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Only one problem with Rift, but it's a BIG one !
delete5230
Member EpicPosts: 7,081
I've been playing Rift about 40 days now. I absolutely love this mmo. I have two characters a level 37 Rogue and a level 27 Cleric that I only use to play as a duo with my friend. I / we play a mixture of PvE, PvP, Rifts, and Dungeons. Most every MMO would usually be tossed aside after 40 days but I still find Rift intriguing.
Now for the past 40 days I had the feeling that something was just not right, something is missing.....What could it be ?.....Well, Two nights ago it hit me like a ton of bricks :
Both my friend and I were questing in Gloamwood ( levels 19-28 ). We were doing a second set of quest for a Keep we received from a quest hub near buy. As we approached the Keep we came across a solo player, he helped us kill some mobs and seemed eager to join. Thinking, what the hell lets invite him !...........Well shortly into it we found out our differences, HE HAD A DIFFERENT SET OF QUEST THAN US. Now some would think no big deal will help him then he could play along. No, Rift is not set up that way, he would have to finish up and do several other quest chains before we would be equal.
Rift gave us no choice but to politely kick him.
I've always been against MMO's with quest chains. This method of MMO game play separates players from grouping. And Rift takes it to a new level. Rifts quest hubs are set to be done in order with very little tolerance to go off path.
1) This is why I quit two Guilds. Nothing in it for the low or mid level player's but maybe ask a few questions.
2) This is why I've been finding myself playing alone when instead I would have 20 people on my friends list.
3) This is why both my friend and I can't play our duo characters AT ALL unless we are both on line.
I've played several MMO's as a DUO and would be able to do what we like, then meet up with him whenever, as long as we maintained + / - two levels.
BUT not Rift !
It's almost as if you can number your progression instead of levels. Larry the Rogue is on quest 247 and Joe the Mage is on quest 261, Larry and Joe can't play together.
Like I say, I love Rift. But playing on Rails quest hubs will be there down fall. Maybe I would not enjoy it so much if both my friend and I were not playing EXACTLY TO THE RIFT MANUAL.
Comments
I found this to be a problem in most MMOs. It's super annoying that I can't play my char because if I do, I will not longer be able to play with my buddy.
Every MMO should have a mentoring system and quest chains which can be picked by anyone despite not having the prerequisites.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
That would be the real big problem. So say you have a quest and you're at the final boss kill or whatever for the very last part of the questline and you'll get a good reward when you finish it. All another player has to do is group up with you and not having done pre req's. He can share in that reward and go on about his buisness. Thats a real easy way to twink your alts and bypass all the hard work the other people have done. Given the fact that most players would be grouped with friends or guild mates it might not be a problem with them when you want to twink your alts because they'd expect the same from you. But if it was a random PuG, some people might be bothered by it.
That would totally kill the whole point of the questline. Also if that were the case everyone would be doing it.
Why didn't you just help him catch up, and then all do your quests together from that point forward?
You were not forced to politely kick anyone, you chose to do so, rather than help him catch up.
You dont get it do you ?
Ok then I should add him my friends list. But what do we do tomarrow when he is on a diff. quest line ?
This isn't just something you run into only in Rift. This is an issue in any questline driven MMO that allows solo play.
If you want to play with a buddy, both of you should roll toons that you will ONLY play together. If you feel like playing when your buddy isn't on, play on a different toon. That is about the only real "solution" I have to this problem.
That was once a great thing about WoW. I often kept several quests for quite a long time if i couldn't do them on my own, like the elite ones in the earlier days. Watching them going from red to orange to yellow over a period of days while doing other quests, but eventually i could finish them with someone else.
Rift is but a solo mmorpg and even as a solo mmo way too streamlined.
That is what GW2 is intending on resolving with the dynamic events. When there is a army of centaurs attacking a villiage, everyone (in essence) has the quest, and is at the exact same spot in the quest line. It's a wonderful idea, and hopefully it works out like they imply it will. At the very least, things should start moving in the right direction to resolve the problem you describe.
All of my posts are either intelligent, thought provoking, funny, satirical, sarcastic or intentionally disrespectful. Take your pick.
I get banned in the forums for games I love, so lets see if I do better in the forums for games I hate.
I enjoy the serenity of not caring what your opinion is.
I don't hate much, but I hate Apple© with a passion. If Steve Jobs was alive, I would punch him in the face.
That's exactly what Rifts and Invasions are.
The OP is explaining a problem which all MMO's have and haven't found a real way to overcome. The only MMO that I've found who has made the greatest stride in closing the gap between players is CoH with their Sidekick system.
Isnt that similar to WAR's public quest?
This is also one of my main gripes with the MMO genre because quest chains just promote solo play, in an MMO, because it becomes a pain to try and find someone (who's on the same stage in your quest) to group with. Which is exactly why I'm eagerly waiting for Guild Wars 2, because the game's Dynamic Events, which completely replace open-world questing, will fix this. You can just watch TotalBiscuit's Guild Wars 2 playthroughs to grasp how the Dynamic Events would work, because there's no other themepark MMOs that are doing anything to fix questing.
