World looks pretty bare

Noaani

Telandras wrote: »

I would ask that you grant me a measure of grace here: Intrepid advertised "a true alpha," no doubt, but they also advertised the rudiments of questing, crafting, nodes, a couple of end bosses, some dungeons, multiple classes with some degree of development in terms of their skills and themes

I would be interested in specifically where you got this.

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.

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.

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.

Noaani

Xeeg wrote: »

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.

Also; freeholds.

Blip

Noaani wrote: »

Telandras wrote: »

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?

Not a good idea.

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.

Also, the gear dropped from mobs, or lack thereof, seems pretty dissatisfying.

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.

True but it is stil valid feedback

daveywavey

Telandras wrote: »

Noanni, my current project is >310,000 lines of original C++ and CUDA. I don't do memes

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.

Just pointing out the Test Goals for Phase 1:

Telandras

OK, all well and good. My expectations, such as they were / are, arose from Steven Sharif's statements and material on the two hour Alpha II rollout video a couple of weeks ago, plus other videos released by the AoC official channel in the prior two months. In the above state goals, I do see "progression" testing but I'll also allow that it's priority 4 after scaling, stability, and performance (I presume, perf of the underlying packet algorithms, sserver meshing, etc.).

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.

Dygz

Betas are feature complete - mostly just bug hunting and squashing as many bugs as possible before release.
Alphas are still adding content. And Ashes still has a lot of content to add.

Telandras

I expect there is a lot of missing content--but how do my plans look as far as what I plan to test and how I plan to go about it?

Dygz

Sounds good. The devs want feedback on all that stuff.
Just keep in mind that Phase I is primarily about stability.

nanfoodle

I went from one end of the map to the other in the spot test. I spent hours just going around the map. It was mostly empty. I really thought after 8 years it would be allot more flushed out.

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

Noaani

Telandras wrote: »

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

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.

Noaani

nanfoodle wrote: »

I went from one end of the map to the other in the spot test. I spent hours just going around the map. It was mostly empty. I really thought after 8 years it would be allot more flushed out.

If you do this on launch day, the map is likely to be just as empty - if not more so.

RocketFarmer

Got to wonder what fills up the empty places when the nodes hit level 4, 5 or 6.

nanfoodle

Noaani wrote: »

nanfoodle wrote: »

I went from one end of the map to the other in the spot test. I spent hours just going around the map. It was mostly empty. I really thought after 8 years it would be allot more flushed out.

If you do this on launch day, the map is likely to be just as empty - if not more so.

That is my hope as well.

Telandras

That's ineresting, too--that empty areas of the map will fill up as the node gains experience. So I suppose I did speak too soon--at least in some respects, the world is designed to gain more action as time goes on. But, yeah, I think I'll give this a go after all, hopefully dropping in for a little smoother ride once the third weekend / Nov. 8th rolls around.

Thanks all for your feedback in this intense discussion!