[Feedback] My Wishlist for Alpha 2 Launch

As we get closer to Alpha 2 testing, I think it's a good time to leave some suggestions that over the past 2 years myself and my community have been discussing to make Alpha 2 better both for testers and the wider audience that will be watching,

These are not complex or big changes/new systems, but simply some minor adjustments and ideas that might help make the experience better from day 1

- Having PK/Flagging System enabled is a MUST, we need to see the game as it is, even if that is going to make streamers unhappy, PK is part of AoC, but I do think we should not have PKing with level 1 characters. The first thing most players will try to do in Alpha 2, is as soon as the game starts "test" if we can actually kill other players, now, there are a few ways I can think of to fix this - either don't have the flagging system enabled until level 3~5, and make a quick tutorial quest with a big ass prompt explaining it, this would be my #1 suggestion, or simply don't let people delete their character if its corrupted, and get a timer of like 4 hours to make their second character after they have made the first one, something like that is necessary,

as a PvP player myself, that loves and looks forward to the flagging system and open-world pvp, I don't see any reason to have it happen at the first 2~3 levels - also, just to point out, making the starting area a safe zone is NOT the way, these will be abused in the future with players running there when being attacked.

- Have a big ass pop-up as soon as people start playing saying that clearly says "Press Z at any time to switch from Action mode to Tab-target mode" and have 2 images on the screen to force the player to choose their default mode between Action mode and Tab-target, like Sword of Legends online did in the following image

I can't stress enough how important this is, don't do like in Alpha 1 or Guild Wars 2 where theres just a tooltip or people don't even know that they can switch camera mode, I knew a lot of players in A1 that were playing in tab for days until they find out they could play in action mode, this is important and should be there as a mandatory selection in the UI as soon as we login for the first time or even after the character creator.

- Enough guild slots, if the plan is to have a cap of 300 guild members, at least let us start with 150, so annoying if we have to split into 3 or 5 guilds at first, two is fine, so starting at half the max cap would be great.

- Have a basic Duel system in place. This is something that helps both with community and guild-driven events and content creation, as well as more in-depth pvp testing, I think would be such a waste to not have a duel system as we could organize pvp tournaments, make content about it, practice with our guilds, and just have fun during testing with a easy to implement system, and please make it right, no death penalties and when your HP goes to 1 the duel ends and your HP goes back to where it was before the duel started, also, having group or a different number of participants in the duel for 2v2 or 8v5 shouldn't be too hard to code and implement.

- DLSS 3 + Frame Generation, I think this is a no-brainer, and should be extremely easy to implement with 5.2 I see no reason not to have it at the start for better performance and showcase.

- Grace period, this is a Must. If we are spending time on a queue and after 30 minutes we finally get in - and the game crashes, we SHOULD have a 5-minute grace period to log back in and skip queue, I don't understand how this is still not a thing in some games.

- Don't make too many servers, merges suck, even in A2, would rather deal with long queues than not being able to test after servers getting empty, hoping Intrepid can really push server cap to their max capacity, and if necessary have a larger game map for A2 start with more biomes/zones even if they are not content dense, if there's at least 2 castles for sieges, and grind spots we should be good to start,

- Target Markers, this is a very important UI element for Sieges/Wars/Raids.

- Small daily/weekly in-game survey with 2~3 questions max for feedback instead of a 5-page survey with +20 questions. Players don't have a big attention span, when developers do testing they 100% should send out a small survey to actually get people to read it, I believe 1 to 2 questions, max 3 is ideal to get actual answers instead of random selection just to skip it and get whatever reward it comes with.

- Please for the love of god have a screen when we first open the game and choose brightness settings to also let us set the audio level before you blow our ears out with music

That's it for me, I'd like to ask you guys are there any other (reasonable) suggestions you guys have for the start of Alpha 2?

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Depraved

im against prohibiting players from not pking at lvl 1. why restrict us?
also, guilds will start with a cap of 30 or so i think..just level it up

we gotta test guild skills too you know, so either pick size or stats.

Liniker

Depraved wrote: »

im against prohibiting players from not pking at lvl 1. why restrict us?

If you want to PK at level 1 thats the reason why they should not have it enabled, will showcase the game poorly and there is no "reward" or reason to have it, will be a complete mess with randos that don't even know about penalties killing eachother.

