Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Best Of
Re: Why make everything so punishing??
It's almost as if Ashes is designed around having a high sense of risk vs reward more so than it is designed to be fun.
Seems as if someone forgot the notion that risk vs reward *can* (as in, not always) make a fun thing more fun. If the activity isn't fun, risk vs reward makes it even more not fun.
In order for a game with a high sense of risk vs reward to be successful, the core gameplay loops of that game (combat, gathering, crafting) need to be exceptional examples of their type. They need to objectively be the best of the best, not just average.
Seems as if someone forgot the notion that risk vs reward *can* (as in, not always) make a fun thing more fun. If the activity isn't fun, risk vs reward makes it even more not fun.
In order for a game with a high sense of risk vs reward to be successful, the core gameplay loops of that game (combat, gathering, crafting) need to be exceptional examples of their type. They need to objectively be the best of the best, not just average.
Noaani
5
Re: Cost to buy from NPC vendors is far less than cost to craft.
honestly vendors should only buy crap, and sell a few basic crafting mats and rations. they should not sell any gear.. and to make crafters even more important i also think gear should not fall from mobs.. only crafting mats should ( not like copper ingots or bear hide for example, but their emblems and such yes.) this keeps crafters relevant at all stages of game play. named bosses dropping completed items seems ok
Kicker69
1
Re: Why The Game Needs Fast Travel
exploring the world is interesting up to a point. When you learn everything, and this will happen quite soon, you will perform actions automatically. ignoring the environment. I played in others, no one reads the quests, no one looks around. no one cares. and this is a big problem. on the other hand, there is no fast movement - this is +. since you can kill players with resources, taking their loot
Re: Why The Game Needs Fast Travel
I know it's been said that the game will not have point-to=point fast travel.
However, I feel like this is a mistake. The points of not having fast travel are o encourage world exploration and open world PvP. Given that there are PvP areas, large scale wars, and a node spawn system that is dynamic, these reasons are already covered. We will have plenty of reason to go exploring the world.
There's simply no point in making us take 20 minutes or more just to cross the map. This is further exacerbated by all the different leveling areas being very spread out and not having any kind of combined storage. If you add in the fact that the map is nowhere near completed, and you'll have players spending the bulk of their time just to get from point A to point B.
Case in point was making a group for Oakenhold tonight. We invited a cleric who was in the upper left of the map - it literally took him 25 minutes just to get over to us. That's a lot of wasting 7 other peoples' time.
At the very least, we need what EverQuest had - classes with the ability to create portals and gates to other locations. Druids and Wizards both had the ability to travel around, and at later levels they could do so for groups.
Many of your players are going to be people with limited time. We're going to want to spend the time we have doing what we want to do, not auto running and staring at your mount's backside.
So, please, consider throwing us a bone or two here.
Disagree completely. You seem to want to do everything, all the time, quickly. What about the entire idea of an adventure? Needing to travel to a far away land and explore. You will have plenty of things to do but dont expect instant gratifications, we have plenty of those games, we dont need another.
The idea of AoC is that you wont be travelling from the top of the map to bottom every day. That will be a journey days if not weeks in the making. And its good, we will get living breathing world with literally empires on opposite sides of the map.
NO FAST TRAVEL.
Fast travel doesn't exclude the notion of exploration.
In fact, in most games, it requires exploration. If you can't fast travel unless you have been to the location, exploration is mandatory. In this situation, all fast travel is doing is removing the monotony of needing to travel along the same road all the time.umm I would argue the complete opposite is true, this is why something like ESO forces you to travel the zones by collecting those POIs is part of leveling your character.
Not to mention the easier you make it to move around the map the worse off your economy is, games like NW and FFXIV have this problem where all your mats are either dirt cheap or super expensive cause everyone's just able to jump on the ones everyone wants or farm the hell out of basic stuff.
Collecting POIs serves zero purpose if you have no way to return to them except hopping on your horse. It’s not like the area doesn’t show up on your map. There’s no fog of war or anything similar. I can see Oakenbane Keep on my level 6 mage despite never going down into that area. Going there for the Emberspring serves little purpose as well, since you automatically have the nearest Emberspring as a respawn point if you die.
Further, again, dynamic spawns prevent the economy from worsening. There aren’t going to be set spawn points. I would argue that without fast travel people are more likely to farm the hell out of basic stuff. What am I gonna do with my time - ride 30 minutes and farm a small inventory’s worth of mats and ride back or ride around Winstead and farm ash and oak, basalt and granite? Most people are gonna farm ash and oak, basalt and granite.
Sidebar while I’m at it - we have nowhere near the amount of inventory and storage space we need when every type of material has 5 different rarities.Fast travel is shit in an MMO like Ashes for more reasons than just not allowing you to explore the world.
One such reason is Ashes has a heavy emphasis on open-world PvP, which naturally means there will be "zerg" guilds.
