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: Best stuff/time investment in the game comes from low APM activities - not a fan
I like the combat in this game, and i like using my character and his abilities. It really feels good to move around and use your class toolkit.
But a lot of the best stuff in the game doesn't come from using abilities. It comes from the other activities that make up the game, such as:
1. Caravans: Very low Action Per Minute activity. Most of the time. And even if you do get attacked and fight, you have travel time to deal with. ~10 APM?
2. Traveling: A significant part of this game is traveling. It is a major time investment. I'm sure they have analytics on it. Not a very high APM activity either. ~20 APM?
3. Boss camping: Sure, the boss fight itself might involve a decent combat APM, but what then? Maybe kill the surrounding monsters, but if another team is there they can snipe it off of you. Safer to spend some time waiting to be sure to tag, and this will only be worse the more random the boss spawn timer is. Or traveling between bosses. End result is a lower APM gameplay overall.
4. Gathering: Gathering is mostly traveling (low apm) plus clicking and waiting ~5s, so maybe still 20 APM?
5. Processing: Running to and from storage to the processor and loading up, again maybe 20 APM?
6. Crafting: Probably about 20 APM still
7. Planning your character progression and working with others: 0 APM
8. Waiting on team, LFG, etc. : 1 APM
9. Spamming global chat for shitzngigglez: 300 APM
I dunno about anyone else, but it would be nice if we could find a way to make some kind of "opt-in" way to use abilities or something during these activities at least for something to do.
Heck, I wrote this whole post while running a caravan. What does that tell you?
It's a sand box lite game. They can't fill every second with stuff to do. That's kind of up to you.
Re: Best stuff/time investment in the game comes from low APM activities - not a fan
And yet they all stem from you grinding mobs. When I tried running a few caravans in P1, it took me around 1.5h to farm the glint required for a fully-packed caravan and then around the same time to run said caravan. And considering how much apm the grinding has, the overall process of making money has, at worst, average apm.Haha lol, but seriously my main point is to get "good" gear, you need to do a lot of low apm activities that are semi afk/second screen type things.
And from what I've heard, in P2 running caravans has become a much more pvp-centric activity, cause they've been hunted over and over again. Which means that you'll need people to protect you, and once the caravan abilities are implemented - you'll need to do more apm yourself as well.

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Re: Best stuff/time investment in the game comes from low APM activities - not a fan
Ashes is going for the design of things taking time. It's supposed to have chill moments and some action-packed moments. It's the type of game you can't really get in and play for 30 minutes and do something meaningful and get out. This reflects older MMOs. Other more recent games also have this vibe like Valheim and DayZ.
This may not please everyone but I for one am for it. I can cut gather and do professions while watching a show or a stream, I can do caravans with a group and talk some shit while things are quiet. It's a vibe.
This may not please everyone but I for one am for it. I can cut gather and do professions while watching a show or a stream, I can do caravans with a group and talk some shit while things are quiet. It's a vibe.
1
Re: Is taking too long to develop going to kill Ashes?
So when dealing with those players, the #1 thing you need to maintain to retain them is 'a large population'. If another game takes that from you, those people will 'declare your game to be dead' and then go around making sure 'everyone else knows that'. Because they are informing other people about what they value (and implying that other people should value it).
It does not matter to those people how much fun the thousands of players of Mortal Online II are having, it only matters that there are not 'enough people'.
This.
People call Starcraft 2 a dead game, but i logged recently and queued 1v1s in <1m.
As far as i'm concerned, if you can get in and play the content you want in a reasonable time frame, the game isn't dead.

1
Judgement is weird with dual targeting
Ever since I changed my settings to allow for both an ally and an enemy to be targeted, I let my tank die twice and it was very close a lot more, as I forgot to remove my enemy target before casting Judgement to heal him up. Even when I do, I lose precious time to check whether my targeting is correct now before throwing out the instant cast to save a party member.
I would love for this spell to prioritize being cast on allies, then enemies, then myself if possible. Or even better, make it customizable, maybe in a fashion similar to WoW macros, so I can clear unwanted targets before casting it in a single button press.
I would love for this spell to prioritize being cast on allies, then enemies, then myself if possible. Or even better, make it customizable, maybe in a fashion similar to WoW macros, so I can clear unwanted targets before casting it in a single button press.
1
Re: Attacking a world boss should flag you as a combatant
/no..
would make it even harder to see friendly from foe.
would make it even harder to see friendly from foe.
1
Re: [Feedback] Racial identity feels like it's missing; races don't feel visually unique.
I cant think think of any mmo that took Racial identity this far.
I was idly thinking about this while I was at work, and realized I wanted to push back on it a bit.
EQ literally had every single race have a unique armor. I'll grant that was likely due to tech limitations, but the same armor on different races looked completely different, so it's not like that's at all a unique concept here.
WoW didn't have unique armors per race, but each race was its own unique rigged model that had *completely* different dances, jokes, flirts, weapon swing animations, running animations, mounts, jumping animations, idle posture, etc. Racial identity ran extremely deeply in WoW.
Final fantasy races are all visually distinct even when wearing the same armor.
As Crazysam said:crazysam87 wrote: »First thing I felt when creating my char was how inconsequential and boring it was to pick one. In the current state, they could just remove selection and I would not see a difference.
Everquest had unique skills and vision systems for different races. Iksars started with 100 swimming skills because... lizard. They also had forage across the board. Ogres had frontal stun immunity. Trolls had base health regen bonuses. Multiple races had bonuses to their vision systems. Gnomes were the only race who could access the tinkering tradeskill. Every single race had a different base stat allocation.
WoW races all had unique abilities for increased base resistances, stuns, CC breaks, combat speed bonuses, gathering bonuses, attack power boosts.
Picking my race has felt important in every other MMO I play, but it hasn't felt like it mattered at all here.
How is having some armor be slightly different sometimes, everyone having the same dances, and literally no racials existing the MMO that's taken racial identity the farthest?
I highly agree, I feel like intrepid are diving so deep into systems and forgetting as MMO players a big part of why we play is immersion and for the people saying ashes isn't a high fantasy game because of the realism aspect I disagree, I think everything about ashes is extremely fantasy driven, from the lore to the distant planets and magic, I just think intrepid are absolutely terrible at bringing this to life in their game and would rather it looks like earth for what ever reason, with character models just mimicing humans, bears and wolves and frogs and oaks and willows some how all being native to a distant magic planet just makes no sense to me
I think that the only armour that even looks slightly different so far is the level 1 armour sets you find from the goblins, but past level 10 sets the differences are so miniscule that you can hardly notice them

