Server Selection
Anytime you start a new MMO, your first choice is going to be the server. In Warcraft, you had a very wide selection of servers with varying auction house prices, different faction balances, and of course selection of guilds depending on your server and faction. In Rift, it's a little bit different.
You're going to see your standard list of servers with some PvE servers, one PvP server, and one RP server. Servers are known as "shards" in Rift. The shard populations are pretty stable and aren't horribly imbalanced.
In Rift, with patch 1.10 Calm Before the Storm, Trion revisted how factions were viewed and decided that the red versus blue mentallity was not for Rift. They then decided that Defiants and Guardians were going to mix better. So they introduced the "Faction as Fiction" concept. You can read the official notes on the link above, the general idea though is you can group up, be in guilds with, trade, and even marry members of any faction.
On top of the cross faction gameplay, Trion introduced another feature that ties the shards together. In Rift there is a built in feature that allows you to visit other shards in game without even logging out. Just two clicks and a quick loading screen and you're back in the action on a different server.
That being said, there is still one feature that is unique to each shard. That is going to be your auction house. Even if you are visiting another shard, the auction house you visit there will be the one on your shard, not the one belonging to that shard. The only way to bypass this is to either level an alt or transfer shards. There is a free shard transfer option that is built into Rift at the character select screen. Just keep in mind it is on a 7 day cool down period per character. So you would have to wait 7 days before you can transfer that character again, however that beats a $25 fee for an automated process.
