I finally got around to customizing my Runes of Magic UI this past weekend. Curse.com has a section for it and already the addons are flowing in. Anyone who has used them in WoW or other MMOs will recognize many of the features the addons give and tweak.

Apart from UI modifications, I also got my character into the mid-20′s, joined a guild and did a bit of grouping. One thing that is excellent about the game is the community, higher level players are often around in the lowbie zones to assist in difficult quests or to answer questions. Grouping is generally easy to do, though the group content tends to be deadly difficult. (very, very deadly) Given the dual-class system you can typically find players of any type in abundance, this leads to a general ‘bring whoever wants to come’ kind of grouping. I like the style so far, will have to see how it changes later in game.

The guilds in RoM have levels, the levels determine the number of members allowed and some guild content. From what I’ve seen I think most of the guild content is still in the works, they’ve got a level cap set at 5 currently. Leveling a guild is accomplished through the members donating different types of resources — gold, ore, wood, herbs — to fill a type of quota needed to move up. There seems to be an option for guild versus guild PvP — not sure if it’s actually enabled yet, I havn’t seen or heard of any wars going on. Guild halls will also be available at some point. (the npc is in-game for the GH, it’s either the level cap or lack of GH content right now) I’m waiting to see more on guilds in the future — it has the potential to be a very fun part of the game.

Lastly, I’ve done a lot of crafting too. Crafting is quite the grind in RoM, harvesting especially. The items you can make, apart from the rares, are generally not as good as the dropped loot — so I don’t see it being highly profitable. Arcane Transmutation is a — I’d consider it crafting, at least — very fun feature, allowing some really nice customization and buffing to equipment. Using charges that can be bought with in-game tokens — farmed from dailies — or bought off the cash shop, the AT takes runes, jewels and other items and allows the player to remove stats from some pieces and mix them with others. (that was a pretty simple and generalised explanation, you can use fusion stones with pieces of equipment to turn them into mana stones, and mana stones can be combined with another piece of equipment to give it extra stats — to a total of 6 different stats) While costly, I suspect I’ll be doing a lot of transmuting in the future, especially for equipment I can give to alts.