Depraved wrote: »

guilds will start with a cap of 30 or so i think.

lol that number would be terrible

Depraved

do you pk in l2 at level 1? im sure you dont. you can, but you dont. some of us still do low level pvp tho hahahaha.

also its an alpha, it is good to test these things. people will soon realize its not worth it to pk at level 1, but let them figure it out themselves.

i was in a 2000-3000 guild players in another game, and level 1 guilds could only hold 30 people...so we had like 100 guilds hahahaha but then you level them up and start regrouping people. also, the real guild is on discord anyways xD

Liniker

Depraved wrote: »

do you pk in l2 at level 1? im sure you dont. you can, but you dont. some of us still do low level pvp tho hahahaha.

yea I get what you are saying, but keep in mind, this is going to be watched and judged by the masses when NDA comes out, do you think would be fun for streamers/players to join in and keep getting murdered by trolls or even people that have no idea about how harsh penalties are, and will just delete their character and make a new one xd

this happened in Alpha 1 so...

and I'm hoping there will be a duel system in place so you can try pvp out at level 1 if you want

Depraved

STEAL THEIR NAMES WHEN THEY RELOG AND DELETE THE CHARACTER HAHA.

well, i agree there should be a grace period when you delete a character, a few days maybe before deletion in case you change your mind. it also prevents pk, restart, delete. but dont restrict it ;3

also, the time it takes you to relog and do all that, ill be a few levels ahead already...and maybe out of the spawn

Dygz

Ha! We’ll have to see how often they turn PvP off during Alpha 2.
🤣

Azherae

Dygz wrote: »

Ha! We’ll have to see how often they turn PvP off during Alpha 2.
🤣

They'll just make us submit a reason, in writing, with citations, whenever we initiate an attack.

Mag7spy

Dygz wrote: »

Ha! We’ll have to see how often they turn PvP off during Alpha 2.
🤣

See you in alpha 2 ;o

Kilion

Liniker wrote: »

Enough guild slots, if the plan is to have a cap of 300 guild members, at least let us start with 150, so annoying if we have to split into 3 or 5 guilds at first, two is fine, so starting at half the max cap would be great.

Hard "NO" to this. I understand that a big number of player already feel association with one group or another but the internal system was designed to have guild progression max up to 30-50 or 300 depending on the advancement options chosen, meaning the initial size of a guild will most likely be below 30 (I think you know this). Again, I am aware that since the game has long been in development and because guilds intend to migrate to Ashes from other games there is immediate demand for big guilds.
BUT the game won't consist of many big guilds from the get go, you are but the first wave, after that it is much more likely that guilds will form slowly.

I'd suggest - and yes I know it's not the same - that you focus on something else to go along with the migration of your big guild: Taking control of a Node. If you get your friends to all contribute to its growth not only will you be able to level your guild but also gain immediate control as a patron guild in that Node, which I imagine you intent to do sooner or later anyways.

So instead of asking for massive changes to the guild leveling system it might be more realistic to look for ways in which you can make the best of the systems as they are.

Veeshan

Depraved wrote: »

im against prohibiting players from not pking at lvl 1. why restrict us?
also, guilds will start with a cap of 30 or so i think..just level it up we gotta test guild skills too you know, so either pick size or stats.

because it a quick way to get new players to quit :P

Caww

Since the A2 is all about testing, I would like a feature where the Update Notes are available within a game window, both past and present, so it's just easier to see what the changes are without jumping between outside screens.

Liniker

Dygz wrote: »

Ha! We’ll have to see how often they turn PvP off during Alpha 2.
🤣

hopefully none, unless they make a really bad system that isn't working at all 😅

it should be very simple to tune the numbers and increase penalties if needed

Depraved

Veeshan wrote: »

Depraved wrote: »

im against prohibiting players from not pking at lvl 1. why restrict us?
also, guilds will start with a cap of 30 or so i think..just level it up we gotta test guild skills too you know, so either pick size or stats.

because it a quick way to get new players to quit :P

its not.

Voeltz

Liniker wrote: »

- Enough guild slots, if the plan is to have a cap of 300 guild members, at least let us start with 150, so annoying if we have to split into 3 or 5 guilds at first, two is fine, so starting at half the max cap would be great.

In that case it sounds like the system is working as intended. It shouldn't be made easy for you to amass your army of 2000 zerglings. I hope they add plenty of other anti zerg mechanics to stop people like you from ruining the game for everyone else.

Ruerik

Would like to see some kind of option during A2 that lets us keep our names between server wipes.

Probably in game friends lists are a lost cause to keep between the wipes though.

BlackBrony

PKking at level one is a great strategy to get ahead. Slow down the enemy as much as possible. Delete character, create a new one, keep PKing slowing down enemies while your guild gets all the mats.
Why ruin this awesome strategy

Liniker

Voeltz wrote: »

I hope they add plenty of other anti zerg mechanics to stop people like you from ruining the game for everyone else.

where did a big bad guild touched you?