However, no fast travel fucks over zerg guilds. Lets say your guild plans a caravan run or an attack in a certain part of the map, and the zerg guild is spread around the map doing their own thing. With fast travel, they just fast travel to the nearest point to you in 2 minutes and fuck you over with no counterplay. Without fast travel, now they have to travel literal hours to all converge from around the map, by which point you've likely done whatever it is you planned to do. Ashes map is currently around 8% of the intended final size, and it already takes a fair few minutes to travel across the singular biome. Add in the Ocean and the other dozen+ zones, and you have huge map with no fast travel that fucks over those zergs.
So.. you’re telling me it’s better for people to be unable to participate in content? That’s not a winning formula for any game I’ve ever heard of.
There are much easier ways to prevent zergs, such as limiting the number of participants for given events. This is 2025, not 1999. Plus, even if you take EQ’s mentioned method of a few classes having teleport capabilities, it’d still take a fair amount of time to coordinate getting everyone to the point of conflict.
That only 8% of the map is currently complete and we’re already taking this long to travel does not bode well. Players want to be able to spend their time doing what’s fun to them. Running around on your horse for hours on end is not going to fly. That’s simple fact.
This is, again, especially true when leveling areas are very spread out. We don’t have all the 5-10 leveling areas in the same spots on the map.
Plus, Ashes is going to run on group content. Playing solo for most classes is difficult, and you’re not going to be able to kill starred enemies anywhere your level. It is therefore in the best interest of the game to facilitate ways for people to group up, get to the same location, and get to killing.
I love the non-instanced aspect of this game, and the 8 person groups, and the support classes. It reminds me very much of EQ’s early days. But Ashes is going to need to modernize at least some aspects of the game if they expect to retain players, and when you have MMOs coming up on 30 years old doing something essential better than you do, you’ve got to address that.
This is 2025 and not 1990. Great point! Notice how the MMORPG genre is on its deathbed for the last 20 years. Do you not see the correlation? Stupid point.
The MMO genre is not on its death bed.
The PvP focused MMORPG sub genre kind of is though.
The MMO genre is on its death bed since social networks appeared.
People used to play to communicate and interact. is no longer relevant now. only competition and pvp save
Re: Why make everything so punishing??
I am wondering why they make it so punishing during testing phases? The idea is to get players to test all of the systems and areas. If you make the game unattractive, you lose testers. The current system is way to boring to have such a lengthy leveling requirement for a game that kind of wants to test a lot of the systems at max level.
I enjoy RvR. I would love to engage in the RvR system but I do not want to go through the Wall Of killing 10's of thousands of mobs just to reach the point where the game might be a lot of fun. The scary part of this is that 25 is not even the level cap.
I enjoy RvR. I would love to engage in the RvR system but I do not want to go through the Wall Of killing 10's of thousands of mobs just to reach the point where the game might be a lot of fun. The scary part of this is that 25 is not even the level cap.
Mahes
3
Re: Why make everything so punishing??
If you make the game unattractive, you lose testers.
Well it's attractive to a lot of people. I'm a fairly casual player and it's not "too" punishing at all. And i'm a tank.
tashka
3
Re: Weekly Feedback Request - 02/27/2025
Alpha Two Phase II Feedback
Top 3-5 Most Important Bugs:
1- Testing the Final Features
2-Crafting & Economy Testing Still Incomplete
3-Armor, Stats, and Gameplay Balance Issues
4-Weapon branches feel uninspired
everyone can use everything, and spell variety is minimal. No class or build truly stands out.
If new weapons are just being added for aesthetic purposes, without major customization options, then the feature lacks meaningful depth.
Final Thoughts
I know my feedback may seem harsh, but I am speaking both in your interest as developers and in ours as players. May 1st is approaching fast, and I have already seen my guild lose most of its members due to these issues—just as the servers themselves have been emptying.
I worry that Phase 3 will face the same fate:
Top 3-5 Most Important Bugs:
- 1- Mounts still freezing.
- 2 -Characters losing their hair when changing head models.
- 3- Mobs still capable of one-shotting players despite high-level gear (level 20+ with mitigation-enhancing jewelry). I'm receiving 9k critical hits while having over 5k HP in leather armor.
1- Testing the Final Features
- It's time to start testing the final features. Comparing the roadmap and the promises made about the game, I feel like I'm not playing the same game that was initially described. Since Alpha 2 Phase 2 launched on December 20, very few features have been introduced. While I acknowledge that the desert area has seen significant progress, the rest feels underwhelming.
- The vassalization system, for instance, has been pushed to Phase 3. In its final version, the game’s regions aren't supposed to have all nodes occupied—there should be a hierarchical system with a main city, vassal nodes, and upgraded POIs. This system is going to require significant balancing work. Looking at the Riverlands, for example, at a level 4 node, only one level 3 node would evolve, meaning that out of 5 nodes, only 2 will grow, while others remain at level 1 or 2.
