So, I was tempted to log back into Rift when I returned home after a weekend away. Reading about Rift Prime reminds me of enjoying the game, enough to prompt me to log back in again, at least for a poke around on my Cleric main. The problem with the Rift Prime idea is that I’m not played out on this main, I have plenty still to do on him, that makes restarting again from scratch pretty tough for me to swallow. It’s not impossible I’ll give in to the lure of nostalgia; unlike Everquest 2’s nostalgia servers, I actually played Rift at launch and therefore have some pretty strong emotional ties to starter zones full of new adventurers.
Ah, Meridien and Freemarch…
But that would be time spent away from other characters like my Cleric, and other games, and it appears that the character will lack permanence. According to the FAQ, the character will be able to transfer to a different server after the Prime server closes, but I imagine it will be relatively poorly equipped and probably, knowing my slow leveling pace, not even level-capped. The Prime server ruleset means no mount or other account level rewards – that’s pretty harsh, having no mount at all these days isn’t something I look forward to in any game.
Don’t take my ghost horse away!
Still, I logged back in and with no active quests in my character’s log (bar conquest ones), and no memory of where I might have left things off, I did the obvious and easy thing to do – I joined an Intrepid Adventure. My character teleported within seconds into Hammerknell and I spent the next 30-40 racking up experience pretty handily by charging around with a small raid group of random players. All worked well, was easy enough to be low-stress, yet required just a modicum of coordination. It is just the kind of work-out activity that helps you to re-awaken the muscle memories of class abilities and rotations.
So, I have a double dilemma. Do I return to Rift to try out Rift Prime? Do I return to Rift to actually get on with leveling my Cleric instead? So far there’s only one Rift Prime server in North America so the play experience for an EU based player might not be that great (lag-wise or time-zone activity levels-wise). It might be worth me at least holding out to hear if a EU Prime server will be created…
GamingSF 
I’m just about to do a post on this. I wasn’t going to try Prime but then Wilhelm pointed out you can get patron status with the cash shop currency, of which I have a ton from the F2P conversion. So I bought two weeks, the smallest you can get.
I think two hours would have been enough. It was busy enough (I wouldn’t worry about EU hours on an NA server) but it completely lacked the buzz of the original. I had the strong feeling that everyone just wanted to rush through as fast as possible and get to the end. I don’t see this having anything like the community feel Rift had for the first few months after launch.
That said, if you alread have Patron status it can’t hurt to pop in and take a look for yourself. I can’t imagine that you won’t end up preferring to oncentrate on your “real” characters, though.
I checked out the cash shop currency and yes, I have enough for at least a month if not two. I do want to see just what the early zone experience is like, for good or bad. It’s so sad how Rift suffers from the lack of players in other zones. Good that they added Instant/Intrepid Adventures as a work-around too, but still the outdoor zone events were the best the game ever had to offer. On a side note there’s obviously a lot of synchronicity in blogging at the moment, I was about to post on “my inventory is always full in all the game” when you did your recent post on the same topic 😉
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