Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Feedback after the first weeks of phase 2 [continuously updating]
MilosAoC
Member, Alpha Two
Ive probably put around 18h a day into phase 2 most days during this 2 week holiday period. Il just use this post to put down my thoughts and give some feedback. I understand that some of my opinions might be different from others because i play in a very active and competitive guild.
Let me start out by stating some of the bugs that i have experienced most during this initial part of phase 2:
Il now just briefly talk about some aspects of the test:
World bosses:
A huge issue i have with world bosses at the moment is that they all respawn after a server restart. I play on EU, this means that if i want to be part of the boss kills, i have to be awake at 2AM every day. This is non sustainable, but due to the competitive nature of my guild we have a full 40 man on at 2am regardless because we enjoy doing this shit and want the DKP (testing our system for later phases).
Another issue is that worldbosses seem to not reset their internal state of who has the tag on the boss. If a guild does 50% damage and then the boss resets, that 50% damage is still remembered when it dies after. When the boss resets, it should forget all prior damage done to it so the correct people get the tag and loot.
Befallen forge is cool, but all bosses but 1 are easy to do in a group of 8, i hope we see some true raid content soon.
Open world "PvP":
I think the open world pvp element of the game right now is extremely frustrating. I think the main reason for this is the overtuning of the corruption system. Right now, going corrupt is simply not an option, its never worth doing in any scenario. This has the effect that every contested spot turns into an afk fest where people logout and then log back in whenever the thing they want spawns, then everyone just does a dps race or hits the air afk for 5 minutes to get first tag, and you just feel like youre wasting your time as you simply cannot contest these people for the spot. This happens with resource nodes, mob spawns, hunting spawns, basically everything in the game worth aquiring.
Not being able to just kill a guy or 2 from time to time also has the effect that all the pvp interactions outside of the pvp events turn into grief fests. If the player is so heavily discouraged from killing another player himself, he will obviously try to find ways around this to still get rid of those players, by for example mob training or ccing in order to get them killed. This type of gameplay is simply the only option if you dont want to waste your time being extremely inefficient.
I hope intrepid tunes the corruption system to be more inline with what they envision for the final product, so we can properly test their vision of open world pvp.
Gathering
I personally really like how scarce resources are right now. Its probably slightly too scarce, but shouldnt be changed too much IMO. People that actually put in the time to gather have loads of the basic materials. I think the market right now for quality materials is super healthy, theres deals being made, you feel great if you can snipe a piece of the market for a good price, and they are obviously incredibly valuable for crafting purposes.
The main issue is see with the gathering is higher tier resources taking up spawns of lower tier resources. I think there should be a system where an unharvested resource node is rotated every x hours, so that these higher tier nodes that dont get harvested dont persist for so long and will turn into something u can farm in a reasonable amount of time. I believe this alone will be plenty to satisfy people who complain about the scarcity.
One thing i dont like though is how 1 node will respawn in the same rarity multipel times. Ive seen this in multiple games where for some reason, they choose for this approach. Why not let it be fully random? Just make every resource spawn with a chance of being any rarity instead of forcing people to logout on a node and log in every 2 hours and hope that someone didnt press f before them? Is this some technical limitation?
Crafting and processing:
Im personally not a crafter, but my group has worked together to craft many pieces. I see so many people saying that crafting is not worth it, which is completely untrue. If you want BiS stuff, you need to craft. You can craft these pieces right now if you put in the effort and it feels great to get them.
regarding processing, please just give us the ability to process a custom amount of resources at once instead of only fixed amounts. People wanna do other stuff during it, and when you have a non multiple of 5 amount of things to process you are generally not a happy game as you have to stand there to queue up 1 thing 4 times, theres simply no justification for this.
Caravans:
The caravan system is pretty nice when it all works. Outside of the aforementioned bugs, the biggest issue with them is how the events and signing up to them works. People can simply not sign up to the event and still heal people inside the events. This is extremely annoying and needs to be fixed.
I feel like theres some optimization issues with caravans. Ive experienced heavy fps drops when looking at just 1 at times, and when theres more than 6 the chances of crashing for me go up significantly.
Nodes:
I also think all node elections should happen at the same tim to avoid people leaving citizenship and thus being able to cheese multiple elections.
Additional thoughts:
Let me start out by stating some of the bugs that i have experienced most during this initial part of phase 2:
- Various bugs related to caravans, ranging from them disappearing (especially when transitioning them from raft to weagon and the other way around) to randomly getting teleported to carphin while riding them
- Inventory UI getting desynced, requiring you to mount/dismount or relog to fix your inventory
- Weapon finisher procs do not work correctly, if you spec them for 1 weapon and unequip it, the finisher effects of the old weapon will still work on the newly equipped weapon, this stacks up to all weapons
- Quest items can be used as storage. This is clearly not intended but has proved to be a pretty valuable quality of life. Maybe this indicates a slight buff in stacksizes would be in order?
