I quit World of Warcraft in April, 2011, after just over six years of almost constant play. During my time in the game I met many fabulous people, had a lot of fun, and developed skills that I could legitimately apply to the outside world. While I still play for an hour or two here and there, I have not yet fully relapsed.

My time away from the game has given me some perspective on it, I think. It’s amazing how quickly one adapts back into ‘civilian’ life and things that seemed routine back in the day suddenly become strange and outlandish. My taste for progression raiding is certainly over. There are times when I can feel a twinge for it, but that’s mostly abstract competitiveness and not any real yen for raid content. In my natural habitat I have become truly casual, and the idea of spending even six hours a week in obligated game-playing gives me pause.

So here I am, fresh from the sunny elf-less void, and I have a few observations on the double-edged swords of WoW.

1. Too many numbers. I can imagine back in the day when Blizzard was developing WoW that making so much of the math available to the public seemed like a radical geek idea. And really, it was. I know plenty of folks — myself included — who deeply enjoyed burning the midnight oil calculating the exact efficiency increase between offhands. Heck, the Elitist Jerks community wouldn’t exist without mathcrafting! The problem is that by making those calculations available, they suddenly became mandatory.

As poor beleagured Ghostcrawler, Blizzard’s current numbers guru, said in a recent post: “I’d love to have the discussion some time about how close two similar specs need to be before players will play the one that is most fun for them and not the one that does theoretical higher damage. Is it 5%? 1%? 0%?” It’s hard to defend playing the fun spec when the raw math is staring you in the face. In retrospect I wish WoW had held back some of the information to create a little fuzziness around that 5%.

2. Too many choices. WoW revolutionized the idea that an MMO can suit any lifestyle, and honestly now I think that was a critical mistake from the design perspective. Cross-server LFD? To hell with server community, or any community for that matter. Respecs whenever you want? No excuse not to be have a “perfect” spec in your back pocket. Addons to customize your UI? Gearscore!

To be fair, I feel a little silly demanding that MMO developers stop giving us so many options. And I am certainly not saying that progression raid guilds shouldn’t emphasize individual performance, although in all honesty I think most guilds that seriously raid make themselves crazy over that 5% damage difference when in fact it really only matters to the best guilds in the world. Are we just not able to accept the great responsibility that comes with the great power of having a company attempt to cater to our every gameplay whim?

3. People. Last week someone I trusted not only left our community (which is always sad but understandable) but attempted to pull the whole thing down with them on the way out. MMOs and other group games give us the opportunity to meet new people, make friends, and feel like part of something larger than ourselves. They also, occasionally, remind us that people can be dicks.

I guess really that’s my point for this whole piece, such as it is: perhaps Blizzard gave us the tools to be dicks to each other, but we’re the ones who use them.

World of Warcraft has its next content patch, numbered 4.1, up for players on their Public Test Realms. Included in 4.1 are two “reimagined” classic dungeons, Zul’Gurub and Zul’Aman. Last night Prolixity gathered up some friends and went to see what all the fuss was about.

The PTR
PTRs are strange little clusters of the WoW universe. Everything is selling for 10 gabillion gold on the AH, and uber angry hardcore kids end up mingling with windowlicking premades who can’t figure out how they blinked into a corner. After a little effort we found a couple of random DPS to join our group, and we were off!

New ZG vs. Old ZG
There are a few areas from old ZG that are blocked off now, like what was once Jeklik’s room (bat boss) and Mar’li’s cave (spider boss). You can’t get into Mandokir’s old area, but both he and his raptor are out front for you to fight. The tiger boss is no longer present but instead somewhat surprisingly replaced with a giant void miniboss. There are still fights in the  panther room and Jin’do’s corner, but they are with different characters. The old alchemy boss is now an archaeology boss. Hakkar’s ghost is on his platform, but the actual final boss is.. someone else you’ll recognize. I didn’t have a chance to check the old fishing knoll, but I was eaten by a “Spawn of Gahzranka” at one point so he may still be around.

Frogger and Other Gameplay Elements
There are a few tank and spank fights in Zul’Gurub, but there are equally a lot of neat new concepts. There are at least two moments where trash has “Frogger”-like elements, requiring players to weave around obstacles on the fly.

Sprinkled through out the whole instance are cauldrons that imbue the players with a particular helpful power for 30 seconds. These are, if I recall, nature resist, a freezing stun, and an AoE fire nova. These are always extremely helpful if not downright mandatory for certain trash pulls, and one of the bosses requires you to run around clicking the right cauldron at the right time.

Difficulty Level
So my party all had good gear with a number of raid epics. It’s hard to say how much my group reflected an “average” group, but I can say that this instance was pretty tough! I was often very low on mana, and there are a number of things that cause a great deal of damage to the entire party at once.

My opinion is that as of last night’s PTR build Zul’Gurub is going to be quite difficult for your average random player upon launch. I found it to be a really fun challenge, though, and I’m all looking forward to trying Zul’Aman out soon.

So I’ve become unexpectedly attached to RIFT. I still raid in WoW, still hang out on the guild forums, still stay up on the patch notes and whatnot. And I’ve been playing with guildies almost every day… just in Telara.

I didn’t even expect to still be playing RIFT, honestly, after the head start. Despite some of the more exuberant praise of the game you can read on other blogs, RIFT isn’t revolutionary. It is not the “3.0″ to WoW’s “2.0″. Instead it’s an amalgamation of everything you’ve liked about MMOs from the last five years: ample quests (WoW!), public events (WAR!), fancypants graphics (Age of Conan!), slightly more advanced crafting (LotRO!). And that’s fine! It’s fun to play an MMO that really seems to have learned from its predecessors, if it hasn’t exactly built a new foundation of its own.

