon

Archon is one of Rift’s mage souls. It's a versatile soul that brings great benefit to any mage that incorporates it into their build, but it's also a raiding powerhouse when used as the primary soul. In fact, the 51-point Archon is so powerful that in addition to Bard, it's one of the only two souls that are pretty much required in any 20-man raid.

This article is all about the uses of Archon from folding in a zero-point Archon tree to taking advantage of Archon talents in other builds to full 51-point Archon support.

Rift Raiding: Just the Buffs

Bluedot has a great buff/debuff list up on his site, but it's lacking some crucial information that I constantly find myself needing in order to resolve who should cast what in raids. This is his list of buffs with all of that extra detail. I'll be doing a debuff equivalent article soon.

It should be noted that I've been playing Mage for the most part, with some Rogue. I'm almost certain to have gotten some details wrong with respect to Warrior and Cleric, so please double-check my work and send me some feedback if you find a problem.

Rift Mage: 1.7 Update

Update: Props to T Karlsson who pointed out that I'd had a run-away search and replace turn all my Flame Bolts into Fire Bolts... fixed.

Since I first published my How To Do It All Wrong and Win article about pyrolock mage dps, I've done a fair amount of raiding, dungeons, solo and PvP. I have some new info to share with you, and some updates to that article.

First off, the build has changed slightly, as have the macros. I no longer blend in Archon except as a zero-point tree (my fellow guildie, Calvnan, suggested this, and while I still think there's value in the infinite mana of Archon, the flexibility of a zero-point soul combined with the dps increase of this build makes it a great raiding build). This leaves me mana-starved in many situations, so Sacrifice Life: Mana becomes an important part of my rotation, and I have to cast it about every minute in order to maintain a boss fight. This sacrifices one 1-second global cooldown (thanks to the global cooldown reduction from Pyromancer) while giving me a substantial DPS boost from the Warlock tree (remember that both Warlock and Pyro give extra dps based on how many points you spend, so taking additional dps points in those trees gives extra bang-for-the-buck).

Rift: WoW's next generation

I've been playing Rift of late. In case you're not aware of it, Rift is a massively multiplayer roleplaying game like World of Warcraft, EverQuest, Lord of the Rings Online, and so forth. Unlike many other games, however, it's a fairly shameless reproduction of World of Warcraft, in about the same ways that World of Warcraft was a fairly shameless reproduction of EverQuest. Yes, there are massive changes (fewer, I think you could argue, between WoW and Rift than between EQ and WoW), but the core of the games are very, very similar. I believe that Rift uses the Lord of the Rings Online engine, which I think a few other games use as well. Definitely the graphics feel much more like LotRO than WoW.

So, let me review the game in parts.

Lord of Ultima (LoU): Raiding for Resources

In a previous Lord of Ultima (LoU) article, I went into how you should build resource cities. As with many other aspects of the game, resources are something that you can deal with in multiple ways. You could build nothing but gold cities (see the building layout article) and buy from other players, but that's risky. What happens when no one is selling iron and you desperately need some to re-build your defenses after an attack?

A third way to go is raiding. Raiding isn't as risky as trying to buy your resources, but it's not as stable as building your own. So why do it? Mostly because it gives you the flexibility to use your troops to defend your cities and castles and you have more opportunities to kill bosses, giving you artifacts. This guide is definitely an optional one in our series, but follow along if you want to learn how to use an uncastled troop city for resources...

Lord of Ultima (LoU): Planning Your Empire

A castle with supporting cities.

Lord of Ultima is a game that's entirely about planning and long-term strategy. Once you build your second city, you're well on your way to the mid-game: expanding your empire and building support structures for the conflicts that will ultimately come.

I could fill volumes of articles with tips on how to play the mid-game, but this article will only seek to introduce the basics: how to plan out each city's purpose; how to cluster cities; where to place them and when to expand to other regions/continents. Mostly, this is going to be broad advice, not specific instructions like the previous articles. This is because there are so many right answers, and they all depend on your play style. We'll get started right after the break.

No mods? No MMO!

I'm getting tired of people announcing MMOs. Can we please come up with a name for, "a game where many thousands of people can play in the same world, but where the UI is created solely by the publisher, and user interface mods cannot be written? How about Online Large Dynamic game or "OLD game"?

I've heard a lot of feedback around this point, so let me summarize all of the discussion that usually takes place, below, but if you want the TL;DR version: User interface modding is hard to do right, hard to support, and absolutely required of anyone who is seriously trying to unseat the primary MMO (World of Warcraft) in the market. I'll get to why, later. As Warhammer proved, it's not sufficient, but it is a requirement for long-term re-playability and community-building.

As a general note, I'll use "addon" and "mod" somewhat interchangeably, here. I see a "mod" as being anything that modifies the actual in-game experience (e.g. Auctioneer, HUDs, etc.) where "addons" are a much broader category that include simple user-interface changes and other tweaks as well as mods.

But my MMO of choice let's me change colors/fonts too!

Well, that's very nice, but changing layout and look-and-feel isn't what UI modding is about. Here are a few things that user interface modders have done in World of Warcraft:

• Added an auction house interface with long-term trend tracking, pricing assistance, scanning, tooltip enhancements, etc.
• I have a tiny addon installed that just alerts me every time I get agro on my healer or dpser characters, by playing a voice saying "agro!"
• One mod allows damage numbers to be filtered so that many damage numbers can be compressed down into single numbers to avoid spamming my screen.
• A mapping mod puts known locations of mining and herbalism resources on my map and then draws an efficient route between them so that I can run around grabbing stuff for my other professions.
• A chat mod transformed the standard chat windows into an IM-like interface that tracks who I'm having conversations with and warns them when I'm in combat and unable to reply.
• A raid-running mod lets raid leaders perform all kinds of basic administrative tasks more easily and improves on the basic "ready check" mechanic that the game provides.
• I have a mod installed that tracks how much gold I have on all of my characters and how much gold I've made/lost this session. Similarly, other mods track what goods I have on my characters and put notes in tooltips so that I know if an item is already in my bank or in the mail, etc.

