Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place five 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 five 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.
Weekly Feedback - 01/20/2025
Greetings, Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Please share your top 3-5 most critical issues in the thread below using the following format:
======================
Alpha Two Phase II Feedback
Top 3-5 Most Important Bugs:
1.
2.
3.
Top 3-5 Most Important Feedback Topics:
1.
2.
3.
======================
To keep the thread organized, we kindly ask that you avoid back-and-forth discussions, and stick to the format above for your posts. We'll be closing the thread on Tuesday, 10 AM PST
Important Note: While we greatly value your insights, please understand that we cannot guarantee all bugs or feedback topics will be addressed, or provide a specific timeframe for fixes.
Thank you for your continued support, feedback, and dedication to improving the Alpha Two experience!
Please share your top 3-5 most critical issues in the thread below using the following format:
======================
Alpha Two Phase II Feedback
Top 3-5 Most Important Bugs:
1.
2.
3.
Top 3-5 Most Important Feedback Topics:
1.
2.
3.
======================
To keep the thread organized, we kindly ask that you avoid back-and-forth discussions, and stick to the format above for your posts. We'll be closing the thread on Tuesday, 10 AM PST
Important Note: While we greatly value your insights, please understand that we cannot guarantee all bugs or feedback topics will be addressed, or provide a specific timeframe for fixes.
Thank you for your continued support, feedback, and dedication to improving the Alpha Two experience!
1
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
1. Crashing seems to happen quite a lot. With an especially punishing death mechanic, this can get quite exhausting.
2. Trying to do the introductory Caravan quest for the first time, another melee player about 6 levels higher was able to murder us in the driver seat in just a few swings. I was led to believe that the driver could not be targeted, but if this isn't a bug, it sure seems like a bizarre design choice.
3. Named commission enemies not spawning or taking a tremendously long time to spawn.
Top 3-5 Most Important Feedback Topics:
1. Showing a friend the ropes, by around level 8, he asked me, "So is this it? Is this the game?" All I could tell him was that it's Alpha and all the systems aren't in yet, but from his perspective it seemed like the only things to do are (1) gather and craft, (2) get into a farm group and grind for experience, or (3) PvP. And frankly, I couldn't say he was wrong. It might be helpful to know what is coming down the pipeline, what still needs to be implemented, and how it opens up the list of "what I can do ingame today."
2. Similar to Point #1, if a person has no interest in PvP whatsoever, this game does not feel like it has a place for them. When I backed the kickstarter, the emphasis was on the node system ... a living, evolving world where players' actions affected the unfolding narrative. This felt like a PvE Sandbox world. But at present, the PvE and crafting systems feel like they exist just in service of PvP, not alongside or as an alternative. Many design decisions feel like they are intentionally punishing: player death, grinding for levels, struggling to make money to keep up with repairs let alone buy new gear. There are minimal (if any) consequences for looting other players' bodies, so a string of bad luck can completely wipe out all the gains you've made.
3. As a result of 1 and 2, the game in its current state (and what feels like its current design direction) feels focused on an incredibly niche market: the EVE Online style PvP crowd. This emphasis on guild politics and drama and player conflict bears no resemblance to the vision of the kickstarter. Caravans, Node Wars, and Guild Wars are all major systems that are pretty well closed off to non-PvPers. And it feels like the game was never tested with griefers in mind, people who don't care about reward or consequences but just enjoy being complete jerks.
Alpha Two Phase II Feedback
Top 3-5 Most Important Bugs:
1. Inventory bugs that require mounting/discount or relogging. X.x
2. Random crashes/freezes has been a lot more frequent recently.
3. Hunting (the artisan profession) rarity still not working(?)
Top 3-5 Most Important Feedback Topics:
1. Important resources being too limited and spawn camped. Raptors should be added to either the tropics or the desert to lessen the bottleneck effect.
2. Please do not make mounts permanently killable/add a finit duration to them. There is enough progression reversal in AoC as it is without it. :x
3. Mount scaling - some mounts just feel so ... Unfortunate. Skinwalkers, as an example, look so very cool but are completely useless next to the higher tier horses and all the other t2 mounts.
======== ==============
2. Node warehouse and bag inventory desync. This is very similar to number 1, except it happens at least 3x - literally - every time I am moving resource between the warehouse and my bag. Everyone hates plumbing issues, and there are some serious leaks in the system. As with number 1, the only fix is to relog.
