[Gaming] Evolving as a Player Within RIFT

Posted by Khatharsis on August 1, 2011

Aside: I have a few topics I wanted to write about related to the theme of this blog (balance) and could not quite decide which one would get the honor to be the spearhead – the first “real” post of this reincarnated blog. However, I thought this topic best defined who I am as a player, what I find interesting about talking with other people about playing games as well as watching them, and sort of the idea that balance is not really a stationary concept as the word itself seems to imply.

Richard Bartle wrote an interesting piece in 1996 that categorized players into four different classes: killers, achievers, socializers, and explorers. These classifications were based on MUD players. Games such as World of Warcraft, RIFT, Lord of the Rings Online, and many other massively multiplayer RPGs have been attributed to be “graphical MUDs” prior to today’s more familiar label, the MMORPG. It is not too difficult to apply Bartle’s classification to MMORPGs as well. I take myself and my experiences in playing RIFT to show the evolution of my gameplay over time, the fluidity through which I move among the classes, and eventually settling into one categorization.


A brief history
Why RIFT? I was previously playing World of Warcraft for a good 4-5 years prior, several months of it spent in heavy, hard-core raiding environments. I had not read Bartle’s paper until the middle of my first year of grad school and by that time, I was just starting to get back into my second round of heavy raiding that would continue for a few months before ending with the guild disbanding. Cataclysm was a few months off to being released and I made my decision to call it quits a couple weeks before its release. I can reminisce about the end of my WoW experience, bittersweet as it was, but I think what is more interesting here is the entire journey through a persistent-world game.

I have also been playing Guild Wars off and on. One of the features of Guild Wars is an exploration bar that keeps track of how much of the map you have uncovered – not areas unlocked, but literal squares and pixels on the map that you have to run to. Scraping walls turned into a favorite activity (/sarcasm). However, I think I start off any game as an Explorer – there is a world to see and I want to see it.

Exploring the world
On a surface level, “Explorers are interested in having the game surprise them, ie. in INTERACTING with the WORLD. It’s the sense of wonder which the virtual world imbues that they crave for.” (Bartle) Towards the more “hard-core” explorer end, “Explorers are proud of their knowledge of the game’s finer points, especially if new players treat them as founts of all knowledge.” (Bartle)

New games mean new worlds or new areas. I always have problems when I play with other people who are more familiar with the game because they have a tendency to rush me through. When they rush me through, I don’t get familiar with my surroundings and it’s the spatial surroundings, layouts, and patterns that help me orient myself in the game world. When I started playing RIFT, I had a childlike curiosity of wondering what would be over the next hill, what would the next zone look like, what new flora and fauna would I encounter, what mountains were there for me to climb. It was all new and I was eager to explore it.

Since I originally leveled up in RIFT largely alone, I spent a lot of time scraping mountains and hills trying to reach the top because there had to be something interesting in the nooks and crannies. Shinies, aka sparklies, aka artifacts, were also another incentive, encouraging me to walk on fallen tree trunks that overlooked a decent drop or finding a way up the roof of a house to reach its chimney. I ran through at least one cave several times when questing in Scarwood Reach because I kept getting lost doing quests that had me run back and forth, but I finally got a rough idea of the layout by the time I was done.

The explorer class should not be limited to exploring just the world, as Bartle implies. I kept out of PvP in WoW because I never liked PvP, however I resolved to get familiar with the warfronts in RIFT as I leveled up. So I ventured into the killer class, just to finish the PvP quests.

Learning to kill others
I had my trepidations about PvPing, but I felt a little more reassured since it was a new game and not many strategies were created about warfronts. Likewise, I felt less likely to run into more critical PvP-oriented players (aka Killers) who feel the need to scream at others who are not as hardcore about PvP as they are. I once was criticized by a player in Warsong Gulch that I “had never PvPed” because I was in my PvE raid gear. I didn’t rise to the trollbait, but I was offended all the same. Nonetheless, I managed to squeak by that game without dying, making a couple of kills, and saving a flag. But I digress.

