Moving On...

I waited until today to see if my Rift: Prime character would show up. It was supposed to be the last date for transfers to be completed. Nothing.

I can't even see the Trial server, the aptly-named Reclaimer, on the shard list. That's because you can only see it if you have a character there. Clearly, I don't.

Why not? I'd like to know that, too. I read the full text of the official announcement as well as the forum post and FAQ. Nowhere does it say that characters need to have reached a specific level to be eligible for transfer but I got a hint that that might be the issue when I tried to post a query on the official forum thread.

Since I can post perfectly happily on other parts of the forum I'm guessing that Level 10 is some kind of baseline reality check for Prime. I was under the impression I'd passed that bar because, as I mentioned in the previous post, I thought I'd gotten into the high teens when Prime started.

One of the best things about having a blog is that, at least when it comes to gaming, I don't have to rely on my memory. I looked at the post I wrote when Prime launched. It told me two things: I didn't get anywhere near as far as I imagined (it seems I logged out the moment I dinged eight and never logged in again) and I had far less fun than I thought I did.

My review was scathing all round but I reserved particular contempt for the questing:

"The game dumps you at the wrong end of the starter zone and throws a whole lot more lore nonsense at you before offering you the first of what will be a seemingly endless series of the most mundane, trivial quests ever seen in a major MMO... I honestly think I have never seen so many lacklustre quests in one game. Even the dullest of imported F2Ps has more to offer in terms of wit or imagination than this."

All of which makes it quite ironic that I'm writing this up after spending nearly two hours on a random quest I picked up in Meridian, the Defiant capital. A quest I got so wrapped up in that I almost missed my lunch.

It wasn't my plan to start playing Rift again at all, far less start doing extended quest chains on my highest level character. I kind of fell into it. Or was lured.

As I mentioned last time, Rift can be extremely "rewarding". I've played some Rift most days this week but today was the first time I did any actual adventuring. It was the first day I'd had time. Mostly I've been too busy claiming rewards, sorting inventory and setting up hot bars.

On seven characters it takes a while, especially when every single character has twenty-eight "Rewards" waiting to be claimed in the cash shop and half of those rewards open to spill out more rewards that open to spill out more...

I mean, I like free stuff as much as anyone but this is ridiculous.

It would be one thing if it was just a bunch of old tat, like it is in most games, but there's good stuff in here! The highlights were serious upgrades to the main weapons of several characters and the fastest mounts I've ever owned in Rift for all of them.

The massive increase in generosity is just one of the ways Rift isn't quite how I remember it. The game has changed a lot since I last played it properly but all of those changes were completely invalidated by the Prime experiment. I had no chance to evaluate them there. Pete from Dragonchasers has a post up about why retro or progression servers don't work for him and I share a lot of his feelings on the subject.

Classic or re-start servers have a huge appeal, not only because of the crowds and the buzz and the everyone in it together thing but also because the gameplay is so much simpler. It's all kill mob, do quest, gear up, train skill and after twenty years no-one really needs any of that explaining.

Current "Live" servers sag under the accumulated weight of years, even decades of accrued complexity. Nothing is obvious, self-evident or intuitive. It can be daunting, but....

Mature MMORPGs have a plethora of labor-saving devices, everything from fast travel to auto-populating skills. If you're used to those you're going to miss them and even if you're not you're soon going to run up against the reasons they were added to the game in the first place.

I was unaware just how many such short-cuts Rift had taken since I last played on Live until a conversation sparked off in Level 51-59 chat this morning. Someone piped up to say they hadn't played for many years and the hints and tips began to rain down.

Most of the quality of life improvements mentioned were entirely new to me. I had, for example, no idea the game would now call on items in your main bank to complete quests, for example. With inventory space ever at a premium in Rift that's a potential gamechanger, not least because, at some point since I last played, basic vault storage appears to have been doubled, leaving all my characters with a wealth of free bank slots.

Another change is that falling damage has been completely removed. That seems odd, although very welcome. I also happened upon a quest that downlevelled me from 51 to 15 but continued giving me the same amount of xp I would have got at the higher level. That never used to happen. Telara is still as level-gated as always but who knows how many side doors there might be by now?

Sadly, there don't seem to be any very helpful "What's changed since you last played" guides for returning players. Well, there are quite a few but they're all either out of date or relate entirely to end-game, which, reading up on it, would appear to be so different from the Rift I know that they might as well have given it a new name and put it on a separate server.

