Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Dear Intrepid, you are unnecessarily killing a lot of people's desire to test the game for you.
Nerror
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
The start of phase 2 has been badly handled I think. It's like you forgot the perspective of your testing base.
My assumption is that you want to keep a lot of testers happily engaged and testing in the future as well, and that this isn't some social experiment in misery. In order for that to happen, the fun has to outweigh the suck at least a little. For the EU base, you really missed the mark. I don't know how bad it is on the NA servers.
1. End of phase 1
The drop off in the amount of active players you saw near the end of phase 1 wasn't people generally losing interest in testing the game. It was primarily because of the incoming wipe. Instead of playing, they spent time planning where to go and what to do in phase 2. Many big PvP guilds were going to Lotharia and more casual PvX guilds were going on other servers etc. Less than 24 hours before phase 2, all those plans were completely disrupted by the announcement that EU only got one server (and NA one or two). That alone caused disappointment and a loss of people's desire to test the game for you.
2. Content drought
It's blindingly obvious that the current content in the game cannot support this number of players on one server, even without the bugs causing mobs not to respawn. This was obvious during phase 1. Sure, the servers might be close to be able to handling the number of people, and you definitely need to test that and iron out those bugs. But you are shooting yourselves in the foot by making that the default and only option for the testing base.
Once both the desert and the tropics are fully populated with content and nodes, will there be enough content for this many people. Right now that is clearly not the case
Punish us on PTR. We like that. Take the regular PROD servers down for a week and mash us all into one big family on one server to really stress everything server related. That's fine too. But creating only one testing environment you have to have known wasn't ready content-wise as the only testing option, is not. You are killing the desire for people to test for you.
3. People are much less likely to write /bug reports
The scarcity of mobs and resources cause people to feel a sense of urgency in what they are doing. We have 2+ full groups of people contesting spots that can only really support 3-4 players. The sense of urgency and competition doesn't give people any incentive to stop and type /bug. It's rather the opposite. You have access to the numbers, but I bet the avg. number of bug reports per player has gone down a lot in phase 2 compared to previous phases, and it's not because the game is now bug free at all. Especially during prime time. People are just too busy contesting the poor mobs and resources. You are killing the desire/time for people to report bugs.
I don't want this to be a wall of text, so I'll end it here. Please Intrepid, take this feedback, and the feedback from many similar posts, to heart. I want to test, my friends want to test, people are happy to test, but not at any level of suck if the fun doesn't match. I am guessing we'll see a fairly large drop in testers in the next few days/weeks, and it'll largely be because of this, not because the game as it is right now can't also be fun with the right amount of testers per server.
My assumption is that you want to keep a lot of testers happily engaged and testing in the future as well, and that this isn't some social experiment in misery. In order for that to happen, the fun has to outweigh the suck at least a little. For the EU base, you really missed the mark. I don't know how bad it is on the NA servers.
1. End of phase 1
The drop off in the amount of active players you saw near the end of phase 1 wasn't people generally losing interest in testing the game. It was primarily because of the incoming wipe. Instead of playing, they spent time planning where to go and what to do in phase 2. Many big PvP guilds were going to Lotharia and more casual PvX guilds were going on other servers etc. Less than 24 hours before phase 2, all those plans were completely disrupted by the announcement that EU only got one server (and NA one or two). That alone caused disappointment and a loss of people's desire to test the game for you.
2. Content drought
It's blindingly obvious that the current content in the game cannot support this number of players on one server, even without the bugs causing mobs not to respawn. This was obvious during phase 1. Sure, the servers might be close to be able to handling the number of people, and you definitely need to test that and iron out those bugs. But you are shooting yourselves in the foot by making that the default and only option for the testing base.
Once both the desert and the tropics are fully populated with content and nodes, will there be enough content for this many people. Right now that is clearly not the case
Punish us on PTR. We like that. Take the regular PROD servers down for a week and mash us all into one big family on one server to really stress everything server related. That's fine too. But creating only one testing environment you have to have known wasn't ready content-wise as the only testing option, is not. You are killing the desire for people to test for you.
3. People are much less likely to write /bug reports
The scarcity of mobs and resources cause people to feel a sense of urgency in what they are doing. We have 2+ full groups of people contesting spots that can only really support 3-4 players. The sense of urgency and competition doesn't give people any incentive to stop and type /bug. It's rather the opposite. You have access to the numbers, but I bet the avg. number of bug reports per player has gone down a lot in phase 2 compared to previous phases, and it's not because the game is now bug free at all. Especially during prime time. People are just too busy contesting the poor mobs and resources. You are killing the desire/time for people to report bugs.
