After two zones of relative peace, level 30 brings me into the first shared zone of the game, and as I’m playing on a PvP server, this has some interesting dynamics to it. This won’t be a complete review of world PvP in Rift, as I’ve just begun to experience it, but already I’ve seen a few things that I consider worthwhile discussion pieces.

One highlight happened recently during an invasion event. As I approached the location of the final boss, I noticed my side (Guardians) standing on one end, the boss in the middle, and Defiant players on the other. The area around the boss was a deathzone of AoE damage, and while most players focused on the boss, the occasional side skirmish would break out. Once the boss went down, an awkward second passed (people collecting loot no doubt), and then both sides rushed each other and a massive brawl broke out.

The above is a good example of a PvE event driving some world PvP naturally. The event collects players into raid groups to fight off NPC attacks and ultimately brings them to one location to fight a boss. At other times I’ve seen either the Guardians or Defiant dominate in terms of numbers, and that side attempts to control the boss to give themselves the highest possible contribution level. As the bosses get more complex and deadly, I’m sure they will factor in more and more during these engagements. Even at level 30 the boss was dropping players left and right, and throwing out some solid AoE damage at whoever drew his attention.

While questing, it can be both a blessing and a curse to play on a PvP server, which is basically how PvP usually goes. It can be a blessing because the occasion run-in breaks up your PvE and gives the zone a little kick of danger. Having a good 1v1 against another player gets your blood rushing, and in the right situation things can snowball into a zone-wide battle.

It can be a curse because you might get ganked right before you were just about to complete a quest you wanted to knock out before logging for the night. Getting punted off a ledge while waiting for your group to gather for an instance might be humors at times, but irritating at others.

One issue I’ve also noticed is that due to how frequent graveyards are, and the downtime required to recover, it’s not unusual for an enemy player to return to the spot of his death before you have even had a chance to fully recover, and this can lead to a lot of, ultimately pointless, back and forth fights. If PvP death incurred a rez timer, or some other minor penalty, this would not be as big an issue.

Finally, as is usually the case in a themepark primarily designed for PvE, there is a lack of purpose behind world PvP right now. Clearing the enemy off a boss or taking over a capture point are nice bonuses, but they are not good enough to really drive PvP. The good news is that thanks to the solid base Rift has, some good PvP server rules could be implemented to push world PvP to the next level. We will see if Trion puts in the time/effort to do so. The guard change in beta was a good first step.

Whether all of this is more positive or negative for you really comes down to whether or not you enjoy the concept of world PvP in an MMO. PvP is never going to be all great all the time, if for no other reason than someone has to lose, but for me personally the highs you get outweigh the lows. If they don’t for you, there are plenty of PvE servers available.