I admit to being a little impressed by the amount of work Trion must have put in during the last few years. The whole operation seems a lot slicker and more streamlined than the genial shambles I remember from my earlier visits. Pity they went bust doing it.

It's also a shame virtually none of that good work was evident in the rushed and ill-timed Prime experiment. I can't help feeling that, were Rift able to launch as a brand-new MMORPG right now, with all its improvements and polish, it would be hailed as a breath of fresh air in a stale market.

No chance of that. It seems the only way an old MMORPG can get any attention these days is to  dress up in its oldest, drabbest clothes and offer people a bad time. Misery sells, it seems.

And on that theme, I rather think my run on EverQuest II's retro-fitted Kaladim server might be coming to an end, at least for now. At Level 21 the game is managing to put on a surprisingly convincing impression of what I remember things to have been like not so long after launch. There's really not a lot you can do without a group and what you can do solo is excruciatingly dull. Authentic, maybe. Fun? Not so I'm noticing.

Last time I went around this track I got off at around the same junction (Nektulos Forest and Thundering Steppes). I bailed until the Echoes of Faydwer expansion brought Butcherblock into the game, whereupon I managed another dozen levels before the server shut down and my Shadowknight got forcibly transferred to Antonia Bayle.

I foresee the same thing happening again. Neither am I very tempted by the announcement that EverQuest's fastest-ever Progression Server, Selo, will now feature a permanent 50% xp boost. So far I've managed to drag myself to Level Four on both my Bard and on the Druid I made because leveling the Bard was too slow. That was with the previous 50% xp boost...

It's been an interesting few weeks, all the same. I am, at least, beginning to get some glimmerings of what it is I might want, which is more than I had at the start of the year. And I can't help but feel there has to be a better option than anything currently on offer. A combination of the convenience and comfort we've come to expect along with the simplicity and straightforwardness we once had, perhaps. That would be nice.

If anyone finds something like that, don't keep it to yourself, will you?

Right Now And Not Later: Rift

Yesterday I played four MMORPGs: EverQuest, EverQuest II, Guild Wars 2 and... Rift.

It was like this. I wanted something I hadn't played in a while and Rift... well, Rift was just...there.

It wasn't my first choice. I began with the not-so-mysterious alpha I'm under NDA for and can't talk about. It's been a while. They haven't been in touch. I was getting curious to see if anything had changed.

Something must have because when I went to log in there was a forty-five minute update. I let that run while I looked around for something to do in the meantime.

I thought about Lord of the Rings Online but the inevitable inventory hassle put me off. I considered Dragon Nest  but it's closing down in May and anyway I've already downloaded the mobile version, Dragon Nest M, which appears to be pretty much the same game. Might just as well stick with that.

I looked at Villagers and Heroes, which I've also installed on my new Kindle Fire (my phablet died last month. I am so done with of moble devices either breaking down or me breaking them...). I haven't set up an account yet, though and it was getting late. Really, who can be bothered with the admin?

Gazing blankly at the dozens of possibilities on my desktop, I just happened to notice Rift's distinctive pink blush. That reminded me of Wilhelm's recent post on the closure of Rift Prime and I thought "Hey, didn't I have a character there?" Still half an hour before the alpha patched. Why not?

According to Wilhelm, Prime characters all went to the U.S. Trial Server, Reclaimer. Never heard of it and I'd already forgotten the name when I patched up and logged in. I Only know the name now because I just went to TAGN and the official forum post to check.

At character select I saw my regular seven characters on Faeblight. It took me a moment to remember that in Rift you can move your characters from server to server at will, and another moment to remember how. Once I'd figured it out I saw I had two more characters on two other servers so I figured one of them must be my ex-Prime guy.

The first I looked at was a Level Eight Bhami I dimly remember making for some reason. I'm sure I had a reason...  The other was a Level Nineteen Dwarven Cleric. That sounded about right. I very vaguely seemed to recall getting as far as Gloamwood on Prime before I gave up. That would have put me somewhere in the high teens.

I logged the Dwarf in. He was in Sanctum, the Ascended's Capital-in-Exile. There was a festival going on. There were balloons and bunting everywhere. And people. Lots of people. Rift is one of those games that fills every available space with NPCs so it always looks busy but there were plenty of actual players, most of them on bizarre mounts, skittling about in all directions.

I wandered around the festival grounds for a while. Another thing about Rift: it looks much better in game than it does in screenshots. The pictures in the post don't do it anything like justice. Every time I log in I end up gawking. All the colors pop. There's incredible detail. The set design is first-rate. It's a gorgeous world.

