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.
World looks pretty bare
Telandras
Member, Alpha Two
As someone who has bought a key for Phase II, the world that I'm seeing looks... barren. Large packs of mobs here and there, but otherwise just a bunch of empty spaces to run around. I can understand the concept of testing systems and that things will lack polish, but how about making an attempt at creating a patch of the environment with the density of mobs and gathering nodes that players are intended to experience when the game goes live?
Also, the gear dropped from mobs, or lack thereof, seems pretty dissatisfying.
The point of an alpha should not be TO GRIND, and yet that's what many of the players seem to be doing to level. They should be making leveling and gear drops come quickly, so that there is a greater chance of any one item, and different areas of the world that require different character levels, to be tested. Steven Sharif's already said that this is going to be a "true alpha," which sounds like he's saying that your satisfaction and enjoyment of the pace of content is not what's being tested. They should be accelerating virtually everythiing so that people can test the systems, not making people grind mobs to level or run around for hours to gather a few materials for a single crafting quest.
Furthermore, the developers have laid out their intention to make the alpha "as persistent as possible." Why? It's an alpha. They would be learning much more by resetting players frequently and having them level again and again, by some different path or as a different character, every couple of weeks (a Wek a week... make that a slogan). It seems... lazy of them, and a disservice to people who paid money to Intrepid Studios for the opportunity to help debug their product.
I will grant, there are bugs and idiosyncracies that can only be teased out by grinding. I say so as a developer of a different sort of software which runs on GPUs (we had to grind for more than thirty GPU-days before we could establish that there was a bug lurking somewhere in there, and once we had the scent we were able to hone in on it and solve it). But there are SO many bugs to find, and there's only so much that an be learned by making players constantly eat and drink or wander around or kill multitudes of similar mobs to gain experience. If there's a bug in the resting XP system (WoW veteran detected...) then it's probably going to show up just as easily if mobs are granting 1500 XP per kill than if they are granting 50. And if there's a bug in the graphics for celebrating your character leveling up, or in the way the overturn auto-unlocks and enhances certain abilities, it's much better to have more level-ups, not less, in the alpha phase so that more and more situations can be encountered.
Make things progress faster, so that more bugs can be encountered more quickly. Otherwise I'd just as soon go back to WoW and resume farming mounts (with no hope of catching up after a four-year hiatus, now that so many limited-time rides have gone by). The alpha is not polished, I get that. But until he game is polished it's impossible to know if I would enjoy running around and farming mobs or picking flowers for an evening. It's also useless to make players grind mobs to level, as if that's helping to polish the mob XP and attack damage against players of a given level. We're way from that point. So, until there's a much greater degree of polish, Intrepid should be showering players with lucky drops, a glut of XP to level one character and then a few alts, and plentiful gathering nodes in many places or juxtapositions with terrain they might be thinking of carrying over to live.
I look forward to writing more complaints if and when I enter Verra. I would especially appreciate care packages for articulate and thoughtful reviews. Epic staff, please.
Also, the gear dropped from mobs, or lack thereof, seems pretty dissatisfying.
The point of an alpha should not be TO GRIND, and yet that's what many of the players seem to be doing to level. They should be making leveling and gear drops come quickly, so that there is a greater chance of any one item, and different areas of the world that require different character levels, to be tested. Steven Sharif's already said that this is going to be a "true alpha," which sounds like he's saying that your satisfaction and enjoyment of the pace of content is not what's being tested. They should be accelerating virtually everythiing so that people can test the systems, not making people grind mobs to level or run around for hours to gather a few materials for a single crafting quest.
Furthermore, the developers have laid out their intention to make the alpha "as persistent as possible." Why? It's an alpha. They would be learning much more by resetting players frequently and having them level again and again, by some different path or as a different character, every couple of weeks (a Wek a week... make that a slogan). It seems... lazy of them, and a disservice to people who paid money to Intrepid Studios for the opportunity to help debug their product.
I will grant, there are bugs and idiosyncracies that can only be teased out by grinding. I say so as a developer of a different sort of software which runs on GPUs (we had to grind for more than thirty GPU-days before we could establish that there was a bug lurking somewhere in there, and once we had the scent we were able to hone in on it and solve it). But there are SO many bugs to find, and there's only so much that an be learned by making players constantly eat and drink or wander around or kill multitudes of similar mobs to gain experience. If there's a bug in the resting XP system (WoW veteran detected...) then it's probably going to show up just as easily if mobs are granting 1500 XP per kill than if they are granting 50. And if there's a bug in the graphics for celebrating your character leveling up, or in the way the overturn auto-unlocks and enhances certain abilities, it's much better to have more level-ups, not less, in the alpha phase so that more and more situations can be encountered.