- This raises important questions: Which zones will develop? Which will be abandoned? Is this system truly viable for launch? If it won't be ready for Phase 3, it will cause issues, especially when dealing with the player rush. Such a system can only be properly tested under high server population conditions, which are necessary to evaluate its limits and advantages.
2-Crafting & Economy Testing Still Incomplete
- Phase 2 was supposed to focus on economy and crafting, yet we have seen very little of it. Instead, crafting feels long, tedious, and incomplete—there are no true professions in place. How are we supposed to test and give feedback on a system that is barely functional?
- Resource gathering is inconsistent—animals rarely drop materials, and crafting level 10-20 armor is excessively difficult. According to your vision, players should be progressing through level brackets by crafting their own gear, but currently, this does not work at all.
3-Armor, Stats, and Gameplay Balance Issues
- The "glass cannon" meta is too dominant. Armor stats feel random and unbalanced, rather than being part of a well-thought-out system. This shouldn’t require constant adjustments and reworks—it should have a solid foundation from the start.
- A major update is scheduled for late March, yet many core Alpha 2 features remain unaddressed:
- The +1 enchantment system is a complete disaster in its current state, turning the game into "One-Shot Land." Once again, this feature was implemented without proper testing, and now that we see how broken it is, it remains unchanged instead of being reworked or removed for redesign.
- The core issue is that DPS classes benefit from +1 to all offensive and defensive stats, but the stat scaling is completely flawed.
For example, a +1 to Strength, Dexterity, etc., also grants +1 to armor, which is completely incoherent. - This results in fights where whoever attacks first wins, leading to tanks with 5k+ HP getting instantly one-shot.
- Yes, this is an Alpha, but basic stat balance is pure math—this should have been properly designed before implementation, not treated as a balancing issue after the fact.
- This lack of systemic balance is further compounded by stacking effects:
- +1 enchantment bonuses
- DPS weapon stat lines
- Armor color variations
- Upcoming passive stat revisions
- All these layered buffs create an overloaded system that simply doesn’t work, when in reality, the game is much more enjoyable when gear is balanced without all these excessive bonuses.
4-Weapon branches feel uninspired
everyone can use everything, and spell variety is minimal. No class or build truly stands out.
If new weapons are just being added for aesthetic purposes, without major customization options, then the feature lacks meaningful depth.
Final Thoughts
I know my feedback may seem harsh, but I am speaking both in your interest as developers and in ours as players. May 1st is approaching fast, and I have already seen my guild lose most of its members due to these issues—just as the servers themselves have been emptying.
I worry that Phase 3 will face the same fate:
- A server wipe with a fresh start,
- Yet no essential systems fully implemented,
- Leading to growing imbalances and a rapid decline in player retention.
Imanek
2
Re: Why make everything so punishing??
I tend to agree, the other issue is, even with it being exhaustingly punishing, none of the systems are even fun, like straight up deleting 25% of resources on death could be removed as it's extremely rare you will ever make it back to your corpse to loot it anyway
Add to that the XP debt you get from death, no idea what it's adding to the game.
Shabooey
2
Re: Suggestion: Looking For Group
Vyra in P1 fought back against the newcoming toxic players. Several guilds on the server immediately came together to show that the server is not about shitty behavior and pointless toxicity.but Ashes will 'always' have that problem where the 'calmer' servers can be disrupted rapidly by the 'hostile' player subgroup, because Intrepid intentionally doesn't give us any tools to deal with that.
And sometimes, the basic nature of the game goes against it. I think this is one of those times.
Now, obviously this was on a relatively small scale, compared to what we might get on release, but I still think that the game does let us address this issue. And will only give us more tools once pvp systems are implemented correctly.
Yeah, I was there, but that didn't last, and merging servers into the size required for the game to function...
It's just speculation/bias based on past (and I guess recent) experiences.
My group's TL server got worse and worse relative to our preferences, and after the merge and realizing that they weren't going to get 'balanced out' (it got worse technically), we transferred to another and it's Night and Day, as they say.
But in Ashes, server transfers aren't that simple, and if they were even temporarily, you'd get some effects that I think are worse.
That said, P1 was pretty 'not representative of Ashes', we didn't even know about static respawns then, and there were no "Marketplaces" so you could lock out unwanted players.
Azherae
1
Suggestion for guild XP commodity
Should have this item cost gold not glint, since glint is untradeable this allows guild member to pass gold to guild leader to buy the commodities and load themn up on his own caravan and then the rest of the guild can defend it instead of runnign there own caravans of like 1-2 XP emblem things each.
Would also add a gold sink aswell which is an extra bonus imo with how current economy is going
Would also add a gold sink aswell which is an extra bonus imo with how current economy is going
Veeshan
1