Broadly, “Killers are interested in doing things to people, ie. in ACTING on other PLAYERS.” (Bartle) Perhaps this can be modernized to include griefers as those more Killer-oriented are “proud of their reputation and of their oft-practiced fighting skills.”

The first warfront I had a lot of fun with. I even managed to hold the fang until it one-shotted me and that was probably my most awesome experience with PvP. However, the warfronts from there went downhill as I continued to level. Defiants seemed to get increasingly worse the higher I leveled and I eventually resorted to doing the warfronts in the mornings when less competent Guardians were around and I could finally get those PvP quests out of the way. Again, the warfronts cannot be accessed outside of the PvP setting and each time I went in, the more I learned and became familiar with the terrain.

By the time I hit 50, I stopped doing warfronts altogether. Even the level 50 warfront and quests I never bothered to pick up because I just wasn’t interested by then.

Finding the right spot to socialize in
When I hit 50, I was part of a small guild that looked promising if very small. I was learning to tank on my rogue (a role I strongly desired to play in WoW but never got the chance) by running my guildies through the lower level dungeons. It helped that I was much higher in level than the dungeon requirements. However, just about the time I hit 50, two of the guild leaders returned back to WoW and after two weeks of waiting to see if the last guild leader would do any recruiting (which he didn’t), I left for a larger guild, interested in checking out the end-game content before calling it quits. (I was the only member.)

“Socialisers are interested in INTERACTING with other PLAYERS…Socialisers are proud of their friendships, their contacts and their influence.” (Bartle) Unfortunately, all of the contacts I made while leveling up stopped playing the game after a month or two. Being an introvert, joining a large guild and integrating myself into their community was a daunting task, but I’ve slowly learned their personalities. A few of them have learned mine as a result of interviewing a few of them for research, but not nearly enough in a guild of that size.

However, I desperately wanted to raid again. Yet, again, I was a little hesitant to get started because I stopped running dungeons when I hit mid-30s due to time constraints and did not know the majority of them. I bought a lot of my gear to run experts and eventually worked up the courage to join guild runs, explaining that I didn’t know the fights in certain dungeons. Guildies and PuGs alike were patient to explain the fights to me and I even read up overviews and strats on RiftJunkies so I wouldn’t look too bad.

The first raid I was a part of was actually a PuG when I was drastically undergeared, but since rift raids are much more forgiving than instanced raids, I wasn’t immediately called out for subpar performance and I finished my first raid rift within an hour and a half. At the time, I was still learning the guild atmosphere and asked the raid leader who was scheduling the first guild raid rift a couple days later if he was only taking 10 people. He was under the assumption that only 10 people would get the quest completion, but said I was welcome to help outside of the group. I hung around for the first half and listened to them labor over trying to finish the raid during the second half and eventually logged off. I wasn’t particularly happy but I was also busy doing silly achievements to explore more of the world.

Achieving the achievements
As I leveled, I would randomly get achievements. Some of these achievements were cute, some were more silly, but otherwise I was pleased that none were particularly, noteworthy stupid as I encountered in WoW. As I was leveling, I couldn’t wait to do the achievements at 50 because there was so much interesting stuff there to try – I was focused on leveling, achievements could wait.

