Rift Addon Ideas

I am a big fan of AddOns, and I loved the WoW AddOn system. Not just using them, but creating them as well. As a programmer it was a piece of cake to learn it. 

Rift has a similar system. My only problem that it is also based on Lua, which is a language that I've never grown to like, even after using it for a while. 

Still, as I am now playing Rift, I wanted to look into AddOn creation a bit, and come up with one or two ideas. 

At this moment it is exactly two:

The first one is an inverse shopping list: You can drag&drop items to a "bin", and when you interact with a shopping window, it opens the - sorted - list, and gives you a button to sell all. This is basically an extension of the already existing [Sell greys] button. A lot of additional functionality could be included in this one, such as an actual shopping list with items that you need to buy from time to time, etc. But sadly, it can not be done with the current Rift API, because it doesn't allow you to interact with shops. Probably a thing to come. 

The second one, on the other hand, seems to be perfectly viable: A raiding/grouping minimap, that shows the players/pets/enemies from a top down view. There is just one problem with that: I am lazy, and as I do not group often, I don't see a reason to create it. (nor have the actual knowledge to make it really useful)

But that is not the end of it. I have a few other half formed ideas in my head, some of them might actually come true. I'll give you an update then.

Ninjas and Dragons

I have a game idea in my head for a few days now. It's basically a mobile based tactical team game, similar to Laser Squad or the UFO games, with Ninjas, Dragons, and individual character advancement system for the team members. I wouldn't say that it is in a shape to start development already; at the moment it's more like a bunch of disconnected ideas without a consistent big picture.
All I have now is just some concept art that I was sketching up while I was attending a conference call. Here is one of those.. enjoy.

Ninja doing what ninjas do best.

Heritage

The first game focused blog I was participating in was created by one of my friends back in 2007. We started to write it together, dumping a lot of unrelated ideas about how MMOs could be made better. To date, we have created 357 post about a lot of different topics including quests, client 2 client data replication, instancing, rendering, etc. etc. 

The last post was created at 19/08/2010 by him, and it is about abilities, which in his opinion should be weapon based instead of class based. 

A short time later, he died. 

Now I am sitting on this heap of ideas. That blog was always private to us, so I can actually say that most of what is written there is now only known by me. 

I'd like to honour his memory with publishing it, but all of the content is in Hungarian, thus it would be pretty much meaningless. On the other hand, I don't have the time and energy to translate it. 

All of these ideas are just sitting there now, fading away, getting less and less relevant as the time passes. I can't tell how sad thinking of this makes me. 

Rage Sub

So, after a lot of thought, and seeing that a lot of people around me decided to resub for Vanguard, I made the same decision, and logged in to SOE to renew my sub.

It is a wonderful thing to play Vanguard again.. I'm pretty sure. The only problem is that I couldn't actually pay for the sub, because - as I learned the next day - my bank simply declined the request. This is not the first time I have issues with online payment, and one of the reasons why I pay with paypal whenever I can. But that is not possible with SOE. So, what did I do then? Rage subbed to Rift. 

I know, after trashing Rift so much, it seems to be a strange decision. But, of all the possible choices, that is the one that seems to be the best.. or the least bad. Rift, as Syp pointed out last week, is a great choice if you don't need much immersion. For me, Rift offers some fun now, but if we need to break up - when Vanguard goes F2P or when GW2 is out - there will be no tears. We can stay friends, even spend a night together here and there, but we both know that it was not meant to last. 

Anyway, this rage decision was the right one, I believe. I enjoy my evenings in Telara, I even found a guild yesterday, so it's fun. I take it very lightly, spend a lot of time with exploration and similar stuff. And PvP of course, as I just explained the other day. Should you come across Malakka@Steampike, that is me. 

Nice and shiny.. explosions

I was never a big fan of PvP, until Rift. For some reason, I started going to Warfronts in Rift, and started to enjoy it a lot. 

At that time, I was mainly playing with a rogue, and a very specific one for that - a saboteur. What you need to know about the saboteur is that they have two main kinds of attacks: bombs and charges. Bombs are usually AOE attacks with some special effects - ie. stunning, rooting, etc - and charges are small personal bombs that you can apply from a range, and later detonate all of them at once with a separate skill. There are a lot of different charges, some will simply damage the opponent, while others may stun or cause bleeding. There are two things which make charges somewhat special: you have very good control over the timing and a lot of them has area effect around the target. 

Now, coming from a different angle, what you often see on a battlefield in Warfronts is a group of players standing very close to each other, trying to defend something. If you can find a sniping spot, and can apply 5 charges on an opponent, you can literally win the battle. Imagine the whole group getting dazed at once, for 2 seconds. The best is to use them in combinations though: Stunning combined with some bleeding, or similar. 

There is yet another thing that makes the saboteur invaluable on Warfronts: The ability to lay traps. They require some preliminary work, but again, there are a few different kinds of them, and they mostly have AOE effects, so if you get in a situation with the saboteur when you are part of the above mentioned defending team, you can at least hinder or damage the incoming enemies, which may help your group to survive for longer.