There was an NPC ready to send me to a couple of other festival locations way above my level. I took him up on his offer and spent a while wandering around those, gawking some more. I picked up a weekly quest to do fifty festival games. I thought I might do that but then I couldn't find any so fifty seemed like a big ask

After about half an hour I ported back to Sanctum. I noticed I had mail so found a mailbox (old school!) and checked my post. A ton of freebies. Rift is the most ridiculously generous game with handouts. Always has been.

I took most of the stuff which, of course, filled all my available bag space. Should have seen that coming. I found the bank and stuck some of the excess in there. Then, with a whole bag and a half free for loot, I thought I might do some adventuring.

I was going to go to to Gloamwood but it's a long ride on a slow pony. I could have ported but I couldn't remember where the portal was. I'd already looked where I thought it should have been and it wasn't there.

I was checking something else in Options or Systems, one of those, when I happened to notice the button for Instant Adventures. I'd forgotten all about those. We didn't have them on Prime, of course, and it's probably a year or more since I was on a regular server.

The recommended activity was some kind of event related to the current holiday so I took that. I thought it would be the busiest and therefore the fastest to pop. It was fast, alright. Less than ten seconds later I was in a Raid, running around some huge city I didn't recognize, listening to some bombastic, moderately amusing announcer, who reminded me a lot of that annoying jerk in WildStar, only not actually as annoying, while I tried to keep up with a bunch of strangers, most of whom seemed to have no more idea where to go or what to do than I did.

The quests kept popping, the announcer kept yelling, mobs kept dying and the loot kept flowing. So did the XP. It was chaotic, meaningless and disturbingly enjoyable. As gameplay goes it felt like some kind of parody. The Benny Hill theme music might as well have been playing in the background.

I was getting xp and loot before I even found my fellow raiders. When I did I realised I only had two skills on my hotbars, one attack and one heal. Didn't seem to matter. I just spammed those. No-one said anything. No-one cared.

I did a full level in less than half an hour. I was there just long enough to hear the announcer begin to repeat himself as the "Raid" cycled back through the point where I'd come in. It seemed to be on a continual loop. Groundhog Day gaming.

The loot was piling up, mostly in sealed bags, and I wanted to see what I'd got so I bailed. Back in Sanctum I sterted to unbox and soon my inventory was full, again. In thirty minutes the "Raid" had trebled the money I must have made in the previous nineteen levels so I bought another bag slot for my vault, then I did a circuit of Sanctum looking for the auctioneers, found them, bought a bag, went back to the bank and sorted myself out.

Once again, Rift proved to be the most generous of all MMORPGs. Half an hour in that "Raid" netted me not only a full level and a big chunk of cash but also several pets, three or four pieces of cosmetic gear and a load of useful consumables. I could play GW2 for a month and not get a haul like that. Possibly a year.

It was motivating. It shouldn't have been but it was. It made me feel I'd not wasted my time. Odd, because really I had. The event was purposeless. The gameplay required literally no skill at all. It hadn't mattered a jot that I didn't know what any of my abilities did; it made no difference whether I used them or not.

Getting a bunch of stuff you aren't going to use, on a character you don't care about, in a game you don't intend to go on playing, by doing things that take no skill or understanding, should not be satisfying. But it was. And fun. Let's not forget fun. What's more, it made me want to play again. And sort out my characters. Get some of those pets and cosmetics moved to different people, who'd appreciate them.

If I'm not careful I could end up playing Rift again. Probably won't. I might, though...

And I still don't know what happened to my Prime character. That Dwarf can't be him. He was wearing a few things made by one of my other characters (Rift puts the maker's name on crafted gear) and I don't think that would have been allowed on Prime. Which, in turn, begs the question "Who was that Dwarf?"

I think I'll just go log in again. There's a mystery and I ought to get to the bottom of it or they'll revoke my Scooby card.

I never did get around to that alpha, either...

Lost Time Is Not Found Again: Rift Prime

Rift Prime launched last Wednesday, with the traditional log-in queues and lag. Or so I read. I wasn't there. I'd forgotten all about it.

It wasn't until Wilhelm posted the day after that I remembered one of the things I was supposed to do on my week off work was decide whether or not to give Prime a try. I was leaning very strongly towards not bothering until he pointed out that the required Patron status is purchasable with Trion's funny money rather than real cash.