- Drowning doesnt apply death penalties, meaning you can infinitely drown yourself to respawn somewhere else. This has probably been the absolute biggest QoL bug there was during this alpha. When walking around in this test 18h a day, its a relief to not have to walk across the entire map 20x a day. I think it would be good if intrepid added something like a free teleport to your home shrine ever 1-2 hours or so.
- Stats from scrolls bug out when you die or relog. You have to do a full hard reset/relog (go eu <-> na) to fix it.
- Stats from broken gear dont get reapplied after repairing them. You have to reequip the item
Il now just briefly talk about some aspects of the test:
World bosses:
A huge issue i have with world bosses at the moment is that they all respawn after a server restart. I play on EU, this means that if i want to be part of the boss kills, i have to be awake at 2AM every day. This is non sustainable, but due to the competitive nature of my guild we have a full 40 man on at 2am regardless because we enjoy doing this shit and want the DKP (testing our system for later phases).
Another issue is that worldbosses seem to not reset their internal state of who has the tag on the boss. If a guild does 50% damage and then the boss resets, that 50% damage is still remembered when it dies after. When the boss resets, it should forget all prior damage done to it so the correct people get the tag and loot.
Befallen forge is cool, but all bosses but 1 are easy to do in a group of 8, i hope we see some true raid content soon.
Open world "PvP":
I think the open world pvp element of the game right now is extremely frustrating. I think the main reason for this is the overtuning of the corruption system. Right now, going corrupt is simply not an option, its never worth doing in any scenario. This has the effect that every contested spot turns into an afk fest where people logout and then log back in whenever the thing they want spawns, then everyone just does a dps race or hits the air afk for 5 minutes to get first tag, and you just feel like youre wasting your time as you simply cannot contest these people for the spot. This happens with resource nodes, mob spawns, hunting spawns, basically everything in the game worth aquiring.
Not being able to just kill a guy or 2 from time to time also has the effect that all the pvp interactions outside of the pvp events turn into grief fests. If the player is so heavily discouraged from killing another player himself, he will obviously try to find ways around this to still get rid of those players, by for example mob training or ccing in order to get them killed. This type of gameplay is simply the only option if you dont want to waste your time being extremely inefficient.
I hope intrepid tunes the corruption system to be more inline with what they envision for the final product, so we can properly test their vision of open world pvp.
Gathering
I personally really like how scarce resources are right now. Its probably slightly too scarce, but shouldnt be changed too much IMO. People that actually put in the time to gather have loads of the basic materials. I think the market right now for quality materials is super healthy, theres deals being made, you feel great if you can snipe a piece of the market for a good price, and they are obviously incredibly valuable for crafting purposes.
The main issue is see with the gathering is higher tier resources taking up spawns of lower tier resources. I think there should be a system where an unharvested resource node is rotated every x hours, so that these higher tier nodes that dont get harvested dont persist for so long and will turn into something u can farm in a reasonable amount of time. I believe this alone will be plenty to satisfy people who complain about the scarcity.
One thing i dont like though is how 1 node will respawn in the same rarity multipel times. Ive seen this in multiple games where for some reason, they choose for this approach. Why not let it be fully random? Just make every resource spawn with a chance of being any rarity instead of forcing people to logout on a node and log in every 2 hours and hope that someone didnt press f before them? Is this some technical limitation?
Crafting and processing:
Im personally not a crafter, but my group has worked together to craft many pieces. I see so many people saying that crafting is not worth it, which is completely untrue. If you want BiS stuff, you need to craft. You can craft these pieces right now if you put in the effort and it feels great to get them.
regarding processing, please just give us the ability to process a custom amount of resources at once instead of only fixed amounts. People wanna do other stuff during it, and when you have a non multiple of 5 amount of things to process you are generally not a happy game as you have to stand there to queue up 1 thing 4 times, theres simply no justification for this.
Caravans:
The caravan system is pretty nice when it all works. Outside of the aforementioned bugs, the biggest issue with them is how the events and signing up to them works. People can simply not sign up to the event and still heal people inside the events. This is extremely annoying and needs to be fixed.
I feel like theres some optimization issues with caravans. Ive experienced heavy fps drops when looking at just 1 at times, and when theres more than 6 the chances of crashing for me go up significantly.
Nodes:
I also think all node elections should happen at the same tim to avoid people leaving citizenship and thus being able to cheese multiple elections.
Additional thoughts:
- Id love it if we can get a larger compas, maybe just on the top of the screen instead of such a small on only on the mini map
- We need some clear rules about what is and what is not a punishable offense. Half the people accuse you of exploiting for as much as breathing in this game, and there has been concern around people getting punished seemingly arbitrarily based on how much attention a particular situation gets. This is very bad.
- There should probably be an increase on respawn timer when dying in rapid succession. If you die twice in a row fast the second time you respawn should take longer.
- Damage still outscales hp way too hard on gear. This has the effect that the TTK keeps getting lower and lower. Please reballance the gear a bit so that you also get some more HP when u get better gear.
- Taking pvp damage as a combatant should reset the flag timer. Right now its always a guess if youre gonna go corrupt when killing a combatant because they might turn into a non combatant in the middle of you killing them.
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