Valdamar

I really don't care who dies as long as it's not BaBs!

Of course it probably will be BaBs as he's the only character in the Surviving Eight who doesn't give a Task Force in-game (thus it's easier to kill him off) and whose zone will be wrecked in the next update when we know one of the Surviving Eight is killed :/

I do agree with the article that killing Numina or Citadel would evoke no drama due to their non-living and fairly low-key status - I think Positron, Synapse, Manticore and Sister Psyche are fairly safe either because they have developers still at Paragon who use their identity, or because they're fairly major storyline characters in lore - so personally I'm hoping Statesman gets killed because it would be dramatic and I don't like him - but yeah, hopes aside, I still think it will be BaBs :(

It sounds a little like Atriarch, but hopefully it's not vapourware that will spend seemingly forever in development, like Atriarch.

@Space Cobra
- "And hell, give me a four legged dog model or a real-world chicken with a bit of armor and a sword in a game!"

You need some Dev team to make a Glorantha MMORPG - that world has a race of sentient ducks that are playable as characters :) Just try Googling "Durulz".

@Daemodand
Even the 1-50 groups have progression.

Take the Crey faction for example - at L1-20 you're mostly facing their poor minimum-wage Security Guards, then in the middle levels you're facing their MIB-style agents, while at higher level you face their superpowered operatives, many of which wear powered "tank" armour, and at the endgame there's Paragon Protectors who are basically superheroes in their own right (skirting spoiler territory as sensitively as I can).

Or the PPD (Paragon Police Department) that playable villains face - at low levels you face beat cops, moving on to plain clothes detectives (well, not plain exactly - some of them wear Hawaiian shirts :p ), moving into the mid levels you start to encounter Police drones and SWAT teams, then psi cops and cops in powered armour and huge robotic police drones with major firepower, while at maximum level you're up against Police who have bonded with Kheldian Peacebringers so have all the powers that playable Peacebringers have.

Even the 1-50 factions that don't scale as visibly well, such as Circle of Thorns, still have some progression - you don't run into succubi or the other major demons until mid-level.

@(Unverified)
Back alley? I thought they fired all the devs in the car parking area outside the office?

I wish MMOs would focus less on loot and more on story and/or exploration - if I want a monty-haul type loot-gathering dungeon-runner then I'll play one of the Diablo games or one of its clones - I just can't get excited about loot in MMOs when almost every mob these days drops magical gear of some kind and most of it is fit only for vendoring (and all your gear becomes obsolete with the next expansion anyway) - modern MMOs just have way too much "skinner box" conditioning that eventually the rewards seem meaningless - you might increase a few numbers on your stat sheet with the occasional upgrade, but it won't be at all noticeable in gameplay.

I remember the week I quit EverQuest in 2002 - I realised I was less excited looting the best-in-slot chestpiece for my raiding rogue than I was looting a crappy cracked staff for my brand new mage alt, because at least with the latter I could sell it for the money to buy some low level spells to give me extra gameplay options (flexibility more than power), while the rogue chestpiece just gave me a few extra points of DEX/AC/HP that wouldn't even be noticeable in my gameplay.

One of the (many) reasons my all-time favourite MMOs are Guild Wars and City of Heroes is because loot really isn't that meaningful there - and the easily-attained loot you can get in CoH, enhancements, has a noticeable effect on gameplay at all levels by letting you customise your powers to match your own playstyle - while GW's loot is more about aesthetics than stats.

Honestly if MMO developers focused less on loot treadmills (and more on playing content to unlock further content) then the gold-farmers would have nothing to profit from. I certainly don't see any gold spam in CoH or GW.

Before the redesign I had no interest in playing a Sylvari - I still have no intention of playing a Sylvari, but the race design has obviously been improved with a lot more thought going into it in the past year - and as I will have to share a world with characters of this race I'm glad about that.

Personally I don't expect every race to appeal to me and I'm glad that the people who want a more delicate-looking race will have options. Personally I'd already decided that most of my characters will be Norn and Charr anyway (with maybe an Asura for comedy value!), so I'm fine with not wanting to play Sylvari.

Not forgetting to mention it will be great to be playing an MMO without a traditional/stereotypical elf race, when in most MMOs it seems like 75% of the playerbase are playing elves.

@Utakata
"I think the qustion is being asked: "What MMO can you roll a plant as a player character?" Thus ArenaNet may have some validity to their bragging rights. :)"

Or not - Dark Age of Camelot had the Sylvan playable race last decade:

http://camelotherald.wikia.com/wiki/Sylvan

Mmmm pie.

