Don't listen to these fools, my uncle works at Nintendo, you just have to save Aeris and defeat Shen Long to unlock the NPC.

Yeah, a couple people I know basically killed the game for themselves by playing too many characters at once. Ended up going through Belsavis multiple times in a row and just burned out before even getting one to 50.

I don't know about balancing Huttball, but that smuggler ability to hide behind your teammate sounds hilarious so they should do it anyway.

The class missions are definitely the most important ones. My BH is level 26 and she's done nothing but story missions, instances and PvP so far. I guess you could try ignoring them after you get your ship, but I think it'll stop a lot of the side missions from opening up too. It also gates your companion conversations. And who knows if Makeb or some other future content will require you to have finished your story? The good news is that with a Shadow you can stealth through missions very quickly and there are relatively few story missions overall.

I promise you it exists, because I came to this forum looking for a fix. Never happened to me before today, and today it happened three times. Sometimes I don't feel like tanking, so today I selected "Damage" on my guardian. In the chat window it said "Your group role is now set to: Damage." I double checked that tanking was not toggled on. Group finder window pops, I'm the tank. I sighed and respeced because I accepted it before I noticed it. It also happened on my sorcerer. I queued only as damage and it gave me heals, twice. I don't know what the bug is but it definitely happens.

I liked Vector! Temple is blandy mc blanderson and Kaliyo is... just no. I also got a flirt option for SCORPIO, which is horrifying. I'd way rather have Vector.

Male Rattataki has to be one of the least chosen race/gender combinations. I can't recall... ever having seen one, actually.

That's kinda awesome. I wonder what the hardest thing you can do with a full group of people punching and kicking would be (you'd have to allow healers of course). Could you get through SM ops?

Seriously, just avoid clicking on the [Flirt] options. It is possible that a gay person will flirt with you IN REAL LIFE someday. Think of this as picking up a valuable survival skill so that your head doesn't explode if it happens (although I would go for "flattered, but not interested" instead of "I will choke you with my magical force powers" in real life personally).

I LOVE the last fight in Directive 7. It's chaotic and awesome fighting an entire room.

The name's Rowsdower. Zapf Rowsdower.

I can't see rated Voidstar being anything but laughable either way. With a couple people prancing around pillars and pacing out their deaths I don't see a way the attackers can get a plant. Maybe I'm wrong but the only time I see people getting the first door is when they are either incredibly overmatched or the other team just isn't paying attention. I agree on the client synching though. Way too often the character's model on my screen and their actual location are in different spots. It's frustrating as hell to position perfectly for a knockback into a pit and they go flying towards your goal line, or when you're dancing around avoiding a knockback and suddenly you're flying at a 90 degree angle because they were actually beside you when it looked like they were in front of you.

The five man content in Rift is anemic, the raids are okay -- they seem to be releasing one major raid every six months. The "events", invasions, instant adventure... honestly that stuff was more boring to me than anything I've ever done in an MMO. It's a straight up currency grind with a palette swap each month where you're competing with a hundred other people to tag a mob for credit before it's vaporized. Your contribution doesn't even mean anything.

I'm pretty sure snipers and marauders are the only classes with inc healing and accuracy debuffs? Marauder has amazing panic buttons and some nice group DPS/move speed buffs, sniper has a lot of control, built-in defense, cannot be charged, 20% AE damage reduction, 15 seconds out of 45 not being able to be CCed in any manner... When I DPS on my other classes their bag of tricks feels a lot smaller. Tanks get taunt and healers get cure I guess.

In a modern MMO like Rift, you can change servers instantly on demand without any GM interaction, the only real limit being that some servers are closed because they are full, and you can only do it once per week to throttle the transfers a bit. GW2 is letting you log your characters on as guests to other servers in some capacity. WoW charges because it can or perhaps because its server architecture isn't up to snuff, but new MMOs are competing with the new standard.