Make things progress faster, so that more bugs can be encountered more quickly. Otherwise I'd just as soon go back to WoW and resume farming mounts (with no hope of catching up after a four-year hiatus, now that so many limited-time rides have gone by). The alpha is not polished, I get that. But until he game is polished it's impossible to know if I would enjoy running around and farming mobs or picking flowers for an evening. It's also useless to make players grind mobs to level, as if that's helping to polish the mob XP and attack damage against players of a given level. We're way from that point. So, until there's a much greater degree of polish, Intrepid should be showering players with lucky drops, a glut of XP to level one character and then a few alts, and plentiful gathering nodes in many places or juxtapositions with terrain they might be thinking of carrying over to live.
I look forward to writing more complaints if and when I enter Verra. I would especially appreciate care packages for articulate and thoughtful reviews. Epic staff, please.
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Comments
If the game has full mob density, and a given class isn't up to standard, that class can't move around the world.
Full mob density around the fame world is something that should only happen when the class kits are 90% set in place. Itemization is by no means finished. Again, each class kit should be in place before you worry about this
Remember, you are not here to play a game - your comments all make it seem as if you think you are.
Again, I don't expect to come to the alpha and enjoy it as a game. I am arguing that they should ACCELERATE leveling and gear drop rates during the alpha to encourage exploration, use of items, effects, and better sample the gear curve. (Whether itemization is finished or not, it makes sense to get data, not withhold gear from players who might use it to provide that data.)
The program that I've been making in my real job is a molecular simulator. I could test it by doing one simulation of one system over and over, or lowering the temperature to something cryogenic so that nothing moves. Both of those things might teach me a thing or two. But it would be much more instructive to run many different molecules, and to raise the temperature so that things bump inito each other and potentially go wrong.
This is the mentality and the spirit in which I am making the above arguments.
wow so insightful and full of wisdom, yes please someone give this guy some free shit
Testing is not complaining.
You are not here to poke holes in content - not yet. You are here to test systems.
Poking holes in content is actually counter-productive at this point.
Altering the XP rewards and raising the probability of gear / amount of gold in drop tables is hardly difficult for the devs to do, and will not break prod. I would imagine (but we probably haven't seen yet) that they have done things to help nodes level faster in the limited environment of the die-hard players testing Alpha II. And, in principle, an economy can work regardless of the amount of cash--the teax rate and the buyout price can be multiples of whatever principal you've got--but if you want to see things happen then it's not unreasonable to inject artificial energy into the system to make them happen.
Do you gain experience?
Does the server queue system work?
Does the character creator work?
If you noticed any of these either working or not working, then you tested a system.
This is an alpha test, your expectations are clearly that of an early access game.
And when it is time to test all of that, I'm sure you will have that variety of encounter that you need.
In the mean time, do all bows deal the expected amount of damage? Are there any edge cases where you can make it so the bow doesn't deal the expected amount of damage - for example dealing a different amount of damage if you are facing exactly north?
That is the kind of thing an alpha test is about. What you are wanting to test happens far later on.
Edit; also, it is not Intrepids role to make the game more easy for you to test, it is your role to text so that Intrepid can more easily make the game.
As a hard-core programmer myslf, I can tell you that the things you have pointed out, while they may be valid points of failure, are going to happen whether players are dinking away at level 3 mobs or running around as level 25 in green / blue gear with trinket procs. And writing scripts to parse out what each player is doing and keep records of their actions would be the sina qua non of an alpha that's ready to absorb player actions.
Let me give you a different example. When I developed my simulation code, we did more than a thousand simulations, each of which took about a day by itself or fifty per day if we bundled them on one of our professional-grade ("data center") GPUs. One of the simulations crashed, and we admitted this but a reviewer of our work insisted that we track down te bug. The way we did that was not to go grinding for another 2-3 weeks, or even 2-3 days on fifty GPUs (not least because the electricity alone would have cost thousands of dollars). What we did was fiddle with settings in the program until we found a certain setting that made the crashes much more likely--not one in a thousand after running for days on dozens of GPUs, but fifty in a thousand after running for minutes on just one GPU. Our bitwise reproducible code helped us zero in on the exact step, and then the pair of particles where it happened, and then the bug.
But, my point: we can weed out more bugs with faster progression towards the more complex things, and thus a faster sampling rate. Grinding is not worthwhile and, I would argue, very easy for the devs to do away with at present.
