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
Keep in mind though, all of the above is in the test. There are quests, there is crafting, there are nodes, there are bosses. None of that is what this test is about, but they are all there.
There is no particular reason to speed up testing.
It isn't helpful at all to compare things to what ever it is you have done or are doing. If anything, that is causing you to misunderstand. You may have had time constraints with testing or what ever, but that doesn't mean that Ashes has a bottleneck around testing time.
If that was a bottleneck for them, the easy solution to it is to add more servers (AWS are great at scaling up), and make it an open alpha test.
The bottleneck Intrepid are facing is that this company you mentioned has about 75 employees are trying to do what other companies do with 1,000 employees, and sub-contractors.
That is where the bottleneck is. That is why it isn't worth putting time in to a testing environment to make it more pleasant to test - that time needs to be spent on things that will make the end game better, not the testing environment.
Edit to add; perhaps a better way to go about this is to state - my expectation for this alpha, after many, many MMORPG apha tests, was exactly what we have had so far.
If your expectation was different, the issue is in what your expectation was. I don't know what your expectation was, and I don't really care (that's a you thing, imo). work out where it is that you arrived at that expectation and figure out if it was Intrepid, or a pre-concieved notion you had.
When doing this, just keep in mind, the expectation you should have had was what was put in front of you - you are not trying to find holes in that, you are trying to find out why that wasn't what you expected.
Also; freeholds.
True but it is stil valid feedback
Just pointing out the Test Goals for Phase 1:
Noanni, I will grant that you are much more of an expert here than I. I haven't played an alpha, but I have played betas, and I dissect things ata very low level. In that spirit, I'd say my expectations and things I intended to do included:
- Level a few classes, and within each:
* Try the attacking, look for various rotations and see how the abilities mesh (this is not about "previewing" so much as getting a sense of whether the devs are designing the classes with good mechanics or not)
* Get up on a mob and zoom in close to watch the animations. Anything about the character or the mobs stand out?
* Try running, jumping, twisting, mounting and doing the same. Anything stand out about those animations?
* Watch the ability animations. How about the color combos, pace and persstence of effects? I'd do this for things that look like some effort has been put into them, but not things that look clearly placeholder. It's all WIP, but if the devs and artists have been working on something I'd want to write some feedback on that.
- Try some crafting. How does it feel with regard to bags, inventory, complexity?
- Try some resourcce farming and world exploration. Happy to do this on foot or on a mount. How do the various parts of the environment look, water effects and movement in the grass / trees? Again, trying to focus feedback on things with polish.
- Try the character creator a few times, explore features and see how different results translate into characters in the world.
- Try UI customization, if available. Can I arrange the bars in a way more to my liking? Can I resize or change the configurations of the health bar, the resource (mana) bar w.r.t. my main ability buttons?
Is that about right? I guess I shouldn't have led this post "world looks barren" but that was my first impression from the vids I was seeing of current alpha II testors. I still think that some of these activities, while valid, would be greatly expedited if I were doing it in decent gear. I can let the mob come up to me and pound on me a bit to zoom in an watch how the various animations are working together if I know I'm not going to go poof in three or four blows, as I was seeing with other alpha II testors.
Alphas are still adding content. And Ashes still has a lot of content to add.
Just keep in mind that Phase I is primarily about stability.
Over the weekend I just played by the quests and markers of POI on the map and all that empty space was not a bother.
I understand in A1, the tester said there was a main line quest that took you all over the map and it mostly got you leveled. That's missing from A2. My guess in all of this, is that IS is only showing us things that need testing and A1 tester tested the poop out of that.
So how much is IS holding close to their chest and how much is not finished? I hope it's not lot of the latter. But we do know for a fact, they are holding some cards we can't see in A2. IMO there better be allot of them
My thoughts on this is that anything in regards to how things "feel" is too early in regards to feedback.
It's great to test out these things, and to take notes on them, but those notes should be more for your reference in terms of changes. Feedback to Intrepid in regards to how things feel right now are potentially counter-productive, but referring to your opinion on changes between how these things are now and how they are when they are in a state Intrepid want them tested has potential value.
That is my hope as well.
Thanks all for your feedback in this intense discussion!