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Enter At Your Own Rift: The first day FAQ
You've watched the trailers, downloaded the podcasts, scoured the forums, and sold your soul for a VIP key. Tomorrow, your patient wait is over, and the RIFT head-start officially begins. As you stock up on Red Bull and Mountain Dew and fight off the shakes during your server queue wait, you might have a few questions about what your first moments in RIFT will be like. For this week's Enter At Your Own Rift, we'll take a look at a few common questions that players might have. Are you wondering about how to form a guild? Have you already made a soul build that you regret and want to reset? Are you lost trying to find an auctioneer or a mount merchant? Read on for some answers!
The Queue: Alex talks mostly about RIFT due to lack of anything better
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. Oh, Monday. I hate you. Not because I have to go back to work, no. I already work on the weekends, so what's the difference? No, I hate Monday because there are no questions to answer in The Queue after the weekend, and you're all quite tired of reading me complain about it! Today will have a couple of brief WoW questions, and then I'm going to talk about RIFT because some of you were curious about the game and that's what I spent my weekend playing. Many of you asked: Is patch 4.0.6 releasing this week?
Fight in the Planar Wars with RIFT's sixth closed beta event
In what might prove to be a very open move, Trion Worlds has been giving players the chance to test out its upcoming fantasy MMO RIFT. There have been five beta events for the game so far, each of which has run for several days and given players access to new areas, classes and game mechanics. The fifth beta event lasted just four days, but in that time over 2.4 million man-hours of play time were logged. With each event drawing in more players than the last, Trion is gearing up for its sixth event. The Planar Wars event begins at 10:00 a.m. PST on February 4th and will run until the same time on February 7th. In this new RIFT beta event, dangerous planar rifts will open up across the land and the elemental planes will spill forth into Telara. Players will have to work together to seal the planar rifts and collect planar loot. As an added incentive for players to work together, anyone who completes an objective set by Trion will be entered into a prize draw to win one of 10 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 graphics cards. Head over to the official beta signup page for a chance to get into this event and any future events, or pre-order RIFT to get into the beta immediately.
The Soapbox: Game "journalism" is not journalism (yet)
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. Hey folks, welcome back to the Soapbox. Before I get started, let me add a personal disclaimer onto the Massively disclaimer you just read: I don't hate game devs. On the contrary, I hold a couple of them in pretty high esteem. What does annoy me is the way that most of them get a free pass when it comes to tough questions. Another thing that sticks in my craw is the way readers sometimes confuse journalism with game journalism. The two aren't often the same thing, and in fact the latter term is a complete misnomer. So, when you throw together my disdain for PR-soaked reporting and my facepalming at any mention of the phrase "game journalism," you end up with this week's Soapbox. In it, I'd like to take a crack at educating the folks who erroneously refer to both me and other game bloggers as "journalists." To do so, I'll spend some time examining "game journalism," and I'll start by defining journalism itself. Then we can look at how applicable the term is to the current landscape of MMO-centric media (and really, game media in general). Merriam-Webster defines journalism as "the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media." So far, so good, right? Well, look deeper. A more thoughtful, thorough, and instructional definition is provided by the folks at Journalism.org. Rather than quote the entire nine-point synopsis here on my front page, I'll highlight what I consider to be the second most important principle of journalism (the first obviously being truth). Not coincidentally, this principle is one that game "journalism" utterly fails to uphold on a daily basis: "[Journalism's] practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover."
MMO Roundup: Last week on Massively
Sometimes you'd like to know that there are other MMOs out there, right? It's not all WoW, all the time! Our sister site Massively can provide you with everything you need to know about all of the other MMOs around -- past, present and future. GamersFirst's predictions for the video games industry in 2011 While end-of-the-year predictions are quite commonplace amongst game industry bloggers and journalists, it's a bit rarer to see prognostications coming from game-makers and executives. GamersFirst bucks that trend with a press release outlining its forecast for online gaming in 2011. Unsurprisingly, the free-to-play publisher sees its preferred business model "taking over the video game market," as well as a massive shift to mobile gaming and digital distribution. 25 free MMOs for that shiny new laptop Were you graced with a new laptop this holiday season? Are you looking to take a few new MMOs for a spin? Massively's Beau Hindman has compiled a list of 25 free-to-play MMOs that your laptop will be perfectly capable of playing, even if it wasn't built with gaming in mind. 5 MMOs that have gone MIA Unlike Chuck Norris, who seems to hang on as an MMO meme with insane tenacity (perhaps it's that extra fist under his beard), there are a handful of MMOs that appear to have dropped off the radar in the last several months -- if not years. Find out which highly anticipated franchises simply disappeared.
RIFT announces the second beta event
If you got to take part in the closed beta event for RIFT over the weekend... well, don't tell us about it. Seriously, don't; it breaks the NDA to even say you're taking part. But if you enjoyed it, you'll get another shot at playing the game sooner rather than later. The second closed beta event has just been announced to run between 10 a.m. PST on December 17th to 10 a.m. PST on December 20th. For the second testing phase, titled "Guardians of the Vigil," players will be testing the first 20 levels of the game, presumably on the Guardian side. Reborn as ascended souls of the Vigil, players are tasked with stopping the tyrant Aedraxis, although we suspect many players will mostly be focused on whatever cool tricks their characters can do with another 10 levels. RIFT is still allowing players to sign up for the beta, so if you're interested in the second beta, you might be well-advised to give it a shot. Not that you could tell anyone about it.
UPDATED: Get the full Rift beta experience with our VIP beta key giveaway!
There's been a lot of talk among MMO fans anticipating Trion's upcoming Rift MMO. (That's right, it's just Rift now, rather than Rift: Planes of Telara.) We know that the Rift developers have several beta events planned, and there are a couple of different types of keys available. One type gives you a chance to participate in each event, and the other -- the much more desirable VIP beta key -- gives you guaranteed access to every event. Lucky for you, dear readers, we at Massively have gotten our hands on 500 VIP keys and we're in a sharing mood! Closed beta is set to begin on December 3rd, but you can grab a key now to make sure you don't miss out on anything. Simply click the pretty green button below to claim your key! [UPDATE: Whoa! those were gone in record time! Congratulations to those of you who nabbed one!] Get your Rift VIP beta key now! > >