Rifts are similar, but rifts are just events that happen around the questline structure. GW2 is basing the entire open-world gameplay around these dynamic events. Rifts are also single events, where GW2 uses the dynamic events in chains, so once an aspect of a particular dynamic event is complete, it leads into the next structure of the event. So if centaurs are attacking a village, and the players rally together and stop the invaders, then the next aspect of the event starts and the dynamic event is about taking the fight to the centaurs and perhaps rescuing some villagers that were kidnapped. Once that aspect has completed, then a new dynamic event in the chain will start up. The only questlines are the personal story quests, and they are not the main gameplay like you see in most MMORPG's.
I'm not here trying to be a GW2 fanboy in the Rifts forums, my only intent was saying that hopefully more games will be working towards systems that resolve the problem the OP has stated, because it is a problem.
All of my posts are either intelligent, thought provoking, funny, satirical, sarcastic or intentionally disrespectful. Take your pick.
I get banned in the forums for games I love, so lets see if I do better in the forums for games I hate.
I enjoy the serenity of not caring what your opinion is.
I don't hate much, but I hate Apple© with a passion. If Steve Jobs was alive, I would punch him in the face.
The thing about Rift is that the rifts lack any variety (so they get boring) can be pretty much ignored, because you're still forced to do quest in order to progress and the Quest chains in rift are linear as f**k. Where as Guild Wars 2 has no Quests (in the outside world) to hand hold you. So all you can do is explore and stumble upon events and there's nothing about GW2's Dynamic events that prevent you from playing anyone else, like how the events scale to the number of players or how a player's level can be sidekicked down for the content. A dev explaining it all, in this video.
Rifts start as and can be completed solo but they can be pushed into bonus (group) rounds. They are also exactly what the OP is asking for. They offer a quest when you get close to it, no matter how many people are there and no matter what stage it's in.
Additionally, Rifts are used in quests but that doesn't mean they are tied directly to quests. They are THE lore portion of the game. I believe closing enough Rifts in a period will push or make it more likely that a zone-wide event will start. Zone wide events happen pretty regularly and I'd say the majority of the time there is at least 1-2 zone events happening.
There is always a Rift or a tear in a zone so there is never a point which you cannot either participate, start or open your own Rift to start it.
Instances are also "group" quests where joining an instance auto-starts you on a group quest.
The GW dynamic(really beginning to hate this tag line) zone/world event is nothing new. Games are using it now and have in the past. I don't have issue with people loving and throwin props for the game they love, I just get annoyed when they regurgitate propaganda as if GW2 is the only game using this mechanic, therefore it's the best game.
OK, it's good that the OP has a solution within the game he's already playing. I thought he was complaining about Rift as well as most MMO's.
All of my posts are either intelligent, thought provoking, funny, satirical, sarcastic or intentionally disrespectful. Take your pick.
I get banned in the forums for games I love, so lets see if I do better in the forums for games I hate.
I enjoy the serenity of not caring what your opinion is.
I don't hate much, but I hate Apple© with a passion. If Steve Jobs was alive, I would punch him in the face.
@OP
Trion knows that it's a problem that's why if you haven't notice in their loading screen tool tip, they mentioned about this and gave a simple reminder -- no solution though.
Ready for GW2!!!
You really fail to understand the point. The OP has a gripe with Rift's linear & solo-esque questing. The questing in Rift is compulsory wheras the rifts are purely optional, same with dungeons.... optional. So even if you can close some rifts with your buddy, you'll likely be forced to go back to solo questing. Seeing how there's no real benefit in helping each other quest, when your on different stages in in the quest chain. That's the problem the OP has with Rift and all the other similar quest-based MMOs out there.
That's exactly the problem Guild Wars 2 will fix with it's dynamic events. It's not even about how similar they are to Rift's rifts or whatever. I don't care if you or anyone else tries to break it down to its core, in order to compare it with rifts & public quests. What I do care about is how it will effect the player's levelling experience when they don't have a quest log to keep track of and can just go out and explore. And because GW2 will have a side kicking system, there's nothing stopping a player from going out to explore with their friend, without being bogged down by quests.
This is just a design decision the devs had to make, similar to every other MMO. There is no solution that doesn´t present other, bigger problems. The Rift devs learned from early WOW.
In early wow, there were several quests, and especially the last quest of a chain that required a group. After the first months of launch, this became a problem because it was difficult to find enough people to group for the quest... a lot of people would level past the climatic end to a quest chain, and then have to go back and finish it solo just to see the conclusion, at which time they outgeared the rewards and got no experience for it.
The other solution is to just not make quest chains.. just have lots of stand-alone quests....this is boring. These are MMORPGs, while the emphasis has faded from the RP part of it, the devs still like to tell a story now and then. That becomes very difficult when you can´t chain quests together.
