Day 2 On Rift Rogue

So I’m on day 2 of leveling and I’m getting close to Level 40. Leveling a rogue has proven to be 100x easier than leveling a warrior. I’m sure the veteran elixirs are a big part of this. I have been leveling a pretty different path from last time. Last time I decided to level as a Defiant Warrior and 100% skipped the Droughtlands zone (due to lack of lead in quests being available).

I think one of the funnier things about my character is with the Earth/Fire event helmet on and a gun my character looks insanely like a desert person from Star Wars.

This time around I’ve decided to level as a Guardian Rogue. This essentially means I’m seeing the other half of the lore and quests. But I’m also seeing a little more. As per last time I’m only doing quests which I get a lead to. So I haven’t hit up the north yet and if there is no lead there, I’m not doing them. This time there was a lead in to Droughtlands. The Guardian lead in is similar to the Defiant lead in to the Highlands. Other than that I find myself killing faeries instead of coyotes and golems instead of goblins.

The Guardian side seems to be a little better organized than the Defiant side and far easier to get places and do things. The Defiants just seemed too scattered. This may be in part to designing the Guardians first approaching from the East to North and then trying to jigsaw in the Defiants.

So maybe today I’ll rant about breadcrumbs.

Breadcrumbs vs Leads

A modern MMO requires two types of quests, breadcrumbs and leads.

But what is a breadcrumb?

A breadcrumb is a quest that you will pick off of a fallen mob and will direct you to do something. It is referred to as a “breadcrumb” because the item will often lead you on a “breadcrumb path” to turn in this quest.

But what is a lead?

A lead quest comes from a neutral of friendly NPC and gives you a specific direction to head to find a location.

Leads and breadcrumbs have distinct purposes and come from a fundamentally different game designing.

Breadcrumbs find their design in the oldest of the oldest MMOs. Originally the purpose of the MMO was to run around and kill enemies. A person was given a set of stats that almost infinitely went up and people sort of just created their own fun. The purpose of the quest at this time was to give you some basic lore and a tutorial to the game. The quests were horribly ineffectual as far as experience goes so people just killed mobs as they went. Once World of Warcraft introduced instanced dungeons people started just grinding dungeons instead.

The goal of the breadcrumb was to convince a person to stop killing random mobs and instead try and do some quests. At this time quests were not linked well together. A person had to know where all of the quest ‘hubs’ were and there weren’t a lot of quests period. So the breadcrumbs were a way for people to pile through mobs and orientate their way towards doing some quests. It was somewhat of a way to give killing the mobs some meaning. You can roleplay you are a hunter out in the woods killing boars for hours and finally collect a breadcrumb quest after hours.

The breadcrumb quest was a way to try and convert the old school MMO players into the ‘new’ MMO player.

The lead is a different concept. The idea behind the lead is to bring a player from one massive groupings of quests to another. There are only so many mobs you can kill in an area so eventually it makes sense that you will have to leave that area. The lead first presumes that there will be a tonne of quests at that given location to do. In this way a good game will have a connection via leads for the entire game.

Some games (World of Warcraft) attempted to mix in breadcrumbs and leads together whereas the breadcrumbs would act to unlock quests. The breadcrumbs in this instance offer you ‘bonus’ quests for randomly finding an item off of a mob. Generally speaking the less breadcrumbs there are in an MMO the more finished of a product it is.

Rift’s breadcrumbs act in the oldest way, to try and convert people who are grinding into doing quests. However, the game is so linked that more often breadcrumbs are just free XP.