Liniker

BlackBrony wrote: »

PKking at level one is a great strategy to get ahead. Slow down the enemy as much as possible. Delete character, create a new one, keep PKing slowing down enemies while your guild gets all the mats.
Why ruin this awesome strategy

Your post history is public, and I remember your bad takes as a PvE guy talking about how PvP is bad and annoying and the game should cater to casual,

Even tho my post is against having level 1 PK - I have a distaste for people trying to be smart with BS comments like that and you are almost convincing me actually to support it, lol

BlackBrony

Liniker wrote: »

BlackBrony wrote: »

PKking at level one is a great strategy to get ahead. Slow down the enemy as much as possible. Delete character, create a new one, keep PKing slowing down enemies while your guild gets all the mats.
Why ruin this awesome strategy

Your post history is public, and I remember your bad takes as a PvE guy talking about how PvP is bad and annoying and the game should cater to casual,

Even tho my post is against having level 1 PK - I have a distaste for people trying to be smart with BS comments like that and you are almost convincing me actually to support it, lol

People can change their minds? Plus your definition of being hardcore is just "I am a guild leader of a guild of 10000 people".
PKing a level one is a strategy, does it deter casuals? Hell yeah. Is it a valid strategy? Of course. I can be against said strategy but it's one nonetheless.

Liniker

BlackBrony wrote: »

PKing a level one is a strategy, does it deter casuals? Hell yeah. Is it a valid strategy? Of course. I can be against said strategy but it's one nonetheless.

we both know you are not being serious

Dezemi

Liniker wrote: »

BlackBrony wrote: »

PKking at level one is a great strategy to get ahead. Slow down the enemy as much as possible. Delete character, create a new one, keep PKing slowing down enemies while your guild gets all the mats.
Why ruin this awesome strategy

Your post history is public, and I remember your bad takes as a PvE guy talking about how PvP is bad and annoying and the game should cater to casual,

Even tho my post is against having level 1 PK - I have a distaste for people trying to be smart with BS comments like that and you are almost convincing me actually to support it, lol

Friendly reminder!

A) While a person might have a opinion you disagree with, they might have other opinions you agree with. The "I disagree with everything you say because you're you"-mentality is extremely unhealthy! I, as an example, agree with some things you say - but I also (as you know) disagree with some opinions of yours as well. :']

People with a healthy mental well-being can, and probably will, change their opinions as time goes by and as the current "evidence" change. :] Nothing wrong with that!

Spif

Starter areas are PK-disabled in most games. The reason for this is that creating a new character and immediately going red has no risk. You're not going to lose anything by stacking up corruption. Just delete and restart.

As far as guilds go, they should keep the progression similar to what is planned for release. There are 100k+ people signed up for A2. That's enough to fill a few servers, and also enough to level nodes and guilds. It may happen slower than on release, but that's ok.

Liniker

Spif wrote: »

Starter areas are PK-disabled in most games. The reason for this is that creating a new character and immediately going red has no risk. You're not going to lose anything by stacking up corruption. Just delete and restart.

Yea I honestly don't see any reasonable reason to have PK enabled at level 1, and this is coming from someone that loves PvP and usually the first thing I do in an MMO is send a duel request to test things out lol

I just see it as a poor representation of the system for new players and viewers, since as mentioned, people will flag and PK without thinking of consequences since:

1- they might not even be aware of the consequences,
2- they don't care since they will be thinking they can delete and make a new one,

Fantmx

Liniker wrote: »

As we get closer to Alpha 2 testing, I think it's a good time to leave some suggestions that over the past 2 years myself and my community have been discussing to make Alpha 2 better both for testers and the wider audience that will be watching,

These are not complex or big changes/new systems, but simply some minor adjustments and ideas that might help make the experience better from day 1

- Have a big ass pop-up as soon as people start playing saying that clearly says "Press Z at any time to switch from Action mode to Tab-target mode" and have 2 images on the screen to force the player to choose their default mode between Action mode and Tab-target, like Sword of Legends online did in the following image

I can't stress enough how important this is, don't do like in Alpha 1 or Guild Wars 2 where theres just a tooltip or people don't even know that they can switch camera mode, I knew a lot of players in A1 that were playing in tab for days until they find out they could play in action mode, this is important and should be there as a mandatory selection in the UI as soon as we login for the first time or even after the character creator.

- No PKing with level 1 characters. The first thing most players will try to do in Alpha 2, is as soon as the game starts "test" if we