However, Bartle defines achievers a little differently and I don’t want to mix up the classification of achievers with the achievement system that is now so popular among games. “Achievers are interested in doing things to the game, ie. in ACTING on the WORLD…Achievers are proud of their formal status in the game’s built-in level hierarchy, and of how short a time they took to reach it.” (Bartle)

Interestingly, by the time I joined my current guild, my achievement points were much higher than other 50s. I was perhaps topped by those who had run the experts and done more PvP achievements. Of course, that has changed over the past few months as I stopped doing achievements because they became more grindy in nature – kill 250 goblins in Gloamwood and kill 150 aelfwar agents in Silverwood. Both zones are Guardian zones, so killing those NPCs were entirely optional and such a grind. (I did, however, find some solace by playing a Bard and listening to the sound clips, finding particular enjoyment when my Codas would finish off an NPC and their dying scream made it sound like they hated my “music” or horn blast, talk about deadly music…) I had fun running around the world, checking out the puzzles and getting their rewards, finishing out the exploring achievements, doing the quest chain in Shimmersand that starts with winning an illegal cockatrice bet, but that stuff gets old quickly when no one else wants to do it with you.

Achievements are also something I did in WoW because they set many goals for me to reach, to see what I could do to get there. By the time I left, I think I had the highest amount of achievement points in the entire guild, and that was against my guild leader who does a lot of silly things for fun. I guess I got to cheat a little because of my hard-core raiding gave me hundreds of points over her.

Finding the balance
I did what I set out to do in RIFT: play Saboteur in a raid setting. Granted, it’s not a “real” raid if standards are to be judged according to previous MMORPGs, but Saboteur was the soul I loved as soon as I realized how fun it was to hear explosions going off and seeing the NPCs lose a good chunk of their health because of it. I approached RIFT from a much more casual setting than the hard-core raiding approach I reached with WoW. However, after experiencing the raids, I miss it – I miss the collaboration, the camaraderie, the banging of the head against hard surfaces, and the elation when a tough boss finally goes down.

I got to run with the guild when they first went into the Guilded Prophecies sliver. We spent a few hours in there wiping on trash and then wiping on the first boss. We never finished the first boss that night (although their second attempt was much more successful, which I did not attend), but it was still fun.

With the release of 1.2 and 1.3 content patches, they have added temporary dailies (although they’ve stuck around for at least a month each) that award event-only currencies or artifacts. My play became very narrow and routine – how fast could I finish these dailies and would it be fast enough so I could log and do more important things? (During 1.2, it was studying for finals and doing last minute papers and projects.) I stopped running instances altogether in part because my lag is atrocious in the evenings when I am at one residence and I just lack the interest when I’m at another residence where my internet is considerably faster. My progress on achievements slowed and eventually reached a screeching stop. I will look through the list occasionally to see if there’s something I feel like doing, but it’s just another one of those things that get tossed to the wayside in favor of leveling up an alt.

Right now, I think I would classify myself in RIFT as in WoW mainly as an achiever (not to be confused by doing achievements) and secondarily as a socializer as the two go hand-in-hand when doing the end-game grind (getting gear to run heroics/raids). I am, however, mostly a solitary player when it comes to doing personal things that I am interested in, such as getting event tokens, doing dailies, and the such. I no longer explore. I stick to the paths I know, whether they are the shortest route or not. Even when looking for artifacts, I follow the same circles. I haven’t PvPed since I hit 50.

Ending the thoughts
My approach to MMORPGs is just one player out of many. What I like is hearing the stories and silly things other players do as they level and when they hit the end-game. I like understanding how they play as it gives insights into types of play that I may never discover simply because I never thought of it.

My end-game has wavered between hard-core raiding to casual raiding to being a bum. Having a not-so-great internet connection is a large factor into why I am not raiding this summer when the rest of my guild is, but I don’t feel so bad about it. I miss it, certainly. What I actually miss more is my guild who yet still remains in WoW. My attempts to persuade them over to RIFT has unfortunately not worked, but it was fun playing with them for a few days during their trial period. That’s not to say my guild on RIFT is bad, but I miss the atmosphere that my WoW guild provided.

I have to give a little to get a little. I left my first guild to join my current one in search of end-game activity and more socialization and got it, so I won’t complain. I guess, in terms of my future as a RIFT player, I am curious to see if I will drop the game altogether or find something new (or something old) that sparks my interest. And which class it will move me towards: heart, spade, club, or diamond?

Further reading