I posted this on page 4 of a Ghostcrawler thread, but after I did so, looked at it and thought it might be of use to people in the Rift forum, so included it here as well.

Rift becomes F2P on the 12th. I started playing it about a month ago and am very much enjoying it. The leveling experience is amazingly good compared to WoW. I started out on one team of five doing quests up to level 18 or so. Much like WoW, there are a number of collection quests that are pretty annoying. Rift has IWT, so getting or completing quests isn't too bad, but leveling was similar in speed to WoW.


Then I discovered Instant Adventures. They are glorious and a huge innovation over anything I saw in WoW. Once you party (or raid) up, your whole team is instantly teleported somewhere in the world and automatically given a quest like kill 30 spiders. You join other people doing the quest as well, then have a ton of people all working on the same goal. When it is done, you automatically get quest reward experience and get a new quest. The army of folks mounts up, runs a short distance, then starts on the next quest. No obtaining quests, no turning them in, no choosing quest rewards, all of that is automatic and you can continually focus on completing quest objectives. You automatically get class and level appropriate quest rewards in your bags.


The exp is better than regular questing, the quest variety is plentiful, you get to work with others, you get to see the world of Rift, which was all brand new to me - what's not to like?


Anyway, once I figured that out, I quickly got another five boxes and started ten boxing - very little additional effort to level ten instead of five. My teams are now over level 40 and I'm having a great time. I have fiund Rift very similar to WoW but more fun and free.