Major reasons I’m still playing after a month:
Technical Competence. I ran into very few bugs and only a few interface oddities in a month. This is not something to take for granted and the main reason I see myself playing Rift over LotRO or even SWTOR when it comes out as my side MMO. (WoW is still the rec league “raid for 6-9 hours a week and that’s it” game for me. It’s just that good at that.) Even WoW during WotLK had massive technical issues on 64-bit machines.

To get something off my chest: I’m not blown away by the number of hotfixes Trion put out just because that’s a weakness in their architecture that requires client patches to fix things that WoW probably can just do on-the-fly for the most part. (I don’t know if what Rift calls a hotfix actually is one, but it doesn’t seem like that from my perspective.) I does lead to an impression that they’re “doing things” in the public which is one of many in a long pattern of cleverly Orwellian moves by the team at Trion. Another example is that didn’t have server mergers, they gave everyone unlimited server transfers! And told people to get off certain small servers because they were being switched over to “Trial Servers”. Same effect on the subscriber population, but different PR, which is annoying. But if the real press can’t be any good, why do I expect an enthusiast press to look deep? (Oh right, latent faith in humanity. BAD CAL!)

Feature Parity (for the most part) and more. I can queue for dungeons or warfronts from anywhere, hide my helmet (and shoulders!), use two-factor security, and even read Twitter in Rift. It would have pretty much everything one could ask in a modern MMO if the interface wasn’t so all over the place. Still, my WoW interface has all of one out-of-the-box UI element left (the chat box), so hopefully the mod ecosystem grows into something useful. One nice feature is reactive abilities having their own display when they’re active, although because the interface is a little unresponsive, it does lead to a few problems at times.

Music and Atmosphere. I like how the music changes based on how many mobs I’m fighting and such (which leads to a lot of cool stuff as I’m built to AOE groups of 3-4 down). The music in general is solid without being really overpowering like it can sometimes be in LotRO, which is both good and bad in that game. I also like how the lighting changes when you’re in range of a Rift.

PvE Variety (or Rifts, the good side). If one’s willing to roll with the punches, Rift can offer up a lot of variety. Just last night I started off questing in Shimmersand and an Air zone event started up. I was easily able to get into a group that rode around the zone closing rifts and the like and finally we punched a big boss. It was a lot of fun. After cleaning up a few straggler invader groups I returned to questing and queued for a random dungeon. (Go go machine matchmaking!) Got in, group went well so we did another and by the time I got out there was another zone event going, this time an Earth/Fire one. I didn’t get to contribute a whole lot to this one because I was stuck behind the main clearing pack for the most part, but I still had a good time. So, back to questing. After going along for a while I ran into a group of Defiants opening up Major Rift Tears and I tagged along for two of them, finished up a quest nearby, and then headed to Sanctum to turn in event stuff and crafting dailies. I got to do a ton of different things in a night and the game made it super easy for me to get into and out of groups without having to message people about how much Focus I have.

Major complaints:
PvE Variety (or Rifts, the bad side). The downside of all that cool stuff going on is that if I really just want to do some quests, there’s a chance of running into annoying shit like a zone event or a Major Rift right on top of where I need to be. After many years playing on PvP servers, I’m sanguine about taking what the game gives me, to a point. Rift has definitely been on the wrong side of that threshold more than once.

Melee and macros are awful. I generally prefer ranged character for damage dealing, especially at end-game, but I have no problem leveling as melee. I despise Cleric melee. (I doubt Druid is much different from Shaman and Justicar, but I haven’t played it.) It’s just a mashing a ton of abilities when they’re off CD. There are also so many reactive abilities that managing it all is almost best done by a huge spam macro that has none of the sanity of the current WoW set-up (i.e. one on-GCD spell per hardware event). Just make a big list of things and run with it. Terrible.

Souls. At least part of me really likes how character building works in Rift. Making builds is one of my favorite things to do in games. But the downside of that is that a group can have a “tank” that really can’t tank and that sets are rather limited in what they can do. I’ve seen a lot of people talk about how Rift allows up to five stored sets of souls and how that compares well versus WoW. Really though, one needs a number of sets just to do something as simple as questing and the occasional PUG Minor Rift. And that’s ignoring that one is almost surely dead meat in PvP if not carrying the PvP soul after the initial levels. In contrast, my Hunter’s raiding spec can pretty much handle anything I can throw it into well enough. In Rift, that’s simply not the case, at least as a Cleric. And the team at Trion is almost laughably unconcerned with design elegance; there are kludges and deaths by tooltips everywhere. I can’t speak to serious balancing issues, but WoW sets the bar for “well balanced” incredibly high at this point.

Surprising non-complaint:
It’s not bland. It also has zero whimsy to it, either throughout it like WoW or in specific locations like LotRO with The Shire and Lothlorien but I don’t think “bland” is fair. It’s a very straight take on high fantasy with some technology-indistinguishable-from-magic. The armor isn’t expressly functional, there’s still chainmail bikini bottoms, but for the most part armor proper looks sensible. The story isn’t fascinating, but the game does a good job of highlighting important stuff through “Story” marked quests and loading screen updates on the current plot ala Dragon Age II. I think the lack of whimsy is to its detriment if I were to play the game seriously, but as a casual experience, it’s a nice change of pace.

