Writing stuff about Rift makes me think about the days when I tried to be a game blogger. It never worked out. Either I stopped playing or liking the game, didn't have enough time, or couldn't think of anything to blog about.
I've looked around a lot, poking and pulling and tugging here and there, and found that Rift fanmade content is 20% critical acclaim, 5% denouncements, 10% beginner's guides and 65% soul guides (AKA guides to the class system). Oh, and there was one website about the lore, not counting Telarapedia, so I guess take about 5% out of somewhere and put it in lore. Probably out of beginner's guides.
Here's why I don't make a good MMO blogger. I don't do MMOs.
What's that I hear? "But Inky, you've been all over the MMO genre! You've done derpy games no one likes and glorious games everyone likes! That's a lie, you hear me? A lie!"
The sad thing is, I have in fact. I have beaten around the brush so many times I have practically ripped all of the leaves off and ruined my lawn. I've become jaded about MMOs, completely jaded, and it kinda hurts.
MMOs used to be my stock game. They were free (well... the free ones, anyway) and they let me have a character. Suddenly I became anyone I wanted. I was a badass mage who incinerated my enemies alive, summoned demons from horrible alternate planes of existence, and electrified the skeletons out of huge wild dogs. I was always a mage in those early days. I loved the idea of magic, and hurting monsters with it.
And I was only seven or eight at the time, I believe. But I've always been a mature writer, always spelled correctly, always been a grammar Nazi - a little perfectionist child too smart for her own good - and no one suspected any the wiser. I was never called out for being a kid, and always got offended when people would say things like "get thes kids off teh internts! D:<<" because I was (and still am) one of the heavy majority.
It was like that for a long time. I'd choose the mage class without even thinking about it. I went through acres and acres of MMOs. Each fell before me, so quickly that I can't even remember their names. There was one with horrid graphics, a minigame crafting system, and an "epic quest chain" that even I, at my fertile young age (ha ha ha), recognized as "go here, kill level one monster ten times, go back, go here, kill level two monster fifteen times, go back" repetition. That stuck in my head because it was actually later in this chain, after I'd figured out that graphics weren't everything. Still, after walking around in a world where everything looked like a version of the Linux penguin, I figured out that I did actually care.
There was another one that was outrageously difficult that I never got past level eleven on; I don't know how it's doing now, and though I never deleted it from my laptop, I still don't plan on going back. Not now, probably not ever. And another, where I learned to really love the races because they were equivalent to classes, only to find out that - after the really long download that my computer kept rejecting - the game sucked.
Then I met MapleStory.
Oh, it was love at first sight. After going through the tedious tutorial and finally figuring out how to work the damn thing, I was in graphics heaven. Sure, I looked like a generic chick alongside a sea of other generic chicks, but the colors kept me going. The first time I played MS, it was early on in my MMO career; I got to level 2 and stopped. I don't remember why...
Between a horde of other MMOs, I tried it again, and got further as a mage (as usual). I learned to hate it. The community, the graphics, the quests, the advertisements, the attacks, the classes, the options, the "customization," the cookie cutter enemies. God, how I hated all of it. I stopped playing again. Until I returned again maybe a year later, thinking, "I should give MS a chance then, see if I like it now that I'm older." Nothing doing. If anything, I hated it even more. This was my most outstanding experience, in my life thus far, of online douchebags. When I finally came back the last time, they'd JUST added new classes. I tried the "Hard" difficulty one and, wow, it was fun (again)! I knew it wasn't meant to be. And I was two hours into playing it when I threw up. It was the flu. And every time I think of MS now, I feel sick, and for that I'm grateful, because MapleStory is a horrible game. I still don't know why I kept going back to it. Power in advertising?
That terrible relationship over, I was on the lookout for a rebound, and there probably were a few. But soon after that, I found Dream of Mirror Online, or DOMO. I got in, made my character, learned to love the graphics. Typical of me.
But what was great about DOMO was the plot, at first, though I never got that far into it. It was quick 'n' easy, a drive-by plot, but I still had a REASON for everything I was doing. And there was a dungeon early on, one that I came to be an expert at and understand. After that it only got better. I discovered the class system - you could change it whenever you liked, to whatever class you had, as long as you'd unlocked it. It was great, and it helped me discover non-magic classes. I actually never played a mage class, strictly. I played Fencer briefly (which I regret not doing more PvP with, because in retrospect it was a marvelous PvP class) as a transition class so I could get other classes unlocked. I got Doctor, and - WHAT? I was decent at healing?
And then I got Dancer and discovered the wonders of AoE attacks, and sure, I loved that to death, but I discovered other marvelous things too, like Musician, which I loved and still love. It was the main support class, and maintaining buffs became a pastime. Speccing and training my Musician class helped me learn about buffs, stats, etc. which I hadn't understood for a very long time. Not to mention that I was doing something very useful without being in the line of fire, which was great.
And finally, just before I took a long DOMO break, I explored the Mercenary class. And it was all about... tanking.
Oh, could I tank. I had a talent for it, I think, maybe. A knack for beating the living shit out of people who aggro'd onto my teammates without even thinking about it and keeping the aggro on me. I loved it. I loved never dying because people would always keep the tank healed at ALL COSTS. You know what happens if the tank dies? Everyone wipes, that's what. The feeling of power that came with tanking was great. For once people got panicked if I had to leave the group in the middle of a grind. AoEs like Dancer and pullers like Thief were a penny a dozen, but Merc tanks were rare and precious. If you didn't have a tank you were done.
That's how it is with all games, I guess, but DOMO taught me how much I like the exact roles that I WASN'T playing back then: support and tank. I took a break from DOMO and still am, but I haven't permanently quit it and I might yet return one day.
Guild Wars was great, too. I wish other pay-to-play games were pay-once-and-you're-done. And bringing partners who weren't people was fun, until I realized that this WASN'T an mmo. It was... something else, a video game I was playing while talking to other people on occasion, if at all.
But eventually I did discover several things about GW that made it so great. For one, it was plot intensive. A lot less kill-and-grab quests than most, though of course there were those too. Complex classes that required skill to master, not just thoughtless button-mashing (well, at least at first). The ability to create level-cap characters for PvP purposes taught me to love PvP for the first time. When we'd get a really good random group together and all would go smoothly, we'd string together two, three, eight victories before we met the rare better random team and would be taken down. And of course I loved the ambiance, the music and scenery. Nightfall was my favorite. And I loved how everywhere outside of the towns was an instance. Must've been VERY costly to run on a server... but for once, there was no one parading around taking my mobs and loot and just generally kicking my ass.
Somewhere in there I tried World of Warcraft like everyone does. I loved it when I opened the box. I read through the manual anxiously on the way home as my mom drove me to our house (I'm still not sure if she knows what an MMO is, or if she'd have approved back then, but I was antisocial and didn't talk to anyone anyway). I was a Night Elf Druid. But oh, the grind. It hurt. Wow, it hurt.
I barely made it to the level where I got to be a cat. So stupid. Didn't even train the skill. I expect if I went back and tried again, I'd be a lot more efficient, but hey. Maybe WoW and I just weren't meant to be.
Oh, plus there was this other elf who came onto me and told me to take my armor off. Mark of maturity, right there, for me: I laughed and ignored him. A year before I'd have freaked out. Go, me.
Anyway, there've been others. Now I'm at Rift.
Tl;dr MMOs are not for Inky. But she tries anyway.
Hey nonexistent readers, you just raeg at my long self-centered post nonexistently, k? I'll care so hard.
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