Rift End Game

Yesterday while I was doing a very boring ecommerce product migration from one site to another, I was playing around in my Google analytics account and noticed some interesting things. One, traffic had increased since Rift has come out – it was no longer just my husband and two close friends reading the blog. (I love you guys!) Second, my bounce rate was really high, which worried me a bit (“Do I suck?!?”). The current main keywords that people were coming in on were variations on “Rift end game”.

*snicker* Well, that explains it. There are evidently a lot of people searching for confirmation of actual end game content, either because they are trying to make a decision about playing the game, or they have reached 50 and are trying to see if anyone else has anything to do. And then they land on my personal waffle and fluff, and bounce back immediately. Sorry to disappoint, guys…this is SO not a theorycrafting or raid tactics blog.

Of course, that doesn’t prevent me from capitalising on search terms, titles and so on…just to be evil. :)

I think Ravven is 42 right now, and I have been making a definite attempt to not rush things. We do have quite a few 50s in the guild, and I know that they really want to start raiding and doing expert dungeons. But I don’t want it to be all over…I want to enjoy the journey for as long as I can.

I think that playing Warcraft for so long has soured my experience of end game content. In the present era of Gearscore and all of the would-be elitist jerks, raiding and running heroics isn’t much fun. I know there are guilds that do do casual raiding, but (perhaps because of having been a member of a semi-hardcore guild for so long) I think I kind of see those players as being less than effective. See how diplomatically that was put? As much as I no longer want to raid five nights a week, neither do I want to spend time wiping with people who have no idea that the fire is there, much less that it is currrently singeing their feet. I want my cake (competent, knowledgeable people to play with) and I want to eat it too (being in a guild of nice, funny, relaxed, non-dickhead people).

I do think that Rift will have longevity even for people who are not focussed on end game content due to the soul system. I would really like to level one character of each class. As long as I space it out a bit, I think I can level through the same content four times without a problem. I’ve done it much more than that in Warcraft. The one thing that I would like to see is a different starting area for each race. I think that that is a glaring lack that Rift has, and it is something that I hope they rectify in a future expansion.

Anyway, it was a slight relief to see people coming in on normal search terms such as “Rift end game” rather than the old favourite “furry mmo”. That always worried me a bit…I so didn’t want to be gaming blog of choice for people who want to have kinky furry sex in an MMO setting.