I think the ad fits perfectly. Finished Beta 4 of Rift and can say that it is definitely polished...still needs a layer of wax. But it's ready for the March 1st release date.
The soul system (aka classes) is an interesting design. Pick the major class (Cleric, Warrior, Rogue, or Mage) and from there pick 3 sub classes (souls). Like for Warrior there's Riftblade, Reaver, Champion, Paladin, Warlord, Void Knight (class still being added to the website) and Paragon. Each soul has strengths and weaknesses.
For example:
The paladin has great melee defense (+block talent, +armor talent) but sucks verse magic.
The Void Knight has strong abilities against magic (mana drain talent, etc)
The Warlord has talents that upon being hit will reduce the targets physical damage, as well as, +armor talents
Couple a Paladin/Void/Warlord together and you get a pretty awesome tank
So, Rift is sort of like WoW (pre-Battlegrounds), Neverwinter Nights, and Final Fantasy (Random Encounters) all rolled into one game. In fact, the only thing going against this game is that people are still getting that "It's a WoW Killer"-mentality, which as we've seen leads to games failing because they didn't meet the expectations of the players right out of the box; WoW wasn't polished and 11million subs strong as release people!
Only issue that's really present in the game right now is the lack of AA, but I don't know about you but I'd rather have the game stable than have smooth edges at release. After reading some posts this may be purposely disabled during beta and activated upon release
As for the ad. I think it's nice to see a company actually poking fun of WoW directly. I don't recall AoC, Warhammer, STO, or LoTRO mentioning anything WoW-related in their ads. It's like they all tried to say "we're not like 'that game' ", but in the end tried to do everything to make themselves like it.
In regards to the company name...eh, I've seen worse *cough*Funcom*cough*. And just looking up "Trion" yields a lot of results; wonder if the name means something to the people at "Trion Worlds". Oh well, can't judge a game by the company's name
*PS: Try for the beta, there's suppose to be one starting January 22nd. There's also the last one sometime in February
@Mercy...what does my WoW server have to do with Rift?? O.o
If you must know I play on Arthas...and by play I mean login check AH guild chat for 20min then log....1 month into Cataclysm and I'm already bored; gg Blizzard, gg