Twinking in Rift

My last post covered the topic across the MMO genre and this one will focus on the state of twinking in Rift since it’s the game I’m playing now and I sort off twink there as well. As usual the pvp forum is flooded with discussions about twinking. But to be honest I don’t see it as a problem in Rift. 

As written in my last post the term twinking is rather broad covering everything between extremely well geared people who 2 shots everything as well as an excuse for getting one’s ass kicked by better players. Even though Rift gives you the possibility to lock your XP it still doesn’t allow people to 2 shot people like twinks did in wow. Trion has prevented players from using max lvl enchants on low lvl gear and made it easier to obtain good low lvl gear (compared to wow, at least before blizzard made it easier as well). So even though twinks exist in Rift they are nowhere near as unfair as twinks were in wow.

Sure, twinks will still have an advantage which seems unfair, but since gear is a vital part of this game as well as plenty other MMOs, there’s nothing wrong with it. Only when it gets to the extremes! People who are against twinking are often calling us for lamers who can’t fight without a gear advantage and I have heard someone say something like “Twinks should get to lvl 50 so I can show them how it is to fight overgeared players”. This argument (if we can even call it that) is simply just the words of a hypocrite, the worst of them. So it’s ok for r40 people to faceroll fresh 50’s but when a lvl X0 gets beaten by a X9 it’s suddenly unfair, pathetic. And too be honest the gap seems to be bigger at lvl 50.

Twinky winkie

The everlasting discussion for and against twinks have caught my attention at the Rift forums, so I figured out it would be time to bring my blog back in business and cover this subject. I will make a miniseries of posts about it covering both my opinion and how to deal with it in Rift. In the long run you will notice that I’m both for and against Twinking and it can vary a lot from game to game. But first let’s have a look at the definition.

What is twinking?

The term “twink” has a loose definition. It is used for everything from heavily overgeared characters that has massive amount of HP and can 1-2 shot everyone else to a bad excuse when getting outplayed by someone who happens to be higher lvl or better geared. The term itself is covering 2 different things, and that’s where we got the problem. Let’s not forget that gearing is a vital part of MMOs like Rift, WOW and SWTOR so in most scenarios one side will always have that as advantage unless the game itself has mechanics to balance it out.