I don't want this to be a wall of text, so I'll end it here. Please Intrepid, take this feedback, and the feedback from many similar posts, to heart. I want to test, my friends want to test, people are happy to test, but not at any level of suck if the fun doesn't match. I am guessing we'll see a fairly large drop in testers in the next few days/weeks, and it'll largely be because of this, not because the game as it is right now can't also be fun with the right amount of testers per server.
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Comments
Regarding player count drop, what do you say? Will they come back later?
If the intent is to drive people away with scarcity, sure. If the intent is to test a nice balance of scarcity that keep people engaged, then no.
And yes, players will probably come back if Intrepid doesn't continue or repeat the same mistake.
Steven said he and devs play along the players on the server.
I hope they don't cheat and grind with them to feel the consequence of their balancing.
If you log on and it's too full to do what you wanted to do - have a backup plan. Play another game. Or watch a stream of someone else playing. Try again another time.
If your guild disapproves of that and demands regular scheduled activities, remind them you're testing an alpha and suggest other guild activities.
Quality over quantity.
Play the game when it's enjoyable. Do something else when it's not.
The way I see it, that addresses at least point 2&3 from your list. Not sure about the server realm capacity thing.
This is the intended design. Stated from the very start.
Scarcity and meaningful conflict.
Early access not quite what you expected?
Yeah, no, horrible take on this.
My point is they are losing testers who actually want to test the game and provide feedback. Feedback I am giving them here btw. There is a balance to this. The start of Phase 1 had a fairly decent balance of players vs. amount of content to be tested. Things were crowded and contested, but not overly so like now.
So you are saying Intrepid shouldn't have sold all those alpha keys? Because they don't need the amount of testers they have? That's an odd statement I think. They clearly want a lot of players to stress the servers and that is also needed. We had two days before phase 2 started. Let's get more of those and really cram people in there, like I suggested in the OP. Just don't make that the only option is my point, because testing the actual content suffers for it.
I hope they play on the EU server then.
Not to this extent. It cannot be intended for the game to be like it currently is on the EU server. Which is the point of this thread.
To put another perspective on this that might matter to someone at Intrepid, my group contests this last statement of yours, Nerror ('despite' my efforts).
Most of them think that this is exactly what the game is intended to be like and has been all along and some people (mostly me, within the group) have just been fooling themselves the entire time about the goals of this studio.
If you start by trying to hold the perspective that bloodprophet does, can you say there's anything in the design that actually indicates otherwise?
It's what I expected. I have tested Alphas before. I'm expressing what I'm not enjoying. Over populated camps everywhere. People so frustrated everyone is trying to steal mobs. Can't even carve out a camp. Some exp spots where so full you could not get the server to render everyone there.
I know as the nodes progress new content is added. If we gonna have servers that are 10k (currently 5k phase 2 was about 3k) IMO make the nodes default to have more low level spawns and camps. Over just vast empty spaces.
Agreed they need more stuff but that will come as they progress forward.
Over populated camps and scarce resources leads to "meaningful" conflict. That is part of the game and intended. Right from the very first Kickstarter video they were clear on this. It is one of the main pillars.
Do they need to finish what they started and fill the world in. YES. Yes they do.
However it is still part of the overall design.
Then players have choices to make.
If your group or you as a solo have others move in you get to choose:
Move
Work around them
Fight it out
These choices are yours to make.
Now that the game is live, things are different.
Features are missing. balancing is a continuous process, developers are in vacation, mistakes happen or even fundamental concepts might prove to not work as intended due to players behaving differently than predicted.
And we don't have the statistics IS gathered.
Somebody (Pirate Software?) asked a few weeks ago if Steven will provide player count.
Steven said yes, he will in December.
Well, we got something but not a curve, to see how many were at peak and how player count dropped over time.
We also don't know how many are buying the wave 2 packages.
But it can also be that experiments are being done to see how players react, e.g. if EU gets 1 server instead of 2.
Experiments can be a mistake too and can have consequences.
Valtec style experiments.
I like it😈
Imagine the rating if this would be in Early Access on Steam.
Lol, that would be amazing the QQ's there would be epic.
Yes, easily. Let me illustrate.
We know that the target concurrent userbase for the entire realm is 8-10k players. This is on the entire map below, with all the content in the game, including social orgs and religions and more dungeons and POIs and a huge ocean.
We only have the riverlands with actual content, but there are some spread out spawns in the desert around the nodes and the lvl 9ish scorpions and beetles throughout. As is evident from the lack of node levels in the desert, not a whole lotta xp is gained there compared to the Riverlands.
So 10k users for the entire map, both continents, and we have 5k users for the Riverlands plus a bit of desert. The math doesn't math. It cannot be Intrepid's intended design. 5K concurrent users should be for the entire western continent including the islands and all the planned content. That is the design we're given by Intrepid.
