I’ve had an on-again/off-again relationship with Rift.  I played in the beta, and loved it.  I picked up the game.  I got a few WoW guildmates to come with me and we set up a sister guild in Rift.

All was good for about, oh, a month.  Then people got bored and went back to WoW.  Eventually, I did too.  And when that happened – after damn near the same thing happening with Aion – I swore that I would never get sucked into a new MMO again.

Well, from time to time Trion offers ‘free play weekends’ to try to get some of us old players back.  They had scheduled another one from January 19th through the 22nd, so I decided to make sure I knew my password and had the Rift authenticator working, and – surprise – it wasn’t.

I contacted Trion support, and they fixed me up.  They fixed me up good.  Not only did they correct my problem with the authenticator, but they also give me seventeen days of game time.  Seventeen.

What else was I going to do?  I couldn’t ignore seventeen days of free game time.  So I decided to really give it another shot.

And I love it.  I really do.

My primary problems with the game before was that I didn’t have anyone to hang out with/rp with – and I didn’t understand things like how their crafting systems worked, or their item enchantment systems.  So this time – I went out looking for a decent rp-based guild, and found one on Faeblight.  It may not be very busy, but there always seems to be someone on, and that alone makes a big difference.  It’s nice to be able to ask a question and actually get a response, without having to go to /trade or /general.

As much as I want to get Star Wars and be a Jedi and be awesome and kill Ewoks and shit, I’m actually having fun in Rift again.  And that may push back jumping into Star Wars by at least a few months now – which could be a good thing.  By then, my friends that play Star Wars will have decided whether to leave or not – and maybe the cost for the game will have dropped to something sane (like 19.99, instead of 59.99).