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.
My Alpha Two opinions (My first experience with this iteration of AoC)
Shamotery
Member, Alpha Two
So here is a list of my impressions and opinions of the Alpha Two (My first experience with this iteration of AoC). I wont turn this into some Recipe blog where I give you paragraphs of why I'm "qualified" to give my opinions before I get to them lol.
Firstly, I understand it is an alpha and that there are a lot of things they already plan to change or have changes ready for. That they're focusing on stability and bug fixes before they adjust a lot of the things I'm probably going to list but I'd rather list them than not.
Okay so here we go,
Quest Mob Spawn Times:
- The thing brought to the forefront of my mind is Mob spawn times for "Elite Quest" bosses from the commissions board. Waiting around for 10+ minutes to kill one quest mob is not conducive to a good gameplay experience. If your argument is "the mobs give a lot of xp so that's why, they don't want you farming them". I heartedly disagree. Nerf the mob xp and buff the quest reward xp instead. Migrate the xp you would get from the kill onto the quest completion. OR just don't. Just nerf the kill xp and increase the spawn rate so players don't spend over 2 hours just to do 5 quests because you also have to compete for tagging.
Mob tagging:
- I have zero issues with there being competition for mob tagging. I do think it is non-conducive to a positive gaming experience for a lot of people who don't want to fight for tags which is A LOT of casual players BUT *Shrug* I'm not a casual player and honestly I'm okay with this. Not everything in this game needs to cater to casuals, I'd prefer that it didn't period. That's what killed all my favorite mmorpgs catering to casual players and their 2 hour playtime windows. (No offense to casual players I get that you don't have a lot of time and still want to game! I just think not EVERYTHING needs to cater to you). Let us have our own stuff.
Professions:
- The profession systems are really bad imo. Starting zones shouldn't have tons of high level resources that people can't even mine instead of having to go to level 12+ areas just to find copper or decent amounts of zinc. All this needs is an adjustment as to where things spawn. Stop spawning Iron in mass abundance near Lionhold. Put zinc and copper spawns there instead. It was impossibly difficult to level professions. Not to mention the way you craft and craft times need a lot of work. I didn't spend a lot of time on them purely because I was unable to find the resources I needed for my gear. At risk of repeating myself please adjust where stuff spawns, I don't mind some high level resources in low level areas but it feels like I was constantly running into nothing but iron. I truly and honestly after hours in the riverlands or the couple hours I spent running around everywhere else I only found a total of 5 copper nodes and 2 zinc nodes. If the other professions are anything like mining/ armor+weapon smithing then they definitely need A LOT of work. I feel like after a few more Alpha weekends I'll have far more detailed information to provide.
Death Penalties:
- I do not believe that dropping resources on "PvE" related deaths should be a thing. I will accept it regardless of whether or not it gets changed but that doesn't mean I think it is a good player experience (it's not unless you're the one looting people for free stuff). It's a shitty mechanic that promotes shitty behavior from players and I think that's bad for our community. Players shouldn't have to worry about losing rare resources they've found if they're not flagged for pvp. XP penalties are more than enough. Now I totally agree that flagged players should drop loot, you kill another flagged player you deserve something they find valuable from their death. Unless you're like clapping low level players then I disagree, there should be mechanics to protect against low level player griefing. IDK if there is but my hope is that there is one. Overall I accept death penalties minus losing your loot on pve deaths. Getting looted by another team that kited a horde of mobs past you then they all aggro onto your group and wipe you then they loot you. I literally watched this happen and while it was minorly comical again, it's a bad player experience.
Direction:
- Aside from the directives/focus's provided by the AoC team on what they want to focus on testing in each phase I feel like we have little direction in game. There is no strong tutorial as to what players should be doing after you get your mount other than (go to a higher level settlement). I do believe there should be hand holding at the beginning of the player experience. In what forms this should take I'm not entirely sure yet. Maybe better explanations of in game systems, nodes, professions and their respective functions, etc. Introductory quests to these systems seems like a reasonable request, the level of complaints I saw in global just from not knowing what to do, where to go, how to start.