3. Wingardium leviosa. My horse/wolf/bear are not flying mounts, but they cleary have ambitions because they float all the time. This is pretty easy to reproduce, just jump down from a minor ledge twice in a row. Boom. My mount is an enlightened being. The only fix is desummon / resummon.
Top 3-5 Most Important Bugs:
1) Players camping near high-traffic group camps, training mobs, onto AOE mechanics, running off, then coming back to loot dead players stash and only having to run a few feet away to lose their purple PvP tag.
Player that get flagged for PvP due to looting another player's stash - those players are untargetable for retaliation (literally cannot target them to cast spells).
2) Income of coin vs gear and repair costs before level 10 is unbalanced. gear and repairs are far too expensive for how little money there is to be made, let alone having a surplus of coin.
3) to echo Arkazon's comment -- it feels like the game design has not factored in griefers.There are no encounters for mobs, so they freely pull, and can be easily dumped on a group of other players with the sole purpose of having the other group die to mobs, and then stealing their stash after they die. Mixed that with the length of time it takes to run back to a camp (think upper floors of Church at level 9-10), and there's no real way to retaliate against them because you simply cannot return to the area fast enough to do anything about it. Honestly this part of the game is a MAJOR turn off and unsolved will leave you a MOBA-like community of toxic players.
1. Caravan Cargo does not appear immediately upon delivery.
2. Cargo once it decides to appear, has zero value.
3. Commodities Vendor will not buy this Cargo either.
Top 3-5 Most Important Feedback Topics:
1. Caravan Drivers are being hit by NPC and Player AoE, taking negative XP loss.
2. Caravan Drivers are killed by players AoE, and caravan left untouched, Drivers left to run back as harassment.
3. Caravan Drivers are taking AoE damage while Driving the Caravan. There is zero chance a low level Driver will survive.
4. Clicking Defend Caravan does not give you a Defend Caravan Quest, or Give any rewards upon delivery.
5. There is no Caravan Defense Commission in LionsHold or Samia's Hope.
1. Inventory desync or whatever it is that causes you to not be able to move items
2. General desync. Has caused me to lose a lot of stuff on a corpse run. I get back to corpse but along the way the server has desync and now nothing is there. No me or mobs. By the time you relog to fix stuff is lost. The death is already punishing enough without the additional lost items.
3. Key bindings still not working for left movement. It always binds to the right. As someone who uses non traditional movement it makes it hard. Turning with keyboard is too slow to be useful even if it worked.
Top 3-5 Most Important Feedback Topics:
1. Too grindy with no reward for the effort. Kill X mob 200K times to level is only testing patience. I have very little of that so just gather and craft. If the goal is to get more people to push limits and find issues grinding is just doing the same thing over and over in a crowded area with others.
2.
3.
======================
1. Mobs being either green or undamagable.
2. Treasure map chests being lootable by other players but not cancelling your quest or notification. You can end up looking for hours for a treasure.
3. Lags/bugged movement when crossing server boundaries.
Top 3-5 Most Important Feedback Topics:
1. Artisan levels too slowly compared to character level (including node leveling). When reaching level 10 you are no where close to being able to craft your own level 10 gear. I think it would be nice to have that option at least for artisan focused players.
2.There is no PVP on your way to level 20 unless you really try. PvP being a big part of the game I feel there should be some light PvP situations while leveling as well.
3.Marketplace is very confusing atm. Its hard to figure out what items are needed and being sold. What prices are items being sold for. Also searching for specific items is very hard.
4. Render distance can be very short range.
Top 3-5 Most Important Bugs:
1. Non combat Aggro (training on people and getting aggro not fighting that mob)
2. INVENTORY and bank not updating/ Glint pickup bug
3. Quests not having items needed or being able to finish due to length of text on quest info
Top 3-5 Most Important Feedback Topics:
1. Attackers of caravans need a major 'risk' such as becoming flagged for long times / reputation in that zone and becoming KoS by guards for long timer
2. Body looters only having to hide for 1 min is rather short should be like 10 mins.. incorprate some risk to being a killer/looter. Unable to kill/loot anyone like 5 levels different. Both ways so 20x level 15s cant gank a lvl 25... but also a lvl 25 cant just run around killing noobs.
3. Make copper and iron a 50/50 chance on that node spawn or something to have more t1/t2 'needed by all' resources like zinc and copper more available. Otherwise it just stagnates as people slowly get nowhere crafting and a ton of iron nodes etc just sit untapped and uneeded due to crafting bench tiers not being at that level anyway let alone players having that high of skill
======================
1. Mob training / aggro. Currently if a player social aggros a mob by running past them, they get a small bit of aggro. They will then take those mobs to groups actively farming (knowing that AoEs are happening in these locations) and wait for the mobs to wipe the group. They can then loot the ash piles and take off with limited negative ramifications. - Would suggest a stacking PvP timer for ash piles (ex: 30 seconds per pile looted with a cap at X minutes force flagged).