A "hard-core" programmer?
That reads to me as "hobbyist". Perhaps this isn't the case, but that is what that reads like. The fact that the issue you talked about has been essentially a meme for decades kind of reinforces this (Ghandi in the first Civilization game going nuclear was wrongly attributed to this back in the 90's).
That said, your issues with Ashes are still too early for Intrepid to put time in to. The alpha test will be long, there is plenty of time for you to level up, test the lower level stuff, get to the higher level stuff, test that out as well, make alts, test it all again. There is no rush to test it all now.
The only rush is if you want to play it all now. That is how you are coming across.
And I do not wish to grind mobs for an alpha when the devs could just change a few tables and help me get to testing things. Here's where I am: I'm fine being killed by the lag boss, the floor boss, watching the ghosts of other players gallop in straight lines through walls, having my shots miss because the targeting fails. Having to dink away at mobs for hours on end, wander around in search of far-flung crafting materials, or wait on long respawns is not testing anything. I should not be having the problem that my gear is just not strong enough to battle mobs of a similar level, or that I did not pull them in proper way, or that my group needed a tank for nominal world map (non-dungeon) content. Those are all tuning and polish issues which, as you have said, are for a later date.
For now, leveling and killing should be relatively easy, and gear drops plentiful.
You should.
You would have known about the issue you talked about above if you did.
No they shouldn't.
The faster people level up and see the content this alpha test has to offer, the faster they will go off and do other things.
Intrepid want people testing. They don't currently care what level you are testing at. One of the ways they are able to go about that right now is to make it so you aren't getting to the level cap quickly.
Not sure what you are talking about here.
The only thing close to a meme I have talked about is the in relation to the original Civilization game, and as I said, it was "essentially a meme".
I didn't make any comments at all about a meme about games being better by taking longer.
However, keep in mind that you are still looking at Ashes as a game - you shouldn't be.
Again, every post you make reinforces the notion that you are wanting to "play" Ashes, not test it.
When I think of playing a game, I think of putting effort into building a character, collecting, honing strats on bosses and incrementally getting better as I build towards the current season / patch finale. And then doing that with other players in a competitive / comraderie sort of environment. When I think of testing a game, I would expect to be trying this and that, finding that lots of things fail, having a great deal more difficulty because of lag, clunky systems, lack of polish. What I have been suggesting is that, merely by buffing XP and loot tables, they can smooth out a lot of the baseline issues and at least know that players are dying due to clunky systems rather than running around underpowered.
Whenever Blizzard would test a new Wow expansion, they would offer characters pre-leveled, give you the chance to transfer your current character, open a dungeon and just give players gear at the expected level to go in an test it. Granted, some of that was further into the polishing phase, but it's still about weeding out bugs in the code. People did not abandon the testing phase because it was too quick, or too easy, or got boring because they'd seen all of the content. Whenever testors showed up, they did so with an intention to spend a certain amount of time playing/testing the new game. As I think most of us are now.
In a live game, I get the sense of accomplishment that comes with grinding and putting in effort to get ahead of other players. That doesn't make any sense here. I come to the alpha with the intention of spending X hours playing around, trying different things, and then even some number of hours Y (Y perhaps greater than X) writing tickets and reports about my experiences to help the devs understand what I did and how it worked out. If my X hours have to be spent in one area with a group of eight people killing the same pack of goblins over and over to get to level 25 and unlock more of the intended content, that's not a good use of my time or a good testing footprint to communicate to the devs about. And it sounds like the alpha as it stands has X = 100 hours just to do that.
Are you enjoying the alpha?
Phase I should be bare - based on the Alpha 2 Roadmap.
Phase I is for stability testing; not content testing.
You referred to this test and how you think gear and leveling should happen faster. In response, I specifically talked about why Intrepid do not want that for this test, how their goal is to just have people online right now, and since some people look at this incorrectly as an early access or sneak peak (looking directly at you here), it is not in the tests best interests to speed up the time it takes everyone to see the content on offer, as they will leave the test sooner.
By making it take longer to get these things, people spend longer in the test environment, which means more people online at any given time, which is the goal of this test.
Your comparison to Blizzard/WoW is amusing. You are talking about the final stages of testing an expansion. This kind of testing is about testing out the content that the developers think is finished, it is a play test. This testing is done on a platform that has already had the stress testing and basic system functionality testing done (in the case of WoW, this all happened in 2002/2003).
That is why Blizzard (and every developer running a test for an expansion) offer leveling. There is no need to test the leveling process, no need to stress test, no need to test lower level stuff - all they need in that test are people running the new content, meaning they need characters of an appropriate level.
