/AFK: The Final Countdown Edition

Two and a half weeks left, and RIFT players will finally be able to colonize Telara for good.  This isn’t a lot of time to get one’s affairs in order — families need to be abandoned, jobs quit, pets sold the circus, catheters set up, etc.  Hopefully, we’ll get it all done.

Or, y’know, we’ll just treat it like a normal game when it gets here.

Welcome back to /AFK, my weekly list of the the most interesting or well-written blog posts I’ve read:

• Kill Ten Rats — Rift beta 5: rifts ahoy
  “One mechanic I’d not seen in other games that Rift has that I loved was AE looting.”

• Gee It Laldy — Money, demographics, Sony and you
  “I fear that a good game will languish in mediocrity, and not break that illusive console MMO market due to SOE’s backwards thinking money men.”

• KIASA — A bargain is something you can’t use at a price you can’t resist
  “To my mind Turbine have created an item that actively encourages the sort of selfish behaviour that a large part of the community had been resisting.”

• The Common Sense Gamer — Looking at Rift
  “The Rift System: You’ve read about this all over the place and by now, so you know generally what this is…in theory. In practice this mechanic MAKES the community work together.”

• Ardwulf’s Lair — Vanguard Abides
  “It seems to me that if the population is that small, the game’s bottom line might be improved by an order of magnitude – or more – just by making it free-to-play, and relying on a significantly higher population using the existing cash shop.”

• Battle Chicken — 5 events that moved me
  “Once I played through it and saw what happened there and really understood it, I couldn’t help but cry.”

• Tobold — The rewards of grouping
  “I believe that the strict separation of the soloing part and the grouping part of content is harmful here.”

• Rift Watchers — Does faction balance even matter?
  “Faction imbalance isn’t the end of the world. None of us want it, no underdog will enjoy it, and Trion would do well to pay attention to it.”

• Flex Your Geek — Advancements every MMO should include
  “We don’t want every game to be the same, but we do want every game to include features that aid a player in having fun.”

• Overly Positive — The not-so-odd couple of geeks and sports fans
  “The irony of this was that after ribbing me for my MMO stat-mongering, he went on to talk about his fantasy football team’s offensive and defensive numbers with rote detail.”

• Spinksville — 3 good reasons why veterans are getting bored with Cataclysm
  “So, will Cataclysm mark the beginning of the end of Blizzard’s great warhorse?”

• No Prisoners No Mercy — The Siren’s Call
  “I hate this game, but I love it, but I hate it, but I love it…”

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