Gripes, complaints and irritations.

[Hutch]

As I'm spending another evening finding myself irritated by the rifts and invasions while running back to the same area I just left for the third round of uninspired quests, it occurs to me that this game just has not sunk its hooks into me.

Played 3 of the 4 class archetypes to 30+ and I'm feeling this as well.  The only reason to run quests is money and some gear.  Seems the best way to level is to have a set group to run rifts/dungeons with repeatedly.  I really got slapped in the face by this after I had completed nearly 10 quests at a hub and received about 2/3 a bubble when I turned them all in.  Fight your way into an area, kill mob x, fight your way out, turn in quest, and get sent to the EXACT same fucking place you just cleared twice.  It gets really annoying after a while.

I've done something like this in past games, i.e. level several alts in sequence through the same section of the leveling content. I've done this in WoW and in LotRO. I would frankly be surprised to hear from anyone who pulls the same stunt in Rift and doesn't get bored/burnt out.

[Threash]

Apparently you can't dye pvp armor, weak.  Specially since it's a retarded light blue color.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Crafting seems particularly useless in that I can make tons of weapons I will never need while levelling it up and you will never see them because with weaponbreaking to regain needed materials it would be stupid to try and sell them.

[Threash]

Really? i used a lot of armorsmith pieces while leveling up, i had someone make me some weapons too for levels were there weren't any quest rewards.  I only did every dungeon once though, maybe i missed out on drops.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I mean I'll use the weapons I make but...rarely at best. Often I'll either get a better quest or dungeon reward but it's still rare and the crafted goods are well...meh.  Maybe top end crafting is fine but jesus it feels like I'm crafting for no reason BUT to hit max crafting, 9-% of the things I make get broken to make other useless things.

[Bzalthek]

I agree with you here.  The crafting seems largely useless for me personally, and I break my outfitter shit to get mats back until I can no longer usefully use those mats to gain skill, then I just finish using all those mats for shit to place on the AH. 

[Ice Cream Emperor]

I pretty regularly wore pieces of armour I had made for myself as I levelled up, but I still agree that crafting barely qualifies as useful because those pieces were generally -- like all other upgrades in the game -- at most 5% better (and absolutely no different) than what I would have had otherwise. I got more use out of crafted weapons, though, as finding decent two-handers via quest drops was fairly infrequent. But it doesn't change the fact that the basic recipes are 100% boring, like all the other items in the game I've seen so far.

The costs for buying better recipes and the method for acquiring them both seem like total cockblocks (I have done approximately 50-60% of all the dailies available to me since starting the game and I think I can afford one high level blue recipe? Or I can grind reputation yay!)

[Quinton]

It just strikes me as weird that there are all these crafting components that you have to buy!

FFXI crafting was broken in a billion ways, but I always liked that if I wanted to, I could craft everything from first principles (or at least from gatherables) without having certain materials that could only be bought.

[Rendakor]

I had no problem with the crafting, given that it's very basic. You can generally make level-appropriate upgrades more frequently here than in WoW, which means it's at least useful while leveling up. Rift never claimed their crafting was some awesome revolutionary new feature (and if it had I'd be more critical), but it scratches the make-my-own-stuff itch well enough for me.

[Xanthippe]

In the 40s I'm starting to have the WAR T3 problem where there aren't enough quests for any given level; I did most of the level 40-42 quests in IPP just to ding 41, and once I run out of 43s I'm probably going to have to move to another zone because I can't readily handle level 3+ mobs. I'm not sure if the quests are more sparse/worth less % XP, or if it's that I'm doing almost only questing because BGs and dungeons are less readily available.

I am finding at 44 (with very little dungeon running) that I have plenty of green quests to do.  I didn't complete Scarlet Gorge, either, skipped a bunch of quests there.  I didn't receive any breadcrumbs for Droughtlands, though, although I went down and did that after Moonshade.  So now, at 44, I have White Peak, Shimmerstrand and Stillmoor to do - plus Scarlet Gorge quests that I didn't complete. 

If anything, there are too many quests - maybe you missed some breadcrumbs?

[Threash]

I did most of the 40's in IPP, you do not run out of quests.

[Rendakor]

I went to IPP at 39; doing all the quests I could got me to 41, with all quests remaining 44+ and impossible to solo.