1
Ashes "Gathering" that will kill Alpha
Been testing since phase 1 and I must say in the current state the game is very enjoyable. There are numbers of bugs and systems not fully working properly, but as a tester I can understand and forgive all of the shortcomings and issues currently present in the game.
However, what myself and many guild mates and testers are extremely concerned about, is the "Gathering" system. I put it in quotes because its not actually a gathering system, its a camping system. The way the current system works is that when the mining veins or trees are seeded at server reset or on whatever timer they are set to seed, the rarity of that vein or tree remains the same until another server reset or reseed. With this, all one needs to know is the respawn timer of the vein or tree you just hit, and you can essentially camp that node all day and reap the rewards. Find a legendary TIN at 8:00 AM, you can farm upwards of 40 legendary TIN in 1 day, from 1 vein, camping it every 2 hours.
This current system makes a major part of the game illegitimate and un-fun. Gathering should be random, and rewarding for people who just want to run around and pick flowers, or mine rocks, or chop trees, at anytime, in any node. The rarity roll of a spawn should RNG roll (taking into account the users rarity rating) at the moment of picking, chopping, or mining. NOT when the resource is spawned on server reset or reseed.
Gathering is a staple point in most MMO RPGs and i feel like a pretty basic system to implement. If the current system is intended, that's extremely concerning. If its not intended, also concerning that Intrepid couldn't implement a better working system at this point in development given the massive amounts of examples there are with other games.
PLEASE, I and others I know are begging that you fix this immediately. I would wager about 25-35% of players know that this is how the system works, and the Riverlands are already fully camped out by large guilds. Once 75%+ of the player base knows how to camp gathering nodes, it will be impossible to find even a heroic material for the average tester. There will be 5-10 people sitting on spots camping spawn timers, which I would imagine is NOT the intention of the gathering system from Intrepid.
If this is not fixed soon I fear it is going to steer a TON of player base away from testing this game. A quick fix to keep the RNG in gathering could be to re-seed the gathering nodes every 4-6 hours or so or on some random timer, if the permanent fix is too hard to implement quickly. At least then players would only be able to camp 1 extra gatherable spawn before everything is re-seeded. Please please please fix this.
A concerned but loyal tester
- Bater
However, what myself and many guild mates and testers are extremely concerned about, is the "Gathering" system. I put it in quotes because its not actually a gathering system, its a camping system. The way the current system works is that when the mining veins or trees are seeded at server reset or on whatever timer they are set to seed, the rarity of that vein or tree remains the same until another server reset or reseed. With this, all one needs to know is the respawn timer of the vein or tree you just hit, and you can essentially camp that node all day and reap the rewards. Find a legendary TIN at 8:00 AM, you can farm upwards of 40 legendary TIN in 1 day, from 1 vein, camping it every 2 hours.
This current system makes a major part of the game illegitimate and un-fun. Gathering should be random, and rewarding for people who just want to run around and pick flowers, or mine rocks, or chop trees, at anytime, in any node. The rarity roll of a spawn should RNG roll (taking into account the users rarity rating) at the moment of picking, chopping, or mining. NOT when the resource is spawned on server reset or reseed.
Gathering is a staple point in most MMO RPGs and i feel like a pretty basic system to implement. If the current system is intended, that's extremely concerning. If its not intended, also concerning that Intrepid couldn't implement a better working system at this point in development given the massive amounts of examples there are with other games.
PLEASE, I and others I know are begging that you fix this immediately. I would wager about 25-35% of players know that this is how the system works, and the Riverlands are already fully camped out by large guilds. Once 75%+ of the player base knows how to camp gathering nodes, it will be impossible to find even a heroic material for the average tester. There will be 5-10 people sitting on spots camping spawn timers, which I would imagine is NOT the intention of the gathering system from Intrepid.
If this is not fixed soon I fear it is going to steer a TON of player base away from testing this game. A quick fix to keep the RNG in gathering could be to re-seed the gathering nodes every 4-6 hours or so or on some random timer, if the permanent fix is too hard to implement quickly. At least then players would only be able to camp 1 extra gatherable spawn before everything is re-seeded. Please please please fix this.
A concerned but loyal tester
- Bater
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