Rift Pet Peeves

Getting the obligatory “Love Rift and have canceled EQ2 and EVE for at least a month while I focus solely on Rift since it’s so much friggin’ fun!” out of the way.  And now that that’s said, there are several things that bug me — either features missing, features badly implemented, or things I just plain don’t like.  This isn’t a comprehensive list and the TL;DR version would probably be summed up as “Copied WoW when they should have copied EQ2.”  And then my personal conspiracy theory that since Hartsman came from SOE and EQ2 that to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest he avoided blatantly copying the better features from EQ2 so as to not be sued or something.

Oddly, this might end up more or less sorting out for myself why I’ve always loved EQ2 yet couldn’t really get into WoW.  So here we go:

Missing things are:

• Appearance Slots — C’mon, how many games have these now?  I like my sets that I craft for myself and don’t want to break up the look.  The “level capped rainbow look” was a running joke in EQ2 before appearance slots we re added in.  Heck, even DDO has appearance armor anymore.  How could any game ship without them anymore is beyond me.
• Shared Banks — You allow 6 toons per server, yet each has an individual-only bank and has to mail anything to an alt?  Really?  EQ2 shipped with a shared bank 6 years ago. . . I know the technology is out there. . . . .
• Guild Banks — I’m still scratching my head at how such a polished game is missing this feature.  Especially since. . .you guessed it. . . EQ2 shipped with them.  Sorry to harp on this EQ2 thing, but um. . .Mr. Hartsman. . . you were THERE and saw how popular these features were and ARE in that game.  Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
• In-combat sprint — Granted there’s really no death penalty at all, but it’s still nice to be able to sprint past a mob or 3 in a high density area after it’s aggro’d on you.

Badly implemented things are:

• The UI  — It’s HUGE.  I’m told there’s someplace in the settings where I can scale it down, though, so I need to look for that.  Still… I’ve never cared for the WoW UI and this one is pretty much a straight copy across from it.  Your party window with its massive portraits and small health bars don’t help when I’m playing a healer either.
• The mounts — for the love of god, stop making me recast it every damn time I do something.  You had it right in EQ2, Scottie — make me lose the runspeed when in combat, but don’t make the frakking thing go poof and need a 2s recast just becuz a grayed-out mob looked at me funny.  An option a la EQ2’s recently added “don’t show mounts just let me look like I’m running fast” wouldn’t be a bad thing to add either.
• Player Faction on the PvE servers — EQ2 got this one right too, Scott.  It lets EVERYONE on the server play together.  We chose a PvE server becuz we don’t want to fight the other side.  If I want to play with my friends and I like my Eth while they like Dwarves, why can’t we play together?  Oh right, becuz you have your stupid PvP in my PvE server too.  Newsflash:  People who choose PvE servers don’t want PvP.  Even in “pure PvP games” like Eve and Darkfall something like 80% of all players never leave the non-PvP areas.  PvP is a *niche* and shouldn’t be on every damn server including the PvE ones.  And if you must keep it this way, at least let me add cross-faction friends so if someone logs on I can see that to know to switch to an alt in that faction so I can go play with them.  This whole “never the twain shall meet except across the point of a sword” is utterly ridiculous on a PvE server.

There’s more, but this is long enough and I’m actually itching to log in and play so. . yeah, the negatives really don’t outweigh the positives in any way shape or form, but. .. while I’m a fanboi, I can still say that it’s not “perfect” either 😛