Rift PvP

This is probably more about PvP in MMOs in general, but more recently I have experience in Rift.

First I'll start with my philosophy of people. "People are stupid" This is not to say that everyone doesn't have their smarts. Everyone has something they are exceptionally good at while not so great at other things. This also does not exclude myself. I will do things wrong, in the case of mmo's, in pvp and in pve.

I say this because people in warfronts concentrate on things that will either get them killed faster or are not worth doing. For instance, the leader of a warfront marks a healer to focus fire like a good leader should be doing. We want to get them killed obviously but there are 10 people between me and that marked target. As a melee if I were to go into that crowd of people I would get focused myself not because I'm attacking their healer but because I became a lone target.

There are two ways to deal with that situation. Either have your entire group get up in their group of people or focus fire people in the front first. Both are hard to coordinate but the former is even harder to do so. So focus firing a person closest to your group of people would be the best thing to do. I don't care how much defense/valor/healers a guy has, it is hard to stay alive to.

Some day I'll write detailed strategies on how I think the warfronts should be done. Some may disagree with me, but screw them.

SWTOR

First I'm gonna say that I am being quite bias with my opinion in this post. I currently play Rift for my free time. I love the game despite its faults and love the company, Trion, even more.

Recently I've been reading a lot of posts on the Rift forums about 'Rift will die with Star Wars The Old Republic.' I can understand how some people will like the game, but I don't understand how it will be superior. I tested the game for a long evening once. I was impressed with certain aspects, but not so much overall. I played a evil lightsaber wielding dude (excuse my lack of knowledge of terminology of the franchise). I went through the starting area until I had to kill some big thing that I had a hard time soloing easily. Not sure if it was me or not being high enough in level to take him. But anyways, I experienced nearly the entire starting area. I was not impressed. It felt like any other MMO out there.

The combat felt really slow and I mean Really slow. This might be contributed to the fact that I only had two skills to use but I wasn't doing much. Mostly a bunch of visual parrying and single animation attacks per skill. I didn't actually feel like I doing anything exciting.

The PvP battleground or whatever it was called for the game was actually good, to a point. The point of the one I joined was to get a ball and bring it to your opponent's spawn area. I'm not sure what this is called in other games, but I'll call it football with obstacles. The two points I thought was nice about this PvP game. First, there are traps in certain places around the arena that if you don't pay attention to will kill you near instantly. And secondly, everyone's stats were equalized. Though the problem with it was that it took players from every level and as a level 6 I was fighting people that were level 30+ that had so many more skills than me.

One other thing I can give praise to the game for is their little instances. I guess these are story instances where you walk through this glowing wall to enter your own special instanced. Except it wouldn't require much, if any, loading. The smooth transition was a good thing for it. And another other thing. I don't know how it will go further on in the game, but during one part of my class story I would have to decide to let some prisoners free, kill them myself, or just execute them. I was surprised to find out there was a specific way to please your commanding officer for each prisoner. In matter of fact, one of the decisions he wanted me to do was a light side choice when dealing with the prisoners.

But again in all I wasn't impressed. It's another MMO except with a single player story element to it. Unlike Secret World, that I also shortly tested, that I actually was impressed. I won't go too deep in that game though since there is still a lot in that game that can still change. Guild Wars 2 looks a lot more amazing than swtor and even that I have a gripe for, though actually playing the game will determine if that gripe is worth noting.

Swtor in my opinion will not be an amazing game and will be another game that will lose subscriptions early on easily just like many mmos before it.