I love being able to log in and figure things out on my own but I know a lot of people wont enjoy that and for the health of this game I think it's important that more direction is provided on how to get started in AoC. I look forward to seeing it improve and to see what creative ways the devs have in store to keep us engaged and invested! I just want the starter/new player experience to be good or else they wont keep playing. I don't believe the "play till you hit cap and then it gets good" mentality is healthy for a long term game that centers around community ESPECIALLY MMO's. Things need to be engaging from the moment you log in the first time. Players need to be "hooked" within the first couple of hours or they'll quit to go play something else that DOES give them satisfaction and a RoI they can see. I think the dev team and Steve will figure it out but providing my opinions is why I payed 120 dollars, we have like 2 years to get from where we are now to where we're going to be on the official launch.
Final thoughts:
I almost refunded the game and I was so hypercritical of every crash/bug that happened in my first couple of hours. I took a step back, reminded myself it's an alpha and remembered all the other mmo's that I played alphas/betas for and then I logged back in after a half day break and came back to it. Once I came back I had a much better experience. Overall I went from wanting a refund Friday to not wanting the serves to go down monday at 4:55pm when I logged out. I'm itching to get back to grinding and playing this weekend and I can reasonably say I'm feeling like I am starting to get hooked. I want this game to be everything we've all wanted from MMO's for years. The genre has been failing us for 2 decades, so much so most people stopped developing MMO's all together. I'm tired of feeling like all I have to fall back on is wow/ffxiv/runescape to satiate my desire for an MMO. I'm so tired of the current formulas, the micro transactions, the p2w in every game, the destruction of in game communities for the sake of convenience and catering to casual players who only play for 1/2 months when a new expansion comes out anyway.
I look forward to joining you all on this journey and to see how my opinions change/grow over the next couple of years. If you read this thank you
if you get hyper offended or volatile over my opinions I'm not sorry, I am not responsible for your feelings or your projection of other stressers in your life.
But anyway what are your takes? What did you enjoy this phase? What changes do you wanna see?
Firstly, I understand it is an alpha and that there are a lot of things they already plan to change or have changes ready for. That they're focusing on stability and bug fixes before they adjust a lot of the things I'm probably going to list but I'd rather list them than not.
Okay so here we go,
Quest Mob Spawn Times:
- The thing brought to the forefront of my mind is Mob spawn times for "Elite Quest" bosses from the commissions board. Waiting around for 10+ minutes to kill one quest mob is not conducive to a good gameplay experience. If your argument is "the mobs give a lot of xp so that's why, they don't want you farming them". I heartedly disagree. Nerf the mob xp and buff the quest reward xp instead. Migrate the xp you would get from the kill onto the quest completion. OR just don't. Just nerf the kill xp and increase the spawn rate so players don't spend over 2 hours just to do 5 quests because you also have to compete for tagging.
Mob tagging:
- I have zero issues with there being competition for mob tagging. I do think it is non-conducive to a positive gaming experience for a lot of people who don't want to fight for tags which is A LOT of casual players BUT *Shrug* I'm not a casual player and honestly I'm okay with this. Not everything in this game needs to cater to casuals, I'd prefer that it didn't period. That's what killed all my favorite mmorpgs catering to casual players and their 2 hour playtime windows. (No offense to casual players I get that you don't have a lot of time and still want to game! I just think not EVERYTHING needs to cater to you). Let us have our own stuff.