[Nebu]

There is no way to run out of soloable quests.  You have to ping-pong between ICC. Shimmer, and stillmoor from 40-50.  My cleric hit 50 with plenty of quests remaining in ICC and Stillmoor and I never did a dungeon and mostly did zone events for rifts.  Moonglade also have some areas where you leave to do draughtlands about 38 and come back at 40-42 to finish.  Draughtlands also has some low-40's content and almost all of the 3-person quests are doable with a good duo.

[Rendakor]

I said I ran out of soloable quests in IPP.

[Threash]

I did zero quests in shimmer, about 20% of stillmoor maybe.  I hit 50 mainly from ipp, droughtlands before that.  You might have started too early.

[01101010]

I was about 1 level too low for most of the quests post lvl 37. I'd get a quest for mobs 3 levels above and not be able to attempt it due to many cases of death. I'd tool around and try rifting... though no majors would pop considering I was catassing at first and didn't have the pop to spawn invasions regularly. Now I didn't step foot in a dungeon at all so I figured that had something to do with it. I also know I miss a breadcrumb here or there...since there were titles on people my level I had not attained. meh...

[Count Nerfedalot]

I am confilcted regarding Rift crafting.  On the one hand, you CAN indeed make stuff good enough for you to use when you make it.  This is such a simple prerequisite for a good crafting system, yet one which the developers of game after game have deliberately gone out of their way to ensure is not possible.  Also to Rift's credit is that crafting is neither a click-fest nor a drag-and-drop micro-management nightmare, but is instead relatively straightforward and easy to do, with the added bonus of being able to afk at least some of the more extreme grindy parts (although you have to be careful not to get logged off for inactivity 3/4 of the way through converting your 300 hides into 300 leathers!  )

On the other hand, well, unfortunately that other hand has a lot of fingers, all with warts and blemishes and ugly putrid sores.  One problem is the simplicity of crafting itself.  The activity is bland and unexciting while the rewards are tame and just mildly stimulating.  No, it isn't painful to craft, but neither is it particularly fun.  And yes, you can actually get some use out of stuff you craft, but it is not much if any better than what you'd have if you stuck with only gear you got as loot or rewards.  You'd think Alchemy would be an exception to that, but alchemy is pretty seriously hosed right now (all potions on the same timer) and basically useless (nothing that is more than a very minor increment to what you already get from looted and reward items).  There doesn't seem to be any loot or reward equivalent to Runecrafting at all, so you'd think that would make a difference.  Not that I can tell so far, and I'm currently a level 37 warrior who has spent the last 20 levels with the best possible rune on every single piece of equipment I've used, and I honestly can't tell the difference.  (Heroic mobs two levels below me beat me to a pulp in a minute or two, and I churn through waves of normal mobs up to two levels higher than me like a supertanker through a canal - slow but unstoppable.)

So, not much fun doing it, and not much to gain by doing it, so why craft? To play the economy game?  The player economy sucks.  Big hairy rancid ones.  The auction house is a royal PITA, requiring you to spend lots of time and money reposting ALL of your goods every 12, 24 or 48 hours (with rapidly diminishing financial returns for each step up in auction length due to the large number of people crafting).  And for what?  More plat?  What good is that?  Once you've bought yourself a horse and traded up to wool or silk bags for every slot, what else is there to spend it on?  I'm sitting on a pile of plat already and nothing interesting to do with it, and I gave up selling crafting goods completely except for the occasional ginding byproduct.  Sure, I could sell lots more, if I wanted to micromanage my auctions every few hours and (manually!) track the going rate for every single item I could make to find the places where the profits are best.  But I'm fairly confident that I'd find that the best profit would be to just sell the crafting mats rather than the end products, and again, for what?  Lots of annoying, tedious work for plat I have no use for.

Finally, crafting in Rift really just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  It's like the developers didn't really have a reason to put it in the game except to tick off another bullet point from WoW's feature list, and as they were putting it in they figured hey, we might as well get something useful out of it so they turned it into a big money sink, and that's as far as their imagination took them. They don't seem to have any passion for or understanding of the desires of players who want to craft.  Sure, they successfully deployed a bunch of complicated systems that were implemented cleanly and competently (mostly), but without any soul and without having any reason for the players to actually use it.  It became a tool for good of the devs, that incidentally annoyed players (every time I pay a stupid little money sink fee that's obviously there for no other reason than as a money sink *I* get annoyed at least) but gave no real reward to the players for getting any good at it.