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That said, Nightwish was all over the map at times in the first place, so I can’t exactly judge off a few tracks.

In actually decent news, new PvP trinkets! They all have an on-use of +1750 max health and you get your choice of a passive: 47 +Damage, 40 +Spell Crit (or regular Crit) Rating, 80 AP, or 88 +Healing (I assume it will also have 29 +Damage). They will certainly replace my current second trinket.

I don’t like the quiet. It lets me think of her… or the myriad other things I regret.

That’s really as both profound and lacking in angst as you’re going to get out of me, sorry. Anyway, I’d update more, but I’m horrendously boring… and angsty (probably). Also, college, but yeah, mainly the boring.

Oh, that useful thing: WoW Reputation Calculator (it’s really awesome, seriously). Just type in your name, server, and region and it auto-magically tells you how many instance runs/quests/days worth of daily quests you need to hit your next rep level. (from WOW Insider)

Also, as a side note… Armory + WordPress is apparently too much AJAX for one browser to handle *sigh*.

Anyway, we’ve got a decent amount of the guild on Rupture now, it’s sort of like mySpace for Gamers, although specifically for WoW at this point. It’s pretty spiffy, and using an IM client it updates automatically. It was awesome (it blew CTProfiles out of the water on gear alone)… until Blizzard launched The Armory. It’s basically everything WarcraftRealms could ever ask to be, it has info on individual reputations, gear, buffs, arena rankings, guild statistics, except the whole census thing.

Actually, it seems like that’s the only thing The Armory doesn’t have is a full census section. For guilds, it’s really, really cool. Here’s our guild’s stats, all updating as soon as you change a parameter, and looking very cool to boot.

We’ll see what they add to The Armory, it’s really impressive for a start.

• Changed my hosting provider to DreamHost. PM’s been using them for about as long as I remember, and so far I’m very impressed with their admin stuff, and being able to manage all my domains from a central spot is handy as fuck.
• Slightly more obvious then the hosting change is the new domain, http://percentsign20.com. If you ever notice in a URI for a file that has a space in it, the spaces are encoded as %20, thus, space dot com (if this page on URL encoding doesn’t make sense to you, the joke is lost upon you). It’s stupid, but I like it, and I’m not using a sub domain for a non-existent company anymore, yay!
• I’m 20. Goodbye teenage angst, hello twenty-something angst!
• It Burns when I Crusade.
• Guild Wars is fun. Not nearly as fun as Burning Crusade, but still fun.
• Personal stuff that may or many not cause world-implosion. Safety not guaranteed bitches.

Also not guaranteed is me updating this page with anything. Especially with BC out… off to sleep.

Anyway, I updated the links section a bit (notice one thing in the pimpage section ?) and finally added that link I said I was going to… a few months back. Apart from that, not much going on, bouncing between both my characters as of late and have finally taken the plunge and picked up X-Perl, my interface is significantly prettier now.

Oh, and planned Druid talents, although the points in Imp LotP and Nuturing Instinct are basically preference (although I really like Imp LotP). +Healing is more of an endurance stat versus a power stat, so getting +300 on a nearly full heal isn’t that great sounding. Survival of the Fittest is nice, but I may end up swapping the points to Primal Tenacity and either Brutal Impact or Shredding Attacks. It really depends on how useful those talents become, but they’re all quite nice.

A certain someone doesn’t look like she’ll be on tonight, so I’ll probably continue the Druid stuff… next month or so?

Oh, and I found this just now (found at, which I ran into because of my search for an ASCII heart):

Kinda cool, might add it to the sidebar (the smaller version of course). Just so it can match my CC license and really get Random Federal Agency of TERROR on my ass .

In WoW news, I show myself as mildly retarded and then redeem myself in Tier 1, Level 70 Stuff, and Item Levels. And the end of this post can be considered my love letter to Exploration, and then the average level of Economics education in the country makes itself readily apparent.

(Oh, and Google Toolbar is rather finicky with WordPress’s editor, which makes me a mildly sad panda.)

Oh yeah, and Kyo’s back and stuff. Yay.

Considering the importance I have to place on written communication (formal, with school, or personal, like letters to Kyo or reading her messages, etc.) it will force me to think a good deal more about how I communicate certain things, especially with Kyo (since formal writing isn’t exactly a weak point for me… I hope) because of my great habit of over-analyzing things (read as: I probably want to cut her more slack in my head, for she knows not what she does… I don’t for that matter to be honest).

Basically: “get it through your skull that what you just read probably wasn’t meant to offend you” especially coming her most stupendous stealthed one, my girlfriend (since she’s like… awesome and junk).

Oh, and to make sure I didn’t screw up on any of that, I’ll need to pick up Google Toolbar… not like they don’t already have me by the balls (oh, and by the way, it’s awesome).

Finally though… ZOMGZ Agent Shades (try to look past the boobies if you can… it’s hard, I know).