For some expanded reviews and more information I will point out the blogs I have checked out the most.

Player Versus Developer - http://playervsdeveloper.blogspot.com/

Epic Slant - http://www.epicslant.com/

Psynister’s - http://psynister.wordpress.com/

Currently I am having many Grass is Greener moments as I level my characters in Rift.  My highest level character is my Mage at level 20.  Next is my warrior at level 14.  I don’t want to just spout off about how great the dynamic world is with the Rift events.   All I will say at this point is Cataclysm raised the bar on questing and how to integrate story with what you are doing while leveling.  Rift raised the bar on how to have a dynamic world that rewards players for working together to get something done with out the artificial guild/instance/raid mechanics we have all become so use to.  There are other ways of doing things and honestly Trion has set a new baseline on what is to be expected at launch of an MMO.

The fatalist in me says that there is no way that World of Warcraft will be able keep up, and honestly it does not need to.  The thing that I hope Blizzard is taking notes on is for their unnamed MMO for when it launches in 2+ years.  Trion and Rift has done to the MMO market what WoW did when in launched.  Rift is much more an evolutionary MMO to all of it’s predecessors as WoW was to EQ.  The other attempts by WAR, AoC, Aion, and several others the past few years all failed to live up to their potential because they set their sights on WoW and did not just perfect their own game.

After I have had more played time and hopefully there are some reference DBs created on the web for stuff in Rift I will start to write some more in-depth comparisons between the games and give my opinion on where both could improve or make it more interesting/fun.

Also I will most likely be changing the theme of this site to coincide with my more in depth focus on WoW and Rift.  I have played other MMOs: EVE and LotRO mostly and they have not begun to grab my attention like Rift has and WoW did when I first started playing.

Anyway I was looking at the spirit beasts and saw one labeled as Ghostcrawler, a Ghost Deep Sea Crab named after our favorite lead system designer.  My current hunter already has a pet I changed the name to Ghostcrawler and it is a similar model to the one used on the forums.  I hope the new forums have GC updated to his new elite form.

Anyway nothing really important here just something I had not heard about earlier that I wanted to bring to light.  I and I am sure others will be hunter for the new spirit pet.  I find it hilarious to read the combat log in pvp when I have my GC crab pet out and see GC hits SoAndSo for X.  I just LOL.

1. Mouse Over Button -> Key Press -> Auto Binding Mode
2. Movable Default UI Bars

Ultimately the functionality that I am referring to here can be provided by Dominos or Bartender 4 addons. I have used something like them for years and I know of many other players that use them. Not a complete replacement like NuUI and some other compilations but never the less just a couple of very useful mods to let you arrange your bars how you want them.

Really all that needs to be done is to turn off the default UI bar frame graphic and then make the different sets of button bars movable actually exactly like Bartender4 does it. Now even though these 2 mods allow you to customize each bar into a bar of X by Y rows and columns I would just be happing with the ability to move the default 5/6 bars currently showing and be able to break bars 1-6 out of the paging system that the default UI has.

Like some of the “new” features added in WotLK, the Equipment Manager, the ability to preview talent specs before committing, and the entire quest tracking system this would be a very basic enhancement to the default ui to make it a little more customizable without having to resort to a replacement mod.

The other advantage would be that the Vehicle bars would not randomly break on release of a new patch due to a conflict with one of the custom bar mods. We would not have to use custom bars if the default ones were configurable, and I mean more than just Show/Hide.

Well enough of a rant for now. Nothing major to mention but the new Guild UI got me thinking of other aspects of the default UI that could use some attention. One that the users have had to make their own mods to fix.

So what have I been up too in the mean time.  In no particular order.

• Playing Star Craft 2, Beta – hopefully more on this soon or later.
• Playing EVE Online again, the lure of planetary exploration/exploitation in the next expansion was enough to get me back in until the expansion.  How the systems actually work will determine whether I stick around.
• Leveling more Alts, yes this time they are Horde though.  I want to get through the starting areas of each race which I essentially have now and get through Outlands and Northrend quests/lore before Cataclysm.  There is the 45-60 part of the horde questing I have not done yet either and will need to get at least 1 character through that section.
• Got a new computer so can run dual monitors and 2 WoW clients at 30FPS+ in Dalaran with graphics setting at max.  It looks like a new game.  Like I went from Warcraft to Warcraft 2 or 2->3.  But with this beast I also will be able to run one client and have a development studio open while restarting a second client without wanting to stab my eyes out at the lag.  So I may slowly get into mod development or at least making patches to my own mods when they generate errors.  If something interesting develops out of this, here is where I would post initial information.

Well that brings us to the present.  I hope to have a few short posts “soon” lol.

Anyway this was just a quick FYI post.

They are asking for opinions about using the 5M+ US WoW players as a voting block to influence politics.  Now I must admit I have discussed similar thoughts with friends in the past.  But when it comes down to it, if you think herding raiders, like cats is a fun or an easy thing, then think about trying to organize 5 million into a somewhat cohesive unit.

On a slightly different note, it would be amusing and actually might be an improvement to our current political discourse in this country if shouting from both sides of the spectrum were to be like the WoW general forums.  This of course would then degenerate into Barrens Chat but even then I still think Chuck Norris jokes and stuff about someone’s mother may be preferable to the insipidness of what is going on inside the belt way.

As for a more informative and constructive post I may add to this at a later point however for now I think this may be a little too charged of a subject to really get into.  The generalizations that need to be made to just initially classify the dynamics would be enough to set people off.  Besides, I argue politics with another blogger enough at home that I don’t need to get into it here.

The other post I have been working on and off for over a week now deals with travel time.  I was brought to the subject by reading thoughts on the subject on the blog, Player Versus Developer.  Specifically the June 24th post about Teleporting to Quest Hubs.  What has taken so much time was that I have been working on creating a directed graph of travel in World of Warcraft.  I know that even when finished I will be missing some of the edges that exsist.  I am very familiar with all of the alliance travel and most of the Horde pre-BC.  I have been using www.mapwow.com however some of the labels and flight paths are out of date.  It is wierd because they have Northrend from WotLK but they don’t have Mudsprocket from one of the content patches in tBC.  Anyway I hope to have the initial overview of crafting systems up some time in the next day or so and have the travel post for the weekend.

The first few topics I plan on posting about over the next few weeks are the following.  

Raid ID and Instances (Mostly WoW)

AH and Market Systems 

The point of a Crafting System

Time and Rewards

Raids Guilds and Alliances

Some of these may evolve into a mix of the different topics and become multi-part posts just due to the scope of the subject matter.