Again, that isn't what this test is. That kind of testing will happen for Ashes base game in the 6 months leading up to launch. At that time, I fully expect Intrepid to offer auto leveling if they have a specific need to test higher level content, I fully expect them to auto level nodes to test out each permutation of nodes.
Your expectation of what this alpha test is about was clearly wrong, your last comment in the post above proves that - an alpha isn't about enjoying the product, that isn't why you should be here.
they shouldn't do anything you think they should do, since they are the ones who need to test certain things about the game.
also, I invite you to read the purposes of each alpha phase. phase 1 is clearly aimed at testing servers stability, not progression.
also, mob drops is fine, I get items all the time lol
Thanks to me having played MMO's in what i call " ALMOST BRAINDEAD-Mode " for Years and Years,
i somehow - SOMEHOW - managed to miss that there is an Auto-Attack Function until i was Level Six.
Yes. Attacking does work.
Even a Plebeian like me does indeed gain Experience in the Alpha Two.
I ran around in Lionhold like the Village Idiot that stepped through the Portal through Verra and choose to try his best as a Hunter.
After - SEVERAL. - LOOONNNG. - HOURS. - i finally managed with my "mushy-brained Baloney brain" how i get my Horse.
I struggled to understand even every single Quest-Sentence -> which i think is good -> because Questing has been dumbed down SOOO. MUCH. indeed over the Years in Worst of Warcraft which i always played,
-> it was actually a Challenge without serious Quest-Markings on the Minimap and in the ingame-World, to do exactly what i was told to do.
- So i chopped the Wood.
(ran to the WRONG. TREE's AT FIRST by climbing up a freaking MOUNTAIN WALL on the West in Lionhold,)
- prepared the Oak Wood, Timber-Wood, whatever-Wood - after SOMEHOW miraculously getting the Wooden(?) Novice Craftsmanstation to work,
- then mined the Stone,
- opened up the Option Menu and "WIDENED MY U.I. TO THE MAX" -> because my Eyes started to really itch, sting and burn from the microscopic tiny Windows and Texts which were as huge as the Micropenis of an Activision Blizzard Developer from California,
then were stuck at the "STONE-MASON-RY" Crafting-Station for SEVERAL. HOURS. (!!!!!!) because now the goddamn Window to "START JOB" to prepare the Stone into Stone-Blocks was to huge and the "BUTTON" to start the Job was below the lower Edge and Border of my Screen,
-> meaning i had to pull it up first after noticing the Problem SOMEHOW after a long and irritating, no in fact INFURIATING TIME of Hours who flew by, ( heheheheheheheheh ^.^ )
- " THEN " i finally had the Blocks, which i would loved to LITERALLY SHOVE this annoying, constantly annoyed and pissed-sounding NPC Dude down his Throat,
( i mean he is right ^.^ many People who come from the Portal ARE freakin Dunce's - including me ^.^ )
- then i cut some adorable Flowers,
- made them into Powder with the last Crafting Station stationed in Lionhold,
- got my Horse which unironically is the MOST UNREWARDING FEELING EVER because it can not even move faster than my Character can sprint - and i suffered as passionately to get like a freakin' "KUTHITE" from Pathfinder-DnD or whatever their Fantasy-Universe is,
and then,
when i FINALLY REALISED,
that i was slowly about -> from evolving into a complete f~in Idiot into a young, lowly Noob ^.^ - i realised that even i - can in fact gain Experience.
OHHHHHHH how that Questchain boiled my Blood.
At the End of Friday and around Saturday i was for a short while in a few Que's. But nothing that felt longer than the likes of Ten to Fifteen Minutes. THANKS "The Others". I admit i didn't look at the Clock.
Yes.
I made my Character a blond Guy with a short, decent Haircut and tiny Beard. ( Kae'lar Human )
But since my Graphic Card is a huuuuuuuuuuuuuumble "NVIDIA GeForce GTX "1060" 6GB", even as i intend to upgrade in the next Weeks,
my Characters Looks phased out -> my Armor phased out to a huge Degree -> and the other Players also looked a tiiiiiiiiiiiiiny little bit like Ghosts.
I realised that i am an inferior, lowly Human Being regarding Graphic Card Power and i need to evolve.
Funfact !!
I can run Worst of Warcraft with this Graphic Card on middle to upper middlefield Settings.
