I Survived The Rift Head Start Launch...

... and all I got was this turtle.

Ancient Tartagon Turtle Mount

Okay, so it is a very nice turtle.  I don't have a better picture because I didn't find a mailbox to claim my Digital Collector's Edition mount until I was just about to log out for the night.  But yes, I finally played an MMORPG on day 1.  Or maybe even day -5, depending on how you count a head start period.

I found just a few things to comment on.  The first is that Trion doubled the number of U.S. servers, from 17 to 35 (as of 7am Chicago time today).  When I attempted to log in around 9pm Chicago time, all but 5 servers were listed as full.  Any thought of trying to hook up with any of the bloggers I read when completely out of my head as I just wanted to play.  The advantage I may have is that I'm pretty sure I am on a server with no pre-existing community or guilds.  The disadvantage I may have is that I'm pretty sure I am on a server with no pre-existing community or guilds.  I'll have to see how that plays out.

My second thought is that for now, I have to believe the RIFT dev team would really like to limit the number of characters per account to 6.  I still don't have an answer to the number of characters I can have, but I was too busy playing the game to search last night.  But limiting the number of charaters would probably reduce the number of servers that would need to be opened, and with the flood of people just coming into the pre-launch I have to believe the RIFT team is doing everything in their power to limit the number of servers.  Why?  Because after the initial surge and people stop playing after the first month, having a huge number of shards with low populations would be, to use a technical term, a "bad thing".

The third impression I had was that the game, at least on the Alsbeth shard I played on, performed as well if not better for me compared to my experience in beta.  I ran into no bugs and was able to play on the default image settings, which in my opinion are pretty good.  Of course, I only reached level 7 and haven't done a rift yet, but I was impressed.

Another thought is that I just don't like the look of the male characters in RIFT.  I don't think I'm the only one.  Darren on the Common Sense Gamer is actually going to roll up a female rogue.  About the only male character I would roll is a dwarf, which may be my next character.  Hey, I've never played a dwarven cleric before.  Now that's shocking.

My final thought is I still need to do some research.  My first character is a Bard/Riftwalker/Nightblade.  I know I want to specialize in my bard soul, but I'm just not sure what to do with the other two classes.  And as a rogue, I know I want my crafting professions to be apothecary, butchering and foraging because I figure that somewhere down the road I'll be using a lot of poison and in every game I play, I prefer to craft my dps instead of buying it from someone else.  But what about macros?  Emotes?  Is runecrafting worth dropping a gathering profession?  How many characters can I have anyway?  And most importantly of all, how do I take a screen shot of my turtle?  I have a lot to learn about this game, but since I took advantage of the founders pricing, I have at least 6 months to search for the answers.