Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Of course queues are to be expected to a certain degree. This to me definitely sounds as a valid concern.
But you my friend absolutely cannot know for sure to what extent it will be an issue. You can't tell that the worse case scenario will happen for sure, right ?.
I believe Intrepid has shown time and time again how they care, and how careful they are about the game they're creating, and about creating bonds with the community.
Thus I cannot reasonnably picture that the queue issue (which is again, a valid concern) will be extremely painful, and/or will last for a very long time.
That's definitely something that should have been taken into account when they have considered the number of realms and of users per realm, don't you agree ?
Fair points. I hope that this is the case and queues aren't a big deal...
I would prefer a persistent Alpha 2 now instead of May 2025.
These short sessions will just satisfy curiosity about how the game feels, to be able to give better feedback.
I doubt any kind of wealth will survive until May next year.
Merges might happen anyway as map size grows and more nodes are added.
As others have stated, plainly, this is a true Alpha test. This is NOT a finished game. If you’re not looking at this from a tester mindset, don’t pay for access. It really is that simple. They are not going to change the structure of an Alpha TEST to cater to fly-by-night people who feel entitled to access a “playable” game from the word go.
One of the hypest releases of the last few years had only ~1/6 of their sales playing right on release. 1/6 of 100k is below 18k of AoC's concurrents at Phase 1.
Adding even 1 server per region each would bring us to 1/4. With 1000% constant server drops and rubberbanding, a ton of those people will simply realize that testing A2 is not for them and they'll leave within the first week of testing.
By the second week of the same shit (and you better know that it's gonna be the same) - even more people will leave.
By the third week we'll get the influx of anyone who buys the $120 keys. Which would mean that we're simply back to full servers. And Steven literally said that these sales will give them the info on how many additional servers they gotta be ready for.
And as for "queues are also testing" that was brought up in this thread before - yes, it is also testing. It tests how Intrepid's login servers behave under pressure. They test how the queueing system functions (if at all). It tests visuals/UI of the queue and its responsiveness (i.e. refresh rate of your placement).
It would also be a great test of where they wanna put their queue at. If their tech allows it, they could put it past login and before entering the game itself, which means that a shitton of people would be preoccupied with making their character, which, with the supposed CC, would take hours for some people. Hell, the fact that CC is linked with the game client at Phase 1 just strengthens this point.
In other words, you're worrying over nothing.
We'll see.