Professions:
- The profession systems are really bad imo. Starting zones shouldn't have tons of high level resources that people can't even mine instead of having to go to level 12+ areas just to find copper or decent amounts of zinc. All this needs is an adjustment as to where things spawn. Stop spawning Iron in mass abundance near Lionhold. Put zinc and copper spawns there instead. It was impossibly difficult to level professions. Not to mention the way you craft and craft times need a lot of work. I didn't spend a lot of time on them purely because I was unable to find the resources I needed for my gear. At risk of repeating myself please adjust where stuff spawns, I don't mind some high level resources in low level areas but it feels like I was constantly running into nothing but iron. I truly and honestly after hours in the riverlands or the couple hours I spent running around everywhere else I only found a total of 5 copper nodes and 2 zinc nodes. If the other professions are anything like mining/ armor+weapon smithing then they definitely need A LOT of work. I feel like after a few more Alpha weekends I'll have far more detailed information to provide.
Death Penalties:
- I do not believe that dropping resources on "PvE" related deaths should be a thing. I will accept it regardless of whether or not it gets changed but that doesn't mean I think it is a good player experience (it's not unless you're the one looting people for free stuff). It's a shitty mechanic that promotes shitty behavior from players and I think that's bad for our community. Players shouldn't have to worry about losing rare resources they've found if they're not flagged for pvp. XP penalties are more than enough. Now I totally agree that flagged players should drop loot, you kill another flagged player you deserve something they find valuable from their death. Unless you're like clapping low level players then I disagree, there should be mechanics to protect against low level player griefing. IDK if there is but my hope is that there is one. Overall I accept death penalties minus losing your loot on pve deaths. Getting looted by another team that kited a horde of mobs past you then they all aggro onto your group and wipe you then they loot you. I literally watched this happen and while it was minorly comical again, it's a bad player experience.
Direction:
- Aside from the directives/focus's provided by the AoC team on what they want to focus on testing in each phase I feel like we have little direction in game. There is no strong tutorial as to what players should be doing after you get your mount other than (go to a higher level settlement). I do believe there should be hand holding at the beginning of the player experience. In what forms this should take I'm not entirely sure yet. Maybe better explanations of in game systems, nodes, professions and their respective functions, etc. Introductory quests to these systems seems like a reasonable request, the level of complaints I saw in global just from not knowing what to do, where to go, how to start.
I love being able to log in and figure things out on my own but I know a lot of people wont enjoy that and for the health of this game I think it's important that more direction is provided on how to get started in AoC. I look forward to seeing it improve and to see what creative ways the devs have in store to keep us engaged and invested! I just want the starter/new player experience to be good or else they wont keep playing. I don't believe the "play till you hit cap and then it gets good" mentality is healthy for a long term game that centers around community ESPECIALLY MMO's. Things need to be engaging from the moment you log in the first time. Players need to be "hooked" within the first couple of hours or they'll quit to go play something else that DOES give them satisfaction and a RoI they can see. I think the dev team and Steve will figure it out but providing my opinions is why I payed 120 dollars, we have like 2 years to get from where we are now to where we're going to be on the official launch.
Final thoughts:
I almost refunded the game and I was so hypercritical of every crash/bug that happened in my first couple of hours. I took a step back, reminded myself it's an alpha and remembered all the other mmo's that I played alphas/betas for and then I logged back in after a half day break and came back to it. Once I came back I had a much better experience. Overall I went from wanting a refund Friday to not wanting the serves to go down monday at 4:55pm when I logged out. I'm itching to get back to grinding and playing this weekend and I can reasonably say I'm feeling like I am starting to get hooked. I want this game to be everything we've all wanted from MMO's for years. The genre has been failing us for 2 decades, so much so most people stopped developing MMO's all together. I'm tired of feeling like all I have to fall back on is wow/ffxiv/runescape to satiate my desire for an MMO. I'm so tired of the current formulas, the micro transactions, the p2w in every game, the destruction of in game communities for the sake of convenience and catering to casual players who only play for 1/2 months when a new expansion comes out anyway.
I look forward to joining you all on this journey and to see how my opinions change/grow over the next couple of years. If you read this thank you
if you get hyper offended or volatile over my opinions I'm not sorry, I am not responsible for your feelings or your projection of other stressers in your life.But anyway what are your takes? What did you enjoy this phase? What changes do you wanna see?
1