Like Wilhelm, I'm still sitting on a huge pile of credits from the F2P conversion years ago. In what was the most ill-judged purchase of my MMO carreer, I pre-purchased the first Rift expansion, Storm Legion, in the version that came with a full year's subscription. When Trion later decided to drop the sub they gave refunds...in cash shop credits.

That wasn't the ony reason I felt I'd made such a bad decision. There was some odd background to it that I'd like to record here for posterity.

The Background Story

Mrs Bhagpuss and I played Rift for around six months from launch in 2011. We had a good time for a while but only a year later we were already playing GW2.

Although we took to GW2 immediately, at the time the first Rift expansion was announced, GW2 was having huge - really, really huge - problems with bots. Just a couple of months after launch those issues were so pervasive and unavoidable that we discussed our options and decided that, if ArenaNet couldn't get things under control, we'd quit and go play the Rift expansion instead.

So I bought two 12 month packages, which seemed like the best deal. Then we went on holiday to Spain for a week. When we came back ArenaNet had cleaned house. The bots were gone. All of them. It was like magic.

I never heard exactly how ANet did it but overnight they either removed the entire population of bots or made it so we never saw them. In a matter of weeks it went from being the number one issue that threatened to destroy the entire game to something no-one even mentioned. Now the whole episode is utterly forgotten.

So there we were, with a year-long sub to a game with a new expansion and no real desire to play it. When it launched we didn't even log in. We probably never would have, only a friend, who was also in both our GW2 guild and our old Rift guild, left GW2 for Rift so she could build houses with the new Dimensions feature.

Her positive feedback eventually convinced Mrs Bhagpuss to go take a look at the housing there, which happened to co-incide with the F2P conversion in 2013. I went along to try Storm Legion. It was dour and dull. I lasted less than two weeks. Mrs Bhagpuss spent all her free cash shop credits on fixings and furniture, stayed for about a month , then left, never to return.

Since then I have dipped in and out, now and again, on a new F2P account and on my old one with all the perks. I never spent any of my store credits, all 19,290 of them. On Saturday, I logged in and blew a couple of thousand on the shortest period of Patron Status available, two weeks.

Two hours would have been plenty. One, if I could have skipped the tutorial.

The "Review"

Rift always had a terrible problem with its opening act. The tutorial is numbingly tedious, full of technobabble and lore twaddle that makes no sense, plus a lot of shouting and yelling and explosions. It's supposed to create a sense of excitement and urgency but it just makes for an extremely annoying roadblock to the game you came to play.

A few years in Trion added an option to skip the Tutorial but that seems to have been removed for Prime. Unless I missed it. Anyway, I slogged through the tutorial for the umpteenth time, rolling my eyes. I think they might have shortened it a bit. It only took me half an hour.

All the time I was "entertained" by a perpetual stream of moaning, complaining, swearing, boasting and arguing in the default chat channel, which seemed to be set to Level 1-29. To call it disheartening would be a major understatement. It was grim.

There appeared to be a very large number of players with nothing better to do than talk incessantly about what a bad time they were having, how Trion could have done it better or what great things they would do when they got past all the annoying leveling stuff to the Raids they came for. That stream of collective consciousness continued unabated for the entire two hours I played. If anyone who was actually between levels 1 and 29 ever spoke about the content in those zones I must have lost it in the static.

Rift's scene-setting problems don't end when you get out of the tutorial. The game dumps you at the wrong end of the starter zone and throws a whole lot more lore nonsense at you before offering you the first of what will be a seemingly endless series of the most mundane, trivial quests ever seen in a major MMO.

At root, Rift is a very old-school quest-hub theme park MMORPG, extremely closely modeled on WoW but with absolutely none of WoW's elan or imagination. I honestly think I have never seen so many lacklustre quests in one game. Even the dullest of imported F2Ps has more to offer in terms of wit or imagination than this.

That doesn't matter as much as it should because no-one comes to Rift for the questing or the lore or the story. These days they might come for the Raids, I guess, or the Dimensions. Back at launch everyone came for two things: the Rifts and Invasions and the flexible, innovative"Soul" class system.

It always took too long before you found your first Rift or got run over by your first invasion. This time I almost logged off in frustration before - almost an hour and three-quarters after I left character creation - I heard the familiar blast of brass that signals a major invasion.

I'd found a couple of Rifts by then. They were disappointing. I did one with two other people and one in a duo. Both failed. There were scores of players all around but no-one seemed interested. Rifts, apparently, were giving really terrible xp when Prime launched and everyone had immediately learned to avoid them. Trion buffed that xp but from what I was getting it was still very poor.