Yay, but Bleh. 

[Ice Cream Emperor]

I'm willing to believe that you can hit a hump at various points, but post 40 I felt like I was drowning in quests. Every time I would dare explore or wander off The Pre-Ordained Quest Route I would invariably run into yet another quest hub with yet another set of identical quests. Which would be fine except if you actually take the quests, intending to get around to them later, you eventually notice that your inventory is like one third quest items, and suddenly you have no space for useful things like rift consumables, thirty-seven differently-labelled identical grey items, and Greens of the Fortress.

Edit: and well said regarding crafting. It satisfies the most basic animal urges (must collect objects, must collate objects, must click the button!) but it brings no real joy to the table.

[Quinton]

Oh the auction house.  So very bleah.

Here's another place where FFXI was superior -- auction history.  Not quite EVE levels of several months of charts, but at least you could get a feel for what stuff was selling for (as opposed to what it was listed for -- if it's listed at all).  I know WoW had addons or mods for this, but it really strikes me as a basic tool that should be included.

Another thing that was interesting (and sometimes broken) about FFXI auction houses is that there were 4 different ones, in the 4 main hub cities and if you enjoyed playing the market you could often have fun buying from one and selling on another, taking advantage of market inefficiencies and actually making some decent money.

Also, *everybody* needed consumables and there was pretty brisk trade in them, which made skilling up Alchemy at least a break-even sort of proposition.  It's always advantageous to be higher level crafting in FFXI due to reduced breakage (breakage SUCKS) and higher chances of Hiqh Quality (often higher quantity) results.  But the economy worked -- characters across all levels sold drops on the AH for cash, crafters across all levels bought those drops to make things to skill up or sell or both, and characters across all levels bought goods from the auction house.

The only thing I've seen much advantage to buying at the AH in RIFT is bags because I'm always out of space and it's a way to get larger bags before they become available via NPC vendor.  I use consumables incredibly rarely and they're cheap, so I have little motivation to go bargain hunting.  In FFXI you *could* buy consumables from NPCs but they cost an arm and a leg.  You'd get a better deal from the AH most times.  In fact, the NPCs effectively set low and high price caps in FFXI, with the player based market filling the gap.  Though sometimes prices would drop below NPC buy or rise above NPC sell and again one could exploit market inefficiencies for some gain (typically short-lived, as people would start realizing they could get a better deal elsewhere).

I keep crafting, but I keep wondering *why* I keep crafting.  As far as I can tell it doesn't really do much for me and I suspect I'd have more cash at-hand to buy things if I just sold gathered goods to NPCs or crafters (whoever's paying more).

I do like that I can make level-appropriate gear as I level up (which is superior to a number of crafting systems I've experienced), but as noted above that gear is not particularly better than the gear I already get from quests.

[Koyasha]

FFXI's auction house was great, it was the first MMO in which I participated in the economy regularly - in EQ, I could never be arsed to use the bazaar or stand around using trade in east commons.  In WoW I participated because of Auctioneer and other addons.  In any game where I don't have readily available auction information I typically do not participate in the economy, neither buying nor selling things from/to other players.

FFXI's system had the problem of 10 auctions being too short a history though.  It was easily manipulated to whatever price people wanted by one to three people, as long as the item wasn't something so commonly bought and sold that you couldn't fill up the history in a matter of minutes.

So generally speaking, lack of some basic auction house features such as price history - preferably a price history that shows the last 2-4 weeks, as well as doing the math for you and averaging it out, like Auctioneer does - prevents me from taking part in the economy, at all.  I suspect there's a lot of other people for whom this also applies.  This significantly affects many facets of gameplay, since being able to take part in the economy improves many other parts of the game.

[MuffinMan]

I keep crafting, but I keep wondering *why* I keep crafting.  As far as I can tell it doesn't really do much for me and I suspect I'd have more cash at-hand to buy things if I just sold gathered goods to NPCs or crafters (whoever's paying more).

Oddly you just described how I've felt while crafting in every MMO I've ever played.

[Quinton]

I think there's a fine line for balancing the economy -- you need good enough tools that average players can make reasonably informed decisions without a lot of pain, but you also need some amount of imperfection in information flow otherwise there's no "game" to the economy.  Go too far in either direction and you lose the fun.

