I'm only two boxing it to test it out, but I'm having a lot of fun. They've taken the WoW formula and improved on a lot of the more annoying things.

Collection quests drop for the whole,sometimes. If you have to pick something up off the ground, it's first come first served. If you have to kill something and loot it, everyone can get the drop. This really speeds things up.

As far as I can tell, you click on everything on every character. The RIFT developers seem very concerned with automation of any kind. I can't find an auotloot option. I can't find a cast sequence for macros. They seem to have intentionally left those out to avoid the WoW gliders. You can chain abilities on macros, as long as they have cool downs, but my casters have 3 instant spells and only the first one will fire.

I haven't played around with focus, but there is a decent macro system for naming characters, following them, assisting them, and playing around with focus targets, target of targets, etcetera.

I'm only level 16 on two necros atm. So I haven't done much with addons (if there are any yet) or anything like that. I just found the auction house last night.

What really amazes me is two things (That WoW has screwed up): first, you have amazing freedom to play around with a base class. My necros can be healers or nukers or pet based classes. So I don't feel a need to level alts. In WoW I liked mages and I liked Warlocks, so I had to level both. The second thing they got right was group quests and group events. I actually got sucked into a much longer gaming session that I had planned, because my somewhat boring quests kept getting interrupted by invasions and rifts. I found myself in a raid of 30 people chasing massive encounter after massive encounter and leveling quite fast. This was all in the 11-15 level range.

It really blows my mind how much WoW has become a solo play game, with the phasing and punishments for leveling groups. Collection quests are a great example of how RIFT encourages group play and WoW punishes it.

I am a little concerned about the devs fighting automation. I won't five box because the game doesn't seem designed for that. I know they posted that it is okay, but I have a feeling it will be more like Sony's version of boxing instead of Blizzard's. Should that happen, I have two machine and the hardware to share keyboard and mouse without any software.

This is lame, but the game is young and I want to see how things play out. I really liked Star Wars Galaxies for the first two months of game play, before the development team completely destroyed it. So I'm overly cautious at the moment, waiting to see what happens.