Sooo.... what's up?

Yup, I've realised I haven't been really updating (much) on my dreadful life as an RA/Masters student (I'm not even sure what I'm doing right now... like seriously~ no idea.), so here's a couple of stuff that I've been up to; that have been occupying a lot of my time and brain power (lol~).

Firstly, well, I've been 'massively' gaming. What games? Oh you know... those casual tower defense games with superb graphics (but may be boring gameplay - I'm not guaranteeing anything :P) like prime world defenders or Don't Starve or Expeditions Conquistadors (Check out my review here).

However, since last... um I think it's Friday, I've found out that Rift (My second fav MMORPG, the first being WoW :P) is free-to-play!!! I was extremely jubilant. I've played Rift before but only on a trial basis and I love the rift part (well, that's why it's called Rift, isn't it?) of the game - helps burn off the boredom of levelling :P Okay well, I've been gaming for hmm... a few days now (starting from Sat coz I had to redownload the client and patch it on Friday night and I didn't exactly had enough time to play - I need my sleep! lol.) and I'm proud to say I've hit level 45 with 200+ skill points on all 5 professions (still need to catch up on my fishing though - it's the most boring profession so far, but I like to read the chat while waiting for the fish to eat the bait. I gotta say chat is very interesting to watch... with all the Hodor spams or WoW is the first MMORPG or the WoW vs Rift vs other MMORPG and recently the gold selling spam haha :P For example, someone said, 'What is Game of Thrones? - A TV series... I'll bet George is killing himself right now.' Hahaha. 

And well, comparing with my experience at a private WoW server, Rift has considerably less bugs (only found 2 quest bugs in dungeons, but all the quests out of dungeons are doable - but some may be really really hard - like trying to solo the Droughtlands's elite group quests and gave up after I died like the umpteenth time... I mean like seriously, I'm wearing MAIL armour and the mob just cuts through it like butter... they probably will one-shot cloth/leather wearers lol).

Okay, despite the free-to-play + all features available gimmick, if you played until you reached the main capital city, you'll quickly realise the 'all features' are not at all 'all features'. It's a HUGE disappointment. 

One of the major feature that they made it 'at least 1-month subscribers only' is auctioning stuff at the Auction House (AH). Come on! Damn it. They had to go and make that pay-to-use - one of my fav parts of any MMORPG. Now, I had loads of crafted pots and rare loot sitting in the mail of my alt mage with no real way of selling them (except spamming on Trade channel which no one uses :\). For a new F2P Rift player, that's a real let-down. 

Oh and then there are the random crashes and lag spikes (not my internet's problem btw, these are all client/server side). Next one is that you can only create a maximum of 2 characters per shard (server). Now I can't even make alts to store my excessive hoard of sellable items? Gosh! Oh and not to mention, you only get like 3 bag slots and the other 5 you'll need to use real money to buy them or that the max and reasonably-buyable bag has a bag space of only 16. Sigh. Guess I'm too used to WoW or RO2 lol - both have obtainable bags with larger bag space. 

I think I'll just finish levelling my Cleric then swap over to a new shard for a defiant rogue then I'm off Rift (again) perhaps for good. It's just ridiculous to stay there when the stuff that I need (AH, AH, AH!! sigh~ unless I spend like 1800++ plat for REX to get loyalty to use the AH and plat (in-game currency) is not easy to get... I'm currently sitting on ~52 plat. Even at my pretty-high level, I'm still getting only gold from quests and mobs.)

Hmm, well, Rift is a major time-sink but I'm also doing my main project at the moment and I'm not looking at good results... so yeah, I'm kinda sad and depressed and then I'll probably hop over to Rift to play some more and to ignore my hopeless project.... sigh.

Oh well, enough of self-raging, self-indulgence and self-pitying. Despite everything, I MUST finish my project and graduate ASAP. The rest can come after.

I'm out.