2. Zone workers in high traffic / farm areas seem a bit overwhelmed during peak hours (night time, EST). Areas like Carph / Steel / etc suffer from lag and desync.
3. When desync occurs, spells such as the Mage's Magma Field get stuck in an animation lock. This can happen during server lag or if a mob is in a glitched state (takes 0 damage or stuck). Minor inconvenience but something noteworthy.
4. GPU Usage, it seems that no matter what your graphics card / settings are your GPU is screaming at 80-90% usage.
Top 3-5 Most Important Feedback Topics:
1. Character slots - We currently have 5 per server with 6 classes available to test and a 7th around the corner. A nice QoL change would be to add 3 additional slots (1 for each of the planned classes). This way alt lovers and people who genuinely do not know what class they'll enjoy can try them all. Obviously we could start on another server but that has it's downsides as well.
2. Starter quest necklace - Useless item (for now) BUT could be neat if we had a quest line that allowed it to level from Rare to Heroic and add value such as ability to traverse the locked gates near Lionshold allowing easier passage from one side of the map to the other.
3. Carph mobs are all over the place from the bottom floor -> floor 3. It would be nice to see those mobs in their actual spawn locations (Prisma sometimes is vibing in a wall on the stairwell leading to 3, for example).
1. People training mobs onto groups easily
2. Quests that appear to be bugged like quick teddy not spawning (sat around for over an hour even at night and no spawn) A few others that are received early.
Top 3-5 Most Important Feedback Topics:
1. Hunting feels very weird as a mechanic at the moment as its not easily understood how it works IMO. Would prefer a typical skin defeated mob thing that perhaps only procs x% of the time. Or use special weapon to hunt.
2. Some gathering nodes around starter level are too high for anyone to get anything interesting. Feels bad to be like ok let me mine and you see all the shiny but got to go a some boring static cluster of basic rocks. Let the starting gathering levels be able to mine or gather more type of nodes even if it means it has a failure rate with it.
3. Please put more tools in to stop mob training on groups, you made mobs challenging, now solo players can very easily wipe groups by simply pulling a few extra mobs and running them into groups. Maybe create a skill or item that is literally a flag that a group can place down and it creates maybe something similar to the caravan mechanic you have. Its a clearly defined zone, higher tiers have larger radius or maybe some perks, any player that enters that is not part of the group gets a warning that they will become flagged in 15 seconds to that group for pvp. Also for players of that group they can only agro and damage mobs that spawn within the radius and anything pulled into that circle has to meet some other criteria before it can be attacked. Simply put, give a tool that lets the group decide to pvp any player that wants to train mobs but also make it a pain to even try if at all possible to train mobs.
4. I am sure more is planned but would prefer there to be more to a lot of the grind spots such as events, or extremely difficult to clear areas that lead to better grinding spots and bosses. Just need something more to the grind than kill respawns for 50 hours.
1. Node Stealing, You hit node, another player higher rank hit resource node and completes first and gets item.Way to lock node to the person who hits it first?
2. Ghost mobs, getting hit and chased by mobs you can't see. Many mobs are in rocks, in the ground or are invisible. they attack you and you can't hit them or sometimes even see them.
3. Mob aggro. mobs are too aggressive and attack even when they can't see you. No line of sight. If a mob is green or light blue - why are they attacking - they are just annoying.
Top 3-5 Most Important Feedback Topics:
1. Artisan xp / leveling - craafting is just too expensive an cumbersome
2. Copper - Copper - where is that dang node anyways - this has been an issue since day 1 and yet not fixed
3. mob trains - they still happening even after so called fix. Griefing in the game will never allow the game to be a success. This issue was fixed in all other major games - why can't you fix it?
4. Goes with 3 - death looters. need to lock loot for a period after death so we can retrieve n discourage looting. If not in PVP mode, why is our death loot available anyways
Alpha Two Phase II Feedback - Disclaimer: Basically didn't play this week.