I was in this "nice, sweet Loop" of suffering and trying to PUSH my Brain which got weakened from many Years of playing lazily made MMO's,
and i thought for awhile that i may experience Bugs i should probably report. But NO !!!!! It wasn't Bugs. I was just to stupid to understand everything from the get-go ONCE again !!
This was actually not so bad.
I feel that i get LITERALLY (figuratively) whipped into shape again. ESPECIALLY my poor Brain which suffered an enormous lack of being challenged and encouraged to pay Attention and understand things.
Damn.
Feels like we are back in actually Fun MMO's, my Friends. Feels like we are BACK !!
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Guild is " Balderag's Garde " for now. (German)
Many people here like to talk shit about how long Ashes has been in development already - your graphics card is older.
That is an 8 year old graphics card, my dude - and it was mid tier when it was released.
The fact that you can run a game released in 2004 on a card released in 2016 isn't a surprise - the fact that you are trying to run a game that is likely to release in 2026 on that same card kind of is.
If your feedback on this is that the game doesn't run well on a graphics card that is below the minimum required specification (which is a GTX1070) for this alpha test, then I'm sure that will be appreciated feedback.
Edit to add, if this game doesn't release until late 2028 (which is possible), then your graphics card was released closer to WoW's initial release than to that release date for Ashes.
As I've told you many times, I expected to come ot this alpha and die to the lag boss, fall through the floor, have login issues, etc. I expected no more than they promised, to see about 5% of the map and maybe fight 2-3 of the big bosses with my toon running in place. You have ben very persistent in accusing me of being some sort of moocher, just here to play a game, whereas somehow you apparently are a better breed who have the right mindset about this. I don't know what I could say to convince you that I wanted to be a testor in this thing, that I ENJOY testing and finding bugs. But, what I'm seeing of the alpha is that there is just not much to do, and to the extent that there is something to do it's stuck behind a 100-hour wall of mindless grinding, which is not necessary for a game in a developmental phase.
But, whatever. I'm done. I have a job and it's more enjoyable than this looks like it could ever be, if I have to have some cheetos-munching twerp strawmanning my discussions and being accusatory no matter what I say. If you've spent more than $120 and feel proud of yourself, then go do the world (of Verra) your amazing service.
I can see that you want to do that - but I can also see that you want to be a content tester.
The kind of testing you seem to want/enjoy is late stage beta testing, not early stage alpha testing. These are vastly different things.
I'm telling you this so that you have the information that you may need in order to know when you are likely to get the kind of thing you want, not to stop you testing now (that is up to you, I don't care either way).
I thought this exact same thing until I started to really play the game. I know people keep saying that this is a test and not to "play". I fell into the same trap of thinking, and just wanted to skip all of this stuff and reset as required. But one of the core things they are testing is "where is the fun?".
I found myself joining up with randoms and roaming the map looking for grind spots. Looking for places to harvest my first daffodils and granite rocks. And I found myself enjoying my time doing that. In fact, I had an absolute blast!
Alot of the barren spots that I perceived earlier ceased to look like that. Instead, they looked like ways to get in and farm a couple nodes without agroing any mobs, or space available to kite mobs or run away completely when overwhelmed. They looked like ways that a solo player or a big group could still enjoy the content.
I hope that they keep and improve on the current design. The more I played it, the more I saw the utility and fell in love with it.
My suggestions / gripes focused on the notion that grinding isn't the best use of testor time. If they want to stress test the servers, they can still let people kill mobs or level faster, go further. As long as the testors are playing and interacting, that will be stress-testing the server, and as I've said leaving me with only an option of grinding goblins in a dense patch is not encouraging me to engage. If, as Ludullu says above, gear is dropping at a good clip, then I suppose I can be happy with that--as long as I can kill stuff the levels can come at whatever pace.
I also don't want to be too hard on Intrepid--having my own code in "alpha" release due to publishing considerations (had to open-source in order to get the first paper accepted), I have a few features and some very impressive systems (patting myself on the back) but not a lot peeps can do. On the one hand, Intrepid is a company of 75 or so employees (IIRC), and they've been at it for some time, but on the other even if 500 people bought keys to the Alpha II waves that $60,000 would provide for their operating costs on the order of a day. I'm content to be the flea on the tail of the dog. I'm not trying to suggest that I got scammed, just expressing a degree of disappointment and suggesting something minimal they could do to improve the pace of testing. If you think my expectations are too high, I respectfully disagree, but improvements in the coming weeks may smooth it all out anyway.
I suppose, if we draw a line between the "feature complete" state that they've set for themselves by the end of this Alpha in summer 2025, there will be a series of significant upgrades in terms of things to test over the coming months.