But in the end, the content is soloable. Just join a group and chat, but quest wherever you are.
I agree with the OP on the whole design and premise of the way quests are done in games.
They do this as a linear hand holding design,to give players who don't want to think an easy route/path to follow to gain nothing more than levels.
To be honest,before i got further into the OP's thread,i thought for sure he was going to say that he realized they were just soloing in a MMO.
I liked the way FFXI did missions,it was all based on the storyline and everyone had the same storyline.This way the content was VERY challenging,no way to solo it or even duo it,you enjoyed the story in a group,heck go figure it's an MMO.
As for quest chains,this has it's blemish of course in that if it is too long there is a huge gap to make up to get friends or others caught up.However there is a fix but it the partially the players faults.The fix is by joining a guild/linkshell or whatever they are called and doing content with .... "OTHERS".The math is simple,if you have 50 people all soloing long quest lines,that is a lot of gaps that won't make for good MMO gaming.You take those same 50 put them into 8 6 man groups and you now have a lot less gaps to fill.
This only becomes a problem because of the fact that plaeyrs are running around solo so much.Wow does this ssame mistake in a huge way.Wow is designed to solo 99% of the time,then all of a sudden they expect people to know how to function in a Raid setting after they have soloed their entire time in the game.It is a design that contradicts itself and does nothing to help players to function within a group setting.
So the blame is partially the players and poor game designThis is however actually what players have been asking for,so we in a way deserve the flaws we have in mmorpg gaming.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
No, in GW2 it's not like in RIFT. GW2 has the sidekick feature, so if you are playing with a higher level buddy, they get kicked down to your level to play with you. It's more like mentoring in EQ2 than it's like ANYTHING in RIFT. I don't know much about how CoH sidekick feature works, so I can't say on that comparison, but GW2 will have that whereas RIFT does not.
Sorry, I should have read this second page of the thread before posting. This has already been noted multiple times now. Again, I apologize.
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
I like DDO's take on this, if you dont have the quest or dont have it unlocked for you, you can still do the quest with people and get all the chests and xp, just not the shinny end reward
I 100% believe that Developers are 90% responsible for how the community socially reacts to an MMO. They alone can bring people together or make them play solo. Sure some people like solo only, and some like pure group dynamics. But the burden always falls on Developers.
A good example would be Vanilla WoW vs. what Blizzard gives us now. In Vanilla people leveled much slower, you can enter a new zone and take all the quest. The zone was your play ground to do as you please. If you see Larry having a hard time killing a zombie, you can run over help him and maybe make a friend. Now because of fast leveling and Wow on rails, why should anyone help Larry. WHO IS RESPONSIBLE ? ....BLIZZARD !
Vanilla WoW was great.....It's almost like they had a Social worker involved with the making of the game to help the closed minded programmers. In it's day Blizzard destroyed the compitition............Then as time went by Blizzard fired the social worker, and the developers took over and screwed up the social aspect of the game ( understand this is only a hypothetical example of how developers are responsible ).
Rifts are not the answer. Nice try on Trion's part, but they screwed up anyway. Because when a Rift is closed players HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO GO BACK TO WHAT THEY WERE DOING.
It's almost as if you can number your progression instead of levels. Larry the Rogue is on quest 247 and Joe the Mage is on quest 261, Larry and Joe can't play together.
The problem with rifts popping open all the time is that means they aren't special. You can do them anytime you want so you don't feel some sense of urgency to go and close them. They should have thought of rifts more like special events that happen in a day, not things that just keep respawning over and over.
They also should have been more important and harder; there is no reason for a "normal" rift to exist in this game ever. It simply makes NO sense. Every rift in this game should have been something so monumental that you'd always need someone to help you. It's a silly premise that "normal" rifts even exist because that means the threat isn't really that bad in this world which breaks lore. Plus anyone closing rifts solo or duo is bound to get bored on a rift just because its a rift.
Making them less frequent and more challenging (also with greater or equal rewards to what dungeons drop) would have made people flock to them when they popped. Instead, people yawn when they see them.
"TO MICHAEL!"
Its a minor issue. It takes 50-100 hours to reach max level. That means a casual player who only plays 40-50 hours a week can reach max level in a week. 1-50 will only be a small fraction of ones total gameplay. I would not worry about it. Level to 50 whether it takes you a couple a days a week or even a month. Then your problem is solved. Rift's 1-50 leveling is one of the weakest points of the game. But it ends quickly.
I don't know why game do that nowadays.
I mean, yes more player want to play solo.
But the fact that so many stuff make you "unable" to party because you aren't at the same place. It's stupid. Or that you can't make a quest because you are in X party or whatever.
And the worst thing ever in MMO. Phasing, seriously.. why ? Just why... you can't even help the other with his quest anymore.
Luckily, you will soon be able to play you charr exactly in a way you want to with your friends no matter what part of the quest they are doing or what level they are.
"Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted.
Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world."
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