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My Alpha 1 Testing experience

Hey AoC community I was wanting to comment on my experiences of my time during the most recent testing. Typically I'm able to vent/comment on my experiences during my stream, however having AoC on a NDA, I'm having to resort to text. (Sorry if this comes off as ranty) 

First off I want to thank everyone at Intrepid Studios (including the sandal lord himself) for providing us with a truly great core of a game. (AT SUCH A FAST PACE!) It truly is remarkable how fast they developed and created this game in a genre which is notorious for taking forever. 

Now there are your typical bugs, launcher crashes, client crashes, clipping, and other such things that you'd find in an Alpha build of a game. But besides that, Intrepid really polished up their game, I personally didn't have any troubles finding games, and staying in them. 

However, saying all this my biggest concern is performance. Now I know most of alpha is focused on the combat system and they're going to improve it. But I'd be lying if I said it wasn't clunky. Any projectiles in the game weren't visible to me. I'm not sure if my computer had something to do with it, I had task manager running in the background and I was hitting 90-95% on my GPU so...That's not good. But any projectile sent from a bow or wand wasn't visible to me so I had to just spam my shots on my opponents hoping some would hit. That brings me to my second point, the zooming in on a crossbow or wand was a terrible experience, not only would I be hitting 10-15 fps, but I'd also be guessing where I was shooting cause again, invisible projectiles. 

Aside from the minor clunky troubles, AoC was beautiful. (for an alpha game) But where their skill really showed was the particle effects and overall visuals of the abilities you could use. Truly remarkable, nothing like getting away with 5 hp and having this great purple rift open up by blinking away. 

That concludes my sorta review/rant/experience of AoC, let me know what you guys think, and what your experience was going into AoC for the first time. And for those who haven't tried it yet, all you need to know is: PRAISE THE SANDAL LORD.

Comments

  • ArchivedUserArchivedUser Guest
    edited September 2018
    You want high GPU usage, ideally you want a consistent 99%
  • Envy said:
    You want high GPU usage, ideally you want a consistent 99%
    Lol better hope you have a hell of a good cooling system.
  • Seems my comment vanished?...

    My 2 cents for the first day.  Don't want to open a new thread because of my two issues.

    1. Download took forever, I don't know if the download has been optimised for the US but I tested it with a friend. He made it in 15 minutes in the USA to download it, for me in the EU it took 
    3 hours with the same connection speed. Maybe am unlucky but don't think so.

    2. The release time for EU people was also not good. When you release an alpha at 11 PM on Sunday, not a lot of people can play it in EU because they go to work or as I said have to wait until next morning download finished.

    3. Show appropriate error message. Example "You are not authorized to access the service" would lead me to submit a support ticket because I think the alpha access you gave me is wrong. 

    And then you want to login to test, and servers are down...
    ______________


    So what I would love to see in the next phases.

    1. Distribute downloads from different locations (EU, US, Asia etc.), so you have not a heavy load on one infostructure and better connections for locals. As well the timing that everyone has a good timeframe to test don't have to play at 2 AM. 

    2. Better communication with the community / overall, I still don't know should I report bugs to Support, to Forum, when are the next alpha time test phase and so on. 

    I already complained about that on Kickstarter because all moved without significant clarification to the community forum.

  • Sikuba said:8
    Envy said:
    You want high GPU usage, ideally you want a consistent 99%
    Lol better hope you have a hell of a good cooling system.
    They're designed to run and be cooled at 99% GPU usage. 

    I run Overwatch at 99% 75c on air.
  • Envy said:
    Sikuba said:8
    Envy said:
    You want high GPU usage, ideally you want a consistent 99%
    Lol better hope you have a hell of a good cooling system.
    They're designed to run and be cooled at 99% GPU usage. 

    I run Overwatch at 99% 75c on air.
    Oh whoops forgot for a moment that some people don't have the same issues I have with a laptop :p. I mean, I like the functionality/portability of it and a 6gb 1060 runs everything just fine, but goddamn can it get hot. An external fan to go underneath is practically mandatory. And the model itself has pretty strong fans to begin with.
  • Major problems for me was still trying to put house back in order after Hurricane Florence came through.  Received email about 20:00 hours here on east coast.  There was just the codes to get into the game.  No times posted for when you could start down loading the game nor posted times to play.  
    Entered the codes and could not click on NDA to be able to read them.  Gave up on trying to test the game. 
    You should start the down load at least 24 hours before the start of testing with times for everything posted in the emails. 
    My rateing for this testing period is zero out of ten.
  • Download took me about 40 minutes.

    Most of my buttons in the lobby didn't work or they didn't show anything.  Only thing I could manipulate was the armor.

    1st Try (2 mins to launch) - Loaded into a screen with a sword, nobody around me and was bumped out after 10 seconds.

    2nd Try (30 mins of watching a counter clockwise spinning thingy) - gave up and reloaded.

    3rd Try (30 mins of watching a counter clockwise spinning thingy) - gave up and reloaded.

    4th Try (4 mins to launch) - Loaded into a hilly area with a sword, nobody around me and was bumped out after 2 seconds.

    Went to look for anywhere that would give me some information on bugs/issues and where I could give feedback.  Couldn't find any so shut down for the night.  Today, I looked again and resorted to using the forums to post my experience.

    Steven, for the love of whatever God, please use the forums to pass on information.  Let us know where to go to get up to date information on how we give feedback for the stress test.  You always say you want feedback, give us a means and a common area to do that.  If your answer is go to Discord, then why have forums?  BTW, I went to Discord...didn't see any channel that says Alpha Stress Testing or Feedback for Stress Testing.

    I'm going to delete my launcher and try to reload it (in the event that it is the launcher that is giving me the problem), if I don't see something that would dissuade me from going this route (I'll wait a few hours to see if there is a response from someone who actually is an employee of Intrepid).

    I'm not angry, just a little frustrated.  I'm hoping that the next stress test will allow me to give better feedback.  BTW, if there a site/place to go that tells us when the next stress test is?

  • It seems that most people had troubles initially downloading the client, I never had this issue. The only problem I had with the client downloading was when I re-launched the launcher I had to re-download the client. It was just a bug and fixed itself within the minute. However, @Lex1961 I believe Steven keeps a tight eye and updates frequently on the official AoC discord. You should try there, if you get the alpha tester tag you can play with other alpha testers and post your bugs there.

  • I didn't have problems downloading the client either, it hung up once or twice, but not for too long.  I did have to reset the game once when it was stuck in a loading screen. I was able to run about 6 matches and thought it was fairly smooth for an early alpha game.
  • You should start the down load at least 24 hours before the start of testing with times for everything posted in the emails.  
    Then they could only test a 1 day old build.
  • I had no problems with the download. But that appears to be mostly luck.
  • I managed to download the game in about 6 minutes myself. US/Midwest
  • Seaber said:
    You should start the down load at least 24 hours before the start of testing with times for everything posted in the emails.  
    Then they could only test a 1 day old build.
    True, but it would also give them a way to test their auto game updater with any last second build changes, bug fixes or adds to the locked 24 hour game build as test starts.
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