*Not a great day for your game when your patch notes say
"Yeah, we made taunts work now".
*Also: they still don't work.
* I feel the urge to completely bail from Rift more and more each day. The game is just inherently built to make you hate PvP. It is the anti-PvP game. It's bizarro PvP. It's VpV. It's b/\b. It makes that little sense to me.
- The "battlegrounds" are atrocious. I could kind of almost forgive the awful queue times for Warfronts if they were fun. But they're really not. I remember writing last summer that the small number of Warfronts (four) would be fine if they were well-crafted. Let's run them down.
Black Garden (Level 10+)
Grab the flag in the middle. Pro-Strategy: There's a couple trees to run around, so most matches are usually an enthralling game of "Hide Behind The Tree".
I'd be fine (happy, even) with this as a straight-up rock-em sock-em meatgrinder, but this field really only serves to highlight the two most glaring weaknesses of the PvP in this game:
1. This game and its classes weren't intended for PvP at all and that becomes abundantly clear when you throw a bunch of players in a courtyard and say "Have fun doing whatever".
2. Everything's dreadfully boring on like 40 different levels. I'm not paying $15 a month to hide behind a fucking tree.
Also, one of the nice things about playing video games is that you're getting away from being some schlub in Kansas City by getting to storm a beachhead in WWII or killing lizard space marines in a post-apocalyptic nightmarescape. The setting in this Warfront is un-fantasy... it's basically my patio, but less exciting.
The Codex (Level 20+)
A game of flag-capping that suffers from the same problems listed above, except it can be a little more palatable if you wanna just run around and not fight other players. Oddly enough, that seems to be a really high number of people in this game.
Whitefall Steppes (Level 30+)
This seems to be the runaway favorite for Least Favorite Warfront. Essentially, each team must travel across a landscape that is about as wide-open and exciting as fucking Nebraska, grab a flag, run across Nebraska again, and hope the other team's flag carrier dies of old age or something. Approximate time to complete: 450 minutes.
Port Scion (Level 40+)
A large town-like map that involves like 40 different objectives, swarms of NPCs, elites, confusion, node-things, and running around. Approximate time to complete: 780,000 minutes.
Okay, how about Open PvP?
The game is designed to make you feel like a douchebag for even wanting to fight other players. I've seen guys apologize for attacking enemy players. I've seen enemy players curse each other out for PvPing in Rifts. The whole concept and design of the game is anathema to the concept of PvP. It's trying to combine two things that have polar opposite goals.
The question for me isn't if Rift has any fun PvP, because, let's face it - it's very weak. A better question is, could it get better? Could the game grow into something better in that regard?
Is it even set up where that's a possibility?
I really don't think so. There's been talk of adding an Open PvP zone for end-gamers, but again that completely goes against the main thrust of the game. PvE. Dungeon Runs. Raid Rifts. So it goes. I could kind of picture them coming up with "PvP plaques" or some other shit to grind for (yawn), but honestly, it's all moot when GW2, TOR, etc. come out anyway, right?