Top 3-5 Most Important Bugs:
1. Untargetable or otherwise glitched mobs
2. Bizarre character inventory behaviors
3. Storage bugs
Top 3-5 Most Important Feedback Topics:
1. Still don't know which way to test even basic economy stuff (went with UBI-Caravans and therefore didn't bother) - https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/64234/econ-friday-ranting-a-reference-post
2. Artisanship system still seems so disconnected from mostgameplay for non-Gatherers that it's painful
3. Still no comfort login triggers to mitigate the first two things - https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/64692/splinter-topic-the-comfort-nostalgia-login
4. Somehow, the current focus on Treasure Map content is just straight up annoying me (entirely a 'me' issue, pretty sure, but mentioning anyway)
======================
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
There is no space for player skill expression in the game, there is no space for being an underdog player or guild if stats dominate everything else. There is no space to even start talking about class balance in the context of 1v1 or group pvp.
It's all out damage stat race, which brings up your damage output to insane levels from single ability casts. We are back to a scenario, where you are able to 1-2 shot people.
We had the rarity gear nerfs during Phase 1, those came pretty late. The current issues are equally as obvious. Why aren't those issues closely tracked? Why the math behind the stats, the damage output and defensive stats has not been done?
This should have been hot fixed weeks ago, I mean the power gap between geared and not geared players is surely not intended. I have little interest in a game which allows me to 1 shot my opponents due to stat differences. The life of underdog in Ashes has to offer a sensible access to the game content or the population will just die.
If the power gap is intentional, please can we have a statement about it, so those of us who care about balanced and fun pvp experience can direct our attention elsewhere?
Thanks
Blown past falling sands…
1. Mob pathing
2. Loot/XP bugs
3. Memory leaks causing crashes
Top 3-5 Most Important Feedback Topics:
1. Level grind is rough and mind numbing
2. Toxicity and "sweaty" culture
3. System loops not being accessible until max level - especially crafting
4. Tanks, please we need some love
Below is my feedback regarding the January 20th session:
Inventory and loot bug
The issue is still present and remains quite troublesome overall: you often have to relaunch the game or mount/dismount to get inventory and loot to work properly.
Group desynchronization bug
We encountered several instances in Sephi where some group members stopped gaining XP altogether.
Scarabs and scorpions in the desert
In the desert area to the left, part of our group could see and interact with the mobs normally, while the other part didn’t see any mobs at all. This issue was particularly noticeable on Monday evening and intensified toward the end of the night. Personally, I couldn’t even see half of the mobs, although they were still attacking me (invisible). There were also significant rollbacks exclusively in that zone.
My feedback
1- Warning about “griefing”
I would like to draw attention to this kind of behavior, which is actually banned in many other games (DAoC, WoW, etc.). I distinguish between a player or group who happens to run through an area and unintentionally aggro mobs, and a level 25 player (whom I have personally reported to your service—let’s refer to him as “N”) who deliberately gathers large packs of mobs in Sephi and unleashes them on lower-level groups (levels 15–19) trying to level up.
This causes repeated wipes, discourages new players, and creates a poor impression of the game. It’s a small minority of players engaging in this behavior (often from the same guilds), but it negatively affects the majority. Even if the aggressor eventually goes “purple,” a level 15 character has no chance against a level 25. Plus, these players don’t just do it once—they might continue all evening, ultimately frustrating multiple groups.
I understand that PvP is part of the game, but this is far from fair combat, and if nothing is done, the same pattern may emerge at level 50.
2- Resource camping
Right now, it’s too easy for a single player to “time” the fixed respawn of mobs and resources, then collect all loot on an optimized route. I suggest implementing a random timer (e.g., -15 to +15 minutes) for each resource so that a single person cannot monopolize them so systematically.
3- Gear taking precedence over gameplay
I feel like the game is trending toward a model where gear heavily outweighs gameplay. Although it’s still early in development, I’m concerned about the direction this is heading. It’s starting to resemble an “ArcheAge-like” structure, where someone who manages to get a +10 legendary weapon becomes virtually unbeatable. Even though crafting these weapons is challenging, quite a few are already in circulation, quickly unbalancing fights.
As a result, it’s hard to really measure class mastery when so much revolves around gear power in PvP and PvE.
4- Role of support classes
I currently play a Bard, which is supposed to be a support class, but I often feel like I deal more damage than I actually support my team. I plan to re-examine this, but I’d really like to see a more robust support role, with real buffs, debuffs, and area control—similar to what we saw in DAoC—rather than just a damage buff or a “song.”
Furthermore, perhaps support classes shouldn’t deal as much damage, because right now they can be deadly in duels: they have the same weapons as everyone else, plus healing and protective spells.
Thank you for reading, and I am available for any further discussion.