I’ve been playing Rift, and for the most part enjoying myself.
While the weary drudgery of questing can be quite monotonous, I am addicted to finding artifacts, tracking down rare mobs, the auction house, and somewhat prone to seeking out rifts.
It’s this last part that has become a problem. I’m starting to feel like Belgium over the past 60 or 70 years. Where are my invasions Germany!?
Stonefield and Scarlett Gorge have a few rifts here and there but no invasions. The populations in those zones just do not support invasions. I’ve seen one in my time leveling a character on Defiant Shatterbone, and heard of another’s existence after the fact.
Y U NO INVADE ME RIFT!?
As a result I’ve racked up multitudes of planarite, about 1300, but no cursed sourceshards or sourcestones. All the planarite in the world to spend and upgrade my gear, and no way to spend it without those two items.
For those of you who don’t know, planarite is awarded from all rifts in all zones, but each zone has its own unique currency (a sourceshard and sourcestone) which you use with the planar goods merchants of those zones.
Which kind of bothers me because I really like planar and rare planar goods. It can occasionally feel like I’m overpowered in the zone I’m in. Which is pretty cool.
Now don’t get me wrong, I know that invasions happen, but they’re so few and far between that it becomes quite frustrating. Invasions shouldn’t come around every 6 or so hours, that’s far too rare. Yet even during peak playing times invasions aren’t appearing in the mid level zones.
Invasions are spurred on by player populations. Once populations reach a certain level of activity an invasion is started. Otherwise you’d have too few people to successfully defeat an invasion.
The player population seems to be the problem.
Immediately after the first free month was up, there was a noticeable drop in population. I’m not the type to report that the sky is falling, it is to be expected that numbers fall off initially.
Please don’t bring this up in chat if you’re playing Rift, you might get your head bitten off. The population is fine, everything is fine!
I think the invasion mechanic, at least for those zones, needs to be reworked. Invasions need to initiate with lower populations and be appropriately sized.
Expecting people to level past those zones to get to zones with invasions is short-sighted to say the least. Expecting people to stick around for hours to get their sourceshards or sourcestones is unreasonable.
If I end up leveling out of those zones without getting to spend my planarite, I’m going to be kind of annoyed. Never a good thing with fickle, fickle, MMO fans.
I just like this screenshot