Edit: Just eyeballing the landmass, with 10k concurrent users for the entire map spread out on land, the Riverlands should hold around 700 concurrent users. Give or take a hundred.
I disagree on the attribute "meaningful" conflict. I do agree, that the current state of the game fosters a competitive attitude amongst players, however I don't perceive this as meaningful. I do think that scarce resources or even access to certain aspects of the game should be something to compete about, and there are various examples of this already in the game:
Competition is already baked into various systems and contents of the game. However, I don't think Intrepid can honestly want to make access to the core gameplay loop a competition, because being part of a competition means by definition that you have losers and winners. In this context, loosing bascially means that you cannot play the most basic core features of the game: killing mobs and gaining XP to progress your character. Going for a design that requires a certain percentage of players being effectively unable to play the game is bad design at its core.
Fighting about rare resources or access to an open world-dungeon? Sure, that's fine. Because you can still play the game without being able to gather that one resource spot because it's guarded by players. You can also still play the game and progress even if you can't participate at node wars, run a caravan, etc. pp. There I see lots of place for meaningful conflict. But not when it comes to click on "Play" and simply wanting to play the game, i.e. complete quests and kill mobs.
This won't appeal to a wider audience. And by 'wider audience' I don't mean mainstream, or anything like that. But Ashes will need a healthy player base - e.g. causal players - because its vast open world and all the player-driven systems. Aside from that, I don't believe you'll end up with a pleasant and enjoyable playerbase if you teach them starting from level 1 that each and every player - maybe outside your guild - is a competitor. That's a sure way towards toxicity.
They let things settle and start a few weeks later.
I agree for the 90%.
They are missing a lot of content. But at this point that is expected. By me at least. This is exactly what I expected for an alpha.
The hardest part I think they are facing is managing peoples expectations. A fair amount of people heard them say a true alpha nothing is done , but their brain translated early access, as we have been trained by the industry to expect that. Then they get in and get confused by it.
I saw short the other day from Pirate Software talking about this very thing. So many companies now conflate the terms alpha and early access that most people think they are the same.
There is so much work to get done. Just seeing the world transformations over the last few weeks makes me wonder how much is done on their private servers they want to implement but are holding back as the network team is scrambling to make all their newly developed tech work and work properly.
For newer people some of the things they are working on they had to develop and build as they didn't exist before now. New stuff takes time to build.
Hard to build a house before the foundation is done.
Life happens, we figure out what went sideways, fix it and learn.
Just to be clear: I'm not talking about the alpha per se. I don't mind the current state of the game. The lack of content is to be expected in an Alpha and this doesn't bother me - because it's an alpha and because I expect the final product to be vastly different. I was referring to the design approach. If Intrepid were to design the game in such a way that even the core gameplayloop is considered an element of conflict - e.g. mob locations - then this would be atrocious gamedesign.
And because of that, I don't believe they want to go down this road. I don't perceive the current state of the levelleling experience as badly designed on purpose - i.e. they want (!) players to fight about mere mobs - but simply the result of the game being unfinished and central elements missing or being incomplete, such as quests.
No, I'm pretty casual and was invited by my brother and friends, so I have no vested interest. But I'm still giving my feedback about how completely miserable it is. I think all feedback would be important, especially from the more casual solo/small group crowd.
Aside from that i got huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge Burn-Out after the first Two Spot-Test Weekends anyway : i also felt no Desire to even try levelling my Ranger up to LvL 25, because i just knew about the incoming Wipe.
While it was funny that apparently Narc was a little bit whining about this -> Yes it takes a looooonnng time to get LvL 25 and now People who grinded like their Real Life depended on it, feel how much it took out of them and they have to do it all over again if they want to test LvL 25 Content again.
Since the Time to Phase Three is like Five Month and Ten Days now -> this time i feel a little bit more motivated to try and go for LvL 25.
But something tells me i will not even test half the Content i could, if i don't get into a Group which helps me out because alone i am as smart as a completely Booze-wasted 100 Year old trying to learn new Computer Technology of the last Five Years.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Currently no guild !! (o_o)
If only there was a prominant poster on these forums that had been saying this for years.
I feel like too much time is being wasted on things that just do not matter over the large amount of time they have spent making the game so far. Unless they are holding back tons of already made content/systems, this game feels like it will take another 8 years to actually release with the promised content.
The servers were barely passable before phase 2, and they decided to not only release less servers this time, but also do this with a brand new update, a fresh wipe of characters, and 5 days before Christmas.
This just screams no actual testing will be done and was just a horrible plan in every regard.