I played rift when it first came out. and too be honest it is the best MMO i have played to date. I am going to give GW2 a try but if that fails i want to come back to rift. But one problem i had was the grinding for the Planar essence and stuff, it seemed like you had to do a TON to be viable but we were also going for shard firsts when dragonblight was the raid to be in.