The one exception to this is the soul (class) system, which I come to appreciate more and more every day. Trion’s unique design means that each and every one of the four classes can tank, and three of them have the ability to heal or off-heal. (Can warriors off-heal?) So let’s say you’re a stabbin’ rogue doing an instance when the tank DCs. What do you do?! Easy: switch specs to the Riftstalker one you have in reserve and tank that sucker yourself! At the low levels you don’t even need to switch gear, although I can’t say how much that will hold up at the end-game. No more waiting around for a tank and healer — it’s pretty ingenious.

Even if most of the gameplay isn’t new, the game itself is. After six years with WoW it’s kind of fun to have unseen zones, new quests, new characters, new lore. I don’t know where anything is.. heck, I don’t even know what all my buttons do. It’s refreshing to not be in Azeroth some nights. (And that sensation was only reinforced by the 4.1 announcement about ZG and ZA. While I think both of those instances were pinnacles of raid design in their time, I’ve kind of killed those bosses before. A lot. A lot, a lot.)

Now keep in mind that I’m saying this after one week at the robust level of 18. (A bard, for those playing along at home, and I luffs it.) It is entirely likely and perhaps even probable that I will get bored of the game before nearing the level cap of 50. As I’ve said before, the quests are not very interesting so far, and I have no first-hand experience with the instances. Perhaps they’re boring or too easy or something.

And certainly a huge part of it is that newbie leveling doesn’t require a policy-weilding guild leader with a vision and recruitment and schedules and man it’s fun to shirk responsibility and just jump in circles for a while.

There are reasons why I’m enjoying RIFT that have nothing to do with the game itself, and those reasons will likely dissapate. However, I think it is very safe to say that right now, today, at this moment, I am enjoying RIFT a whole hell of a lot more than WoW.

Jessica can be found vacationing on the Byriel-US server in RIFT as Accolade, the Defiant Bard. Feel free to say hi.

In the first few years of running the guild I would get anxious whenever someone mentioned another game, MMO or otherwise. I would try to slyly discourage it: “Oh, Aion! I hear… it gives you rickets.” Over the years, though, I learned from experience that there is room for more than one game in most people’s lives, and even if a Cat DOES leave WoW for another game (this has only happened once, though) few people ever actually leave our community.

I do feel a bit like I’m cheating on WoW when I play another MMO, but I really enjoy checking out other games, particularly at their launch. Despite its popularity World of Warcraft is not the best MMO currently available. It definitely wins in some areas but loses in many others such as crafting, cosmetic items, and honestly just some of the core gameplay.

Anyway, all this is just a really long preamble to explain how and why I found myself in the RIFT: Planes of Telara beta over the past few weeks. I played in the beta at the end of January, and again over the weekend in the Open Beta.

Character Options: I did enjoy the character creation menus, although honestly it’s painfully easy to beat WoW on this front. There’s a height slider for certain races, two-tone hair colors, and options for things like eye rotation and nose size. The array of races seems interesting, too, from dwarf-ish to big giants elves.

Classes: This is one of the places that RIFT shines. You can make a warrior, rogue, cleric, or mage — but wait! You’ve probably already read the details by now, but essentially you have three talent trees and an almost unlimited number of spec options. That means you end up with healing mages and tanking clerics, and a rogue could be be a stabber or a hunter or a bard. Eventually I’m sure the community will math out ideal specs and set the dogs loose on anyone who does not comply, but until that point players can enjoy being truly unique (if not always efficient!). Over the weekend I made a bard/riftstalker who by level 9 could stealth, blink, buff stamina and attack power, and AoE heal a raid or party. It was a blast.

Gear: The gear paradigm of “pants on males, bikinis on females” is alive and well in RIFT, and honestly it seemed a lot more obvious than in WoW. At one point my adorable rogue sold off a chest upgrade because it looked like it had been sexily mauled by a bear. Cleavage is one thing.. melee in a half-shirt and no pants is something else entirely. The esteemed Spinks noticed another example. Guardian faction, in particular, seems to have a surplus of slutty elves. (I leave it up to the individual reader to decide how they feel about that.)

Quests: Honestly, the quests were not that impressive. It’s the “rails” style of questing that Blizzard introduced in Cataclysm, which I don’t necessarily dislike. However the quests are a little obtuse sometimes, and they’re just not interesting. Kill 10 of the local mobs. Collect 10 trinkets from different local mobs. Now kill their leader! Great, go to the next town. I know people complain that Blizzard’s questing is heavy with gimmickry now, but I LIKE those gimmicks! RIFT is seriously lacking in their equivalent of bombing run quests or vehicle quests or something that doesn’t involve just killing ten rats.

Graphics: I hear the graphics in RIFT are awesome, but I wouldn’t know because the game brings my 18-month old video card to its knees. I play on the Low Graphics settings. It makes me sad.

Rifts: These are fun!! I know they liberated the public quest concept from Warhammer Online, and I feel sure that one day Blizzard will liberate that concept from RIFT. As a social gamer, I like seeing everyone in a zone stream out from the trees to band together and kill bad things. The spontaneity of the events is also a blast.

All in all I don’t think RIFT has done anything that much better than WoW. If you are looking for a first MMO, or you have very tenuous ties to WoW and want to play something new I think this will be a fine game to make your “main”. For me there’s certainly not enough to warrant moving me or the guild. I expect I’ll play for a month or two, have some fun, and then move on to whatever is new and shiny then. (Helloooo, Dragon Age 2!)