I played Rift for a while when it first came out, and was pretty impressed with Trion. They did a nice job with the game in terms of keeping me interested, which is always difficult when a game first launches. I found myself running for the events whenever I saw one pop up, and spent many a session doing nothing much else. Lots of fun the way you were auto-joined to a group just by running over to an event (assuming there were others there, which there always were in the lower level zones).
I even found myself actively looking to engage in open world PvP, which I have never really done in any other game (I was not on a PvP shard, and don't even remember if they had them). I also remember one night finding myself in a group at an event when along came another group and a couple of them started up, and I had a great time (I cannot recall the classes but I was playing a character that was able to heal pretty well and do some decent dps) in that fight, wound up running around the zone with the group I was in looking for other fights, and even chased someone down across nearly the entire zone who jumped me and then ran when he couldn't kill me right away.
And then something happened and I lost interest in the game.
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"the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
Hermann Goering, April 1946.