So to sum up, changing colors, fonts and layout is an important part of modding, but so is adding usability to the game that the developers haven't thought of or are not prioritizing.

Addons are cheating / WoW is easy because addons tell you what to do.

I have to agree to a point. There are things that Blizzard has been tolerant of from the addon community that I think they should have stamped out (in some cases they did, but took quite some time to do so). Then there's the question of DBM and other "how to raid" mods. In part, I have to agree that these mods are not a good thing, but most of my reasoning has nothing to do with "cheating." Quite the opposite; mods like DBM are so much an expected part of the raiding experience that Blizzard designs encounters so that they expect you to play with addons that tell you what's going to happen. I'd rather they focus on making these things visually distinct (e.g. giant pillars of lava are probably things you should not stand in). As it is, bosses now "emote" subtle queues that these mods pick up on and tell you "turn around to avoid being blinded," or the like.

IMHO, this is just bad raid design, but the fact that WoW has bad raid design has absolutely nothing to do with the value of mods. Just like WoW bans the use of mods that facilitate cross-faction chat, they could just as easily ban mods which act as "howtos" in raids. That's a matter for game designers to decide, and has nothing to do with allowing addons in the first place.

If the default UI is fine, you don't need addons.

This is said fairly often, but the fact of the matter is that no gaming company has ever produced a perfect (or perfectly customizable) UI. Addons will always improve the game because there will always be someone out there with a good idea that no one in the gaming company thought of. It's just a matter of numbers.

But addons allow viruses!

This, I had to throw in, just because it's sometimes said, and easy to correct: while allowing data from untrusted sources to be interpreted by your computer is always risky, WoW has addressed this problem by giving addons no access to the system or external networks other than by writing saved variables files for state information in a known directory. Addon security must be taken extremely seriously, but with a good, trusted distribution mechanism (something WoW lacks and third-parties have had to back-fill), game designers should be able to do this job reasonably. Your Web browser has a much riskier job to do in running JavaScript which is required by nearly every Web site in the world, now, so if you're OK with the Web, allowing addons in video games is a no-brainer. If you're like me, and you restrict JavaScript on the Web and are very careful about who you allow to run code in your browser, then you should do the same in video games.

I'm a game developer, and I can spend my time on content or UI mods, why would I choose the latter?

This is probably the one question that I have serious respect for. Game developers are pushing the limits of productivity and trying to release a game on time. How can they spend hundreds of man-hours on developing a tool that very few of their players will ever interact with directly? The right answer is to ask how they can spend so much time on the internal content tools they develop? Sure, your players will never use them, but without them, you'll end up producing a game that's unplayable. The sad fact is that you have to budget for this up-front.

On the flip-side, game developers don't seem to push this as a major selling feature. Why is that? If you produce the bigger, badder UI addon framework and it's designed to build a community, why wouldn't you be pushing that to everyone who will listen?! Make it drive the buzz about your product in technical circles where a video game wouldn't normally be news. Get Slashdot talking about it. Have industry publications talking about how this is the new face of community development. Create a new kind of grassroots hype channel for your game!

Quotes

Here are some interesting quotes on the matter:

• "People want loads of content right off the bat, and third-party add-ons are a given now," he said. "It’s a tough situation for new games." -MMO FFXIV needs 'FFVII's impact', Strategy Informer
• MMO fans may be wondering if there will be any interface customisation but at this point TRION are holding off on add-ons. However, they are open to the idea but it’s unlikely they will go as far as the customisation we saw in World of Warcraft. (which I read as "we don't want to be a real MMO") -RIFT Hands-on Preview, IncGamers

Conclusions

My personal feeling is that WoW is a great first try when it comes to allowing user-authored UI mods in an MMO, but it's horribly out-dated. I really don't understand why someone hasn't produced an MMO with an app store, for example. I mean, isn't that painfully obvious? The other problem is updates. There really should be a company-hosted development site through which addon authors can be tracked and their addons monitored so that the authors of the most popular addons can be notified of upcoming releases and betas, be involved in the process, and more importantly, the community can be made aware early on when a major addon hasn't been made to work with an upcoming change. WoW is always broken for a month after any big change because addon development is poorly coordinated, and that's just not something that should be expected.

After all, World of Warcraft is getting on in years, and it seems to me that the world of downloadable addons has taken over several industries. Isn't it about time that MMOs get some love in this respect, and actually start leading the way again?

If you're working for a gaming company and you find yourself wondering: should we have addons? Stop immediately and ask, instead, "what's the next big thing," in addons, and can we do that?

World of Warcraft Screenshot Gallery

My World of Warcraft (WoW) screenshot gallery has been chronicling my WoW gaming experiences for about a year now. I've done a lot of PvP, raiding and soloing on the Horde side, and I've even started a few Alliance toons recently. I play on the Argent Dawn server, so if you play there, be sure to check and see if I caught you in one of my shots!

Images like the one to the left I use to share my UI setup with others. I'll be writing an article soon about how to choose mods and stay up-to-date on what new mods to use for Warcraft, because I'm constantly running into people who don't know how to customize their UI or did once, but don't know what mods work these days.

I've also got images of some of the most intense raid events that I've been through, 5-man dungeons and so on. Check it out, comment and share (yes, all of these images are intended for others to share as they wish... please credit the source when you do so, though).