Also, the auction fees in RIFT seem absurd to me, especially for stacks of items.  For common craft materials or goods I'm seeing the listing cost for a long auction to often be 20-50% of the typical buyout price for those items.  That's crazy.

Further, I much much prefer FFXI's reverse auction to the WoW-style auction house.  For those that haven't played FFXI it works like this:
- FFXI only allows full stacks or single items to be auctioned, simplifying things a bit in that regard
- sellers set a price for their item or stack of items and hand the items over to the AH
- ah listings show the last 10 sales for an item, the date of sale, price, buyer, and seller
- buyers bid what they want to pay for an item or stack
- buyers either win (instantly getting the item for what they bid) or lose (get no item, keep their money)
- the lowest-listed-price item which satisfies the buyer's bid wins (I believe if multiple items are listed at the exact same price time is the tie-breaker)
- if the buyer over-bids the seller who wins keeps the difference

The only things I would change:
- ability to list more than 7 auctions per character
- more extensive price history (maybe daily/weekly average/min/max prices shown as well as most recent sales)

[Ashamanchill]

The only auction house I've ever actually liked was EQ2, where you could just post an auction and it would stay up until the end of time. None of this short ass auction expiration bullshit.

[Zetor]

COH has my favorite auction house implementation. It is completely merged (across servers and factions), has histories of the last 5 sales (like the ff11 example mentioned above), posted auctions or bids never time out, and it also works on the list-bid system (list for X, buyer bids Y, buyer pays Y and wins the auction closest to Y, if available).

edited to add: Crafted stuff is indeed mostly useless (I got some use out of artificer at low levels when there are no ring/necklace quest rewards and caster weapons are scarce). I have a 300 artificer main and a 300 runecrafter alt (getting 300 RC was easy by level 20 with my main supplying the alt with a ton of stuff to runebreak). Neither of them can make stuff that's even slightly on par with what you can get as quest rewards in the AP/CC dungeons or entry-level pvp gear you can get without any renown rank.

[Koyasha]

CoH's 'last 5 sales' history is even more useless than FFXI's 'last 10' except for items that basically never fluctuate in price.  Anything that fluctuates you either have to memorize the price (which is therefore almost no advantage over not being able to see the history at all, really) because it can vary by a lot.  Still, it is just useful enough that I did participate in the economy the last time I played, but still annoying that I had to keep track of highs and lows manually rather than having the computer do it for me.

Other than that, I agree that CoH does have an excellent AH functionality, because I do indeed prefer the FFXI/CoH 'blind bids' system, especially since the person who lists the item at the lowest cost sells it first.  CoH also has the good point that you can put in a bid and leave it up there if no one is selling cheap enough for you, and if someone eventually does list something cheap enough, you immediately buy it.

[Bzalthek]

Not really a gripe, but I'd kinda like a 'set price on this item' thing.  Like I want to sell this for a certain price, and then it autofills the money ranges every time I put that item up.  That would make my life a little easier.

[MuffinMan]

My memory is murky since I haven't played in a couple weeks but I'm sure it was automatically setting the price when I was selling stacks of cloth. I could even split it up the stacks and it would adjust it for the size of the stack. Maybe it clears the memory when you close the auction window?

[Segoris]

Yeah, when you close the auction window it does reset.

[MuffinMan]

That just doesn't make sense then. It's like someone was adding that feature and then sustained a head injury mid-implementation.

[Threash]

It resets when you log off, not when you close the window.

[Segoris]

Weird I always noticed it whenever closing the AH, I may very well be wrong though

[Sky]

The only auction house I've ever actually liked was EQ2, where you could just post an auction and it would stay up until the end of time. None of this short ass auction expiration bullshit.

They did change that at some point to limit it to active accounts, I think you had to have logged in in the last week or something. I know it was pretty awesome before that. Before I'd cancel for the summer, I'd throw up a ton of stuff and pretty much everything would be sold when I re-upped in the autumn and I'd have a bunch of pp to get started with.

[Threash]

Weird I always noticed it whenever closing the AH, I may very well be wrong though

I remembered specifically because one time i logged in, set a buncha things on the ah for sale, went exping for several hours then when i went to sell more things before logging off it auto set the prices again.

[Bzalthek]

Threash is correct.  This has happened to me several times.

[nurtsi]

Crowd control. Fuck it's like Warhammer T4 at release all over again.