The invasion, when it came, was better. People did join in to do that and I got a very brief and faint reminder of how exciting it used to be. Even so, there was none of the genuine thrill we used to feel, no hint of players co-ordinating defence or working towards a common end. There were no call-outs in chat, no-one organizing groups, none of the desperate racing from Rift to Rift to close them down before the event failed.

By the time the Invasion ended I was just shy of Level 8. I finished a couple of quests to ding just out of a sense of tidiness. Then I logged out. I haven't logged in again.

For me, the lure of Rift in those first few months was always the Rifts and Invasions. For as long as the community was focused on those, taking them seriously and responding to them enthusiastically, I remained involved and committed.

As the months passed, Trion made numerous changes to both Invasions and Rifts that made them less appealing, less exciting, less essential. By the time we had Raids and Crafting Rifts and PvP Rifts and Lures the whole point of the exercise had been lost, for me anyway.

ArenaNet took the concept that Trion had borrowed and expanded from Public Quests in Warhammer Online and blew it up into an entire gaming eco-system with GW2. Going back to Rift now, even a highly populated Rift Prime with actual Rifts and Invasions is like going back to watching television on a 12" B&W portable when you're used to a 48" plasma screen.

I still would play Rift again, if the game could guarantee a steady stream of those zone-wide Invasions along with a population of players ready and willing to do battle with them. And that might happen - for a while - in the mid/end-game zones, Iron Pine Peaks, Shimmersands and Stillmoor. I'd love to see that but I'm not going to grind through forty levels of brain-sappingly boring quests to get there.

Whether Rift Prime will be a commercial success for Trion the way Progression servers have been for SOE/DBG I very much doubt. Rift simply doesn't have the depth or breadth of content of either of the EverQuest games, nor the nostalgia factor. Trion, as Brasse's comment on this Massively OP thread confirms, are well aware that interest in Prime may not be sustained.

Mine certainly wasn't. I might log in again before my two weeks Patron access expires. I won't be buying any more. Not even with credits.

P.S. For a much more detailed and considered review, try this at Endgame Viable. It wasn't up when I wrote my post or I'd have worked it in!

Be Careful What You Wish For : Rift

 "...I'll take a Rift Classic server, please. I really miss those Sunday afternoons in Stillmoor."

Me - at the start of the week

 "In the Spring of 2018, we will launch a new server, RIFT Prime...We plan to present RIFT at its roots as much as is possible to do."

 Rift Producer's Letter - three days later

Thanks, Trion! I think.... 

Although I guess no-one should really be surprised at anything Trion does any more, this move does seem to have taken most people unawares. The MassivelyOP thread cuts the company a little slack but posts at Bio Break and TAGN take a more skeptical position, one which I share and then some.

The immediate assumption appears to be that Rift is getting some form of "Progression" server of the kind long-established, now perfected, first by SOE and latterly by Daybreak, for the EverQuest franchise. As yet there's not a whole lot of detailed information on how this might work and what there is does little to encourage any expectations of a true progression server, far less anything that could reasonably considered a return to the Golden Age of Rift as we knew it.

It took SOE/DBG many years to iron the wrinkles out of the Progression concept. Reverting a long-running MMORPG to the status quo ante turns out to be a major undertaking that requires the diversion of considerable time and resources, as Blizzard are no doubt very well aware. Practical considerations mean that even with the best of intentions some infrastructure changes just can't be rolled back. The final result is an approximation, a reminder, of how things used to be, not an archival reconstruction.

That doesn't appear to be an issue for Trion because they don't seem to be interested in taking the time, trouble or expense even to get within hailing distance of the authentic 2011 Rift experience. The Producer's letter makes that abundantly clear to anyone whose rose-tinted glasses haven't steamed up entirely with excitement.

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that the new server will both be time-limited and set on fast-forward ("The PRIME server will progress at a faster pace than the original launch and will eventually come to an end in spectacular fashion") there remains a much bigger roadblock to any fleeting sense of authenticity: "Many upcoming live content changes that apply to existing servers will also apply to the new PRIME server".

Added to that there's some not-so-nostalgic fiddling under the hood in the planning stage, with the Prime server "dynamically matching characters to their current zone’s level [and] dungeons dropping loot specific to your character’s true level". It's clear from the outset that the goal is not to create any kind of long-term home for players longing for the Olden Days, the way Blizzard plans to do for WoW Vanillaheads and Jagex already did for Runescape purists.