Totally agree with the OP. Really Trion bottled out - they put in semi-dynamic events (rifts aren't wholly dynamic - they pop up in the same places again and again, and invasions follow pre-established paths), but then they gave players very little reason to want to do rifts other than fun (and they are fun for a while, until you realise rifts mostly follow the same patterns of mob spawns, then they become just as reptitive as the quest-grind) - because Trion have continually nerfed the rewards on the rifts and invasions, focused the endgame and most new content additions on raiding instead of the rifts (which is utterly bewildering - the game is called RIFT, not RAID), and made all the planar equipment/rewards pretty worthless compared to raid loot (but then that's a problem crafting and to some extent PvP have as well).

Ignoring events/invasions has very little effect on the world whatsoever (about the worst that can happen is completely losing access to most of Fortune's Shore in Shimmersand for half an hour when the caravan defence event is failed there - and on my server it always fails cos nobody can be bothered to defend them - and even then it's only annoying if you need an NPC in Fortune's Shore as most of the facilities are available in other hubs - failing most other events has no worse effect than losing access to 1-2 quest hubs in the zone for maybe 15mins because they've been overrun by 30+ invasions that no player can deal with, cos pulling one invasion/mob means about 150 mobs bulldoze you).

If Trion were braver then the invasions would be a real threat and the terrain control would constantly change like in a PvP terrain control game (e.g. Planetside) - invasions would completely deny areas to players until beaten back - that would be more interesting to me than any quest grind and I'd have been happy to level entirely from rift events. If it really was a war between the six planar factions and the two player factions then I'm sure players would be a lot more engaged in the overland gameworld and the L50 community would be a lot stronger than it is.

But no, Trion bottled out, and instead of creating something truly innovative they basically just bashed together WAR's public questing with ring events from EverQuest and called it done - sure, they've taken "dynamic" content a bit further, but I think calling rifts dynamic without putting quote-marks around the word is being rather charitable.

So now, as I get closer to my 4th L50 character, and start growing bored of the cookie-cutter questing, the repetitive dungeon grinding (and I have zero interest in guild raiding again in another MMO as that is repetition incarnate), not to mention growing extremely bored by the chore of daily quests (probably my own fault as up until last weekend I was doing faction rep dailies, workorder dailies and world event dailies on all of my L50 characters) I have to ask myself if it's worth sticking with Rift - well yes, until October, mainly because my founder's sub is paid up until then - but I'm not playing it every day anymore (been playing Battlefield Bad Company 2 this week and had a lot more fun than my last month in Rift).

While I've been impressed with the rate at which Trion are fixing bugs and adding content, I'm just totally bemused that their content additions are still pandering to the minority of raiders (who will never be happy with the rate of content added - raiders on my server moan daily about the lack of new raids, when Rift already has more raids than most new MMOs in the first 6 months post-launch - that's when raiders aren't moaning on the L50 chat channel about the lack of "hardcore" people around for them to recruit who actually want to raid) - especially when so many group-orientated and solo-orientated players are starting to grow bored and leave (and they far far outnumber the raiders).

Trion needs to decide where their focus is - sadly I think they already have decided that it's with the raiders - which is going to make it tragically easy for SWTOR to rip away their soloers (most people I know are planning to treat it more like a co-op KOTOR3 than an MMORPG) and GW2 will be ripping away both soloers and groupers (I may have made that word up :p ) seeing as their endgame is for groups and not raids (and their PvP is likely to be a lot more robust and better organised than Rift's too, what with Arenanet's GW experiences).

As a player that mainly plays in duos/trios, but also soloes, I'm starting to run out of things to do in Rift - my friend said we can play Guardian side (been Defiant-only so far) and we can do that for a few months until the quest content that side begins to bore us, but I just think Trion have really missed an opportunity by not focusing entirely on rifts, making them more dynamic and meaningful, and making the endgame rewards reliant entirely on participating in rift events/invasions - they've missed an opportunity to create a self-perpetuating PvE+PvP endgame for players of all playstyles, when I honestly thought that was the holy grail for all MMO developers.

That said, by the time my RIFT founder's subscription ends in October I'll have had a good 7 months out of Rift (9 months including beta) and if I quit at that time then I can't really complain - EQ2 and WoW only kept me for 6 and 8 months respectively and RIFT is very much in the same mould, despite its "dynamic content" pretensions - it just irks me that the potential is there for RIFT to have been so much more. Oh well, c'est la vie, and roll on Planetside 2 and Guild Wars 2 (and maybe SWTOR if my mates can convince me to play it).