Soundtrack Saturday: RIFT

 

In this weekly feature, I recommend game soundtracks. I share a few of my favorite tracks, talk about why everyone should listen to the soundtrack, and a little bit about the composer. This week's choice is RIFT by Trion Worlds.

Postcards for Pledges: Promotion Wrap-Up

A quick entry to discuss what did (and did not) happen during A Month of MMORPGs and the Postcards for Pledges promotion.

A Month of MMORPGs: RIFT

In this special month-long series, I talk about various MMORPGs I have played over the years and the things I enjoyed best about them. This series celebrates how social media and social games bring people together, no matter the distance. The MMORPG for Week #3 is RIFT.

Creating Characters: What's In A Name?

"My name is growing all the time, and I've lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story."

          -Treebeard, The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien

I've been told that I'm very good at coming up with names. Having given names to dozens of MMO characters, and more than three times as many characters, creatures, and places I have written about -- I suppose that's a fair statement. This entry is a (generous) handful of my favorite character names and how I came up with them.

My Desktop PC is Down

Houston, we have a problem!

Alright, to be fair, it's not as bad as the picture makes it out to be -- but that got your attention, didn't it? At least I didn't use the headline: "Can your PC spontaneously combust? Click here to find out!"

Here's the scoop: My desktop PC stopped working on Thursday. I am pretty sure that it's my power supply since the little light on the back of it doesn't light up. However, if it got a good zap it may have taken my motherboard with it.

How I am writing this: I am currently using my husband's gaming laptop hooked up to my keyboard, mouse and monitor (because my husband is awesome). He was even kind enough to install my core games for me -- LOTRO, RIFT and Town of Salem.

My gameplan: I could see about getting a power supply for my 9-year-old computer. Or I could invest in a new build to last me for the next 9 years. I am leaning towards the latter since I happen to have funds saved up, as well as some gift card money. (Becoming my patron on Patreon would help!)

Plans for the blog: Since I can still play LOTRO and RIFT, I will still have some regular content. I do also have Dead Mountaineer's Hotel installed so I can take care of that incentive from last year, and there are several other incentives I can take care of, too.

But never fear! Even if I didn't have a backup computer to use for games, I'd manage to take pictures of me learning to play The Lord of the Rings Card Game and blog about that!

LOTRO Executive Producer Letter: Classes, Festivals, Dwarves, and a Spider

Today's letter from Executive Producer Rob Ciccolini (aka Severlin) left me with some mixed feelings, but overall pretty excited!

Classes

If you play LOTRO and keep up with the notes for Bullroarer, then you've likely already seen some of the initial plans for tweaking classes. I am generally not happy about the proposed changes to Hunter and Lore-master, and admittedly don't play enough of other classes to weigh in on them -- but some people are happy and others are not. I just hope all the people who can actually access Bullroarer and give quality feedback will do so! The good news about this process is that they plan to stagger it and work in gradual phases instead of massive, sweeping changes across the board all at the same time.

Update 23

This part doesn't really get me excited because I haven't even made it to Mordor yet, but it still sounds very awesome! The Lonely Mountain, the Iron Hills, and the Grey Mountains will get the dwarf fanatics pumped up -- and the instance cluster, promise of a new raid later in the year, and level cap increase to 120 will take care of everyone else.

Minas Morgul & Shelob

I am sad this has been pushed off to 2019, but also kind of happy they want to devote more time and size to it. Anyone who's played Shadow of War but is also a LOTRO player is probably twitchy with anticipation of this part of the game.

Festivals

I'm intrigued by the Seasonal Instances that will accompany the Summer Festival. It reminds me of the special raids in RIFT during the Anniversary event, as well as Instant Adventures. I just hope SSG does it right (so far, their track record is pretty good). The fact that they mention the instances being able to be done solo is a plus in my book. Group content in the game is plentiful (especially with Mordor, I hear), so giving some love to the solo/duo players is great to see.

Tidbits

• The ability to see sheathed musical instruments? I'm on the fence here. I hope they make the visibility optional, or set it up with cosmetic options the way they have standard weapons. Not all instruments look good dangling from your back or waist!
  
• Harvestmath additions? I hope this isn't just talking about the continuation of the Bingo Boffin quest they started last fall. That was great, and I look forward to the next leg of it, but something new that can be done every day of the festival would be great!
  
• And all I can say about tying off loose ends in North Rhovanion, including Gundabad...

RIFT: Four Years Ago Today

Look at that beautiful Bahmi rogue! Her name is Kantri, and I created her four years ago today in the game RIFT. The nice people at Trion Worlds are big supporters of Extra Life, so they offered up a few freebies to the participants. I took the incentive and marvelous things happened!

Alright, not at first.

I had fun putzing around in the game on my own for a while. A friend told me she played and I swapped servers... and then I never saw her in the game again. (You know who you are. *scolds*) But then I felt really lost and couldn't seem to figure out where to go by my lonesome... so I stopped playing for a really long while.

I returned to the game in early 2015 and found myself in the middle of a zone event. For the first time ever there were a few people giving instructions to us clueless players and it actually helped us get the event done successfully. I caught the name of one person's guild and promptly asked for an invite. It ended up being a HUGE, disorganized guild... but was better than being all by my lonesome.

(Spoiler alert: RIFT, the guild in RIFT, and my Extra Life streaming on Twitch brought me closer to another RIFT player in the guild -- I am presently married to him. Yes, in real life. Just another reason why Extra Life means so much to me!)

I was very active in the guild for the rest of that year, even scooting all the way up to an officer position where I helped lead the raids and was also in charge of the RP (which was a lost cause unless all the kids were on summer break). I left the guild in late December with a few others because we disagreed about how some things were being handled.

Three months later, after having quit my job and moved 800+ miles to Mississippi, I went back to RIFT and created my own little guild called Spectral Gryphon. It's still there, and not very active, but I maintain it anyhow. I don't want to return to a crazy, large guild, and I hope to one day play some more with my friends and husband.

Let this be a lesson for you: Good things may just be waiting for you to take a chance. Oh yeah, and use those freebies you get if you're an Extra Life participant! They're a complete game changer, if you know what I mean!