In addition to the aforementioned preset demise of the server, almost inevitably there's also the incentive of "participation awards that carry over to your characters on existing servers." I think that makes it clear that the target audience is existing Rift players out on a jolly.

On closer examination, what this appears to be is a version of another of SOE/DBG's popular and successful money-making tropes, the Limited Time Event Server. Trion did float this balloon sometime last year, in the relatively downbeat Producer's Letter of March 2017. There the talk was of bringing the "challenge" back to Rift with a series of special ruleset servers, possibly beginning with a Hard Mode version.

That went out to consultation and Rift Prime would appear to be the first practical result, its style and direction taking cues form the forum discussions that followed the original announcement. Trion, in their inimitable fashion, have managed to spin a year's worth of complaints about lockboxes, aggressive cash shops and other similarly unpopular business practices as "suggestions on how to make the business model more appealing".

Apparently that means no lockboxes, "a significantly reduced store" and a non-optional subscription. Pardon me for not being impressed. Or grateful.

The one significant, positive effect this announcement has had on me is to make me re-consider my nostalgia for the game. I loved Rift in beta and I liked it a lot at launch but when I take a step back and look at the overall experience more analytically I have to admit that it was a short love affair that came to an unpleasant end.

My time in Rift overlapped the beginning of this blog and it's easy to see my growing impatience and disillusionment in posts like this one from December 2011, some nine months after launch. Soon after that I went back to playing EQ2, then the GW2 beta weekends started, the The Secret World filled a gap before GW2's official launch and by summer 2012 I was a full-time resident of Tyria. 

In February 2012 Trion made the first 20 levels free with Rift-Lite and I enjoyed a fair amount of casual, drop-in low-level play when the whim took me. When they announced the first expansion, Storm Legion, for November 2012, I made the big mistake of buying two copies, lured in by its deal of a year's subscription bundled in. At that point GW2 was suffering considerable issues with bots and we were uncertain whether we would hang around much longer. The expectation was that that Mrs Bhagpuss and I would make a triumphant return to Rift and our short run in GW2 would be at an end. 

Instead, ANet banished the bots, Tyria felt clean again and Storm Legion turned out to be dour and dull. I think I played for about a week and Mrs Bhagpuss for maybe a day or two. In nearly twenty years those two copies of Storm Legion are the MMO purchases I most regret. I consider the $150 we spent on Landmark alpha access to be far, far better value.

After that I soured on Rift. I still dropped in and out once in a while in desultory fashion but neither of us played again until the game went free-to-play. At that point Mrs Bhagpuss had a brief fling with Dimensions until she'd spent all the free currency we got as ex-subscribers whose subs still had months to run.

It's a patchy history at best. I had very good times in beta, a good run after launch and a few odd moments after that. If I'm analytical about it, the main thing I really enjoyed were the Invasions and some of the Rifts. I liked the questing in a few of the original zones and I enjoyed the crafting to a degree. I liked some of the PvP and I also always found Telon to be a visually rewarding world to explore.

The actual gameplay, however, was always labored and clunky and crucially I never developed a close-enough affinity for any of my characters, although some of them had their moments. Leveling was grindy, especially on the second or third character and from Ember Isle onwards that grind became unbearable. Apart from those addictive and occasionally thrilling afternoons in Stillmoor, there's not an awful lot for me to be nostalgic about.

All of which, ironically, means that if anything induces me to give Rift Prime a try it will be the extent to which the experience doesn't accurately replicate the original. I would positively welcome faster leveling, better loot, less grind and the ability to vary the journey (via zone or level matching) from the very limited options available back at launch. When I stop to think about it, it very much appears I never wanted a "Classic" server after all.

Then there's the question of whether I want to pay a subscription for the privilege of playing (most probably in a half-assed, half-interested fashion) through content I've already played through several times already (much of which wasn't that great to begin with). I guess that will depend on what else I'm doing when it arrives and how much spare time I have on hand. Also on whether Mrs Bhagpuss is interested, which I'm willing to bet she won't be. She doesn't really do nostalgia.

One thing I never did first time round, which might justify subbing for a month or two, was dungeons. I saw a couple, briefly, but almost everything I know about them comes from the stories Wilhelm told about his adventures there with the instance group. That might be a diversion worth a few dollars.

Then again, I really feel like I've already given Trion more money than I want to. Last time didn't turn out well at all and there's such a thing as learning from your mistakes.

Anyway, there's no need to make any decisions yet. That time will come when Trion post some hard details, I guess. I'm not holding my breath.