Rift - Dungeon Lovers Rejoice

With Gamescon taking place right now in Germany, Trion has been pretty active releasing a couple articles or videos each day. IGN shared their hands-on experience at Gamescon. At the end of that article they stated that the developers' ultimate goal was to have enough dungeons that the player could reach maximum level by running each dungeon once. Either leveling is really fast or that's a heck of a lot of dungeons.

The videos coming out have been short teasers. The dungeon mentioned in the IGN article was Realm of the Fae, where you experience the four seasons as you progress through it. And it will be something we can experience early on, as it's a lower level dungeon. Rumors are that beta will begin in September. It's seriously getting harder for me to wait for Rift to release.

Forum Popularity = Beta Invite

I've never been a fan of forums that utilize a reputation system. People vote up those that represent their view point and vote down the opposing view. It's just never made any sense to me to even have this "feature". So it's just been something that I pretend isn't there. But that's been hard to do lately over on the Rift forums since the topic seems to work its way into the majority of posts.

A couple weeks ago the CM announced that forum reputation would be one of the things they would look at when choosing beta participants. What a huge mistake that was. Groups started forming exchanging private messages to vote for each others' posts. Some members admitted to creating multiple accounts in order to vote for their own posts. Members who were voted down were posting the names of those who had done so in retaliation. Those who found themselves at the bottom of the reputation list hurried to fill the forums with their idea of "thoughtful" posts, hoping to regain some favor with the forum posters.

Recently, one fellow posted a suggestion that all the released Rift information be consolidated in one spot on the forums so it is easier to find. Currently, if you want to find the latest information on Rift, you have to do some digging on your own to visit fan sites, listen to podcasts, etc. Now if the reputation system weren't in place, I expect the forum thread would have had more normal responses to that post. Instead, hoping to gain forum favor with the fansite people and the CM responsible for posting forum info, members insulted the fellow, called him a troll for disparaging all the hard work they'd done. It's like some high school reality show over there. What a mess.

For any interested, the CM has also started a thread for you to post why you should be in beta. I'm not a fan of publicly selling myself so will likely be sitting this beta out unless I get invited through some other means. *crosses fingers*

To end on a more positive note, have you guys seen this Guild Wars 2 video? Wow, just wow. This is really looking and sounding amazing.

News from SOE Fan Faire

As most were expecting, the next EQ2 expansion will be Destiny of Velious and releases February 8. I'm crossing my fingers it's not a bunch of snowy islands high up in the sky with some sort of snowdrift-type hover board transport. The expansion will include EQ2's first flying mounts.

The EQ1 expansion releases in October and includes player housing!! Woohoo! Not that I'm playing, but maybe I'll have a look. :)

And they released some concept art for EverQuest Next, which you can find here.

DC Universe Online releases November 2. Not something I have an interest in personally. Just not into the comic books. But pre-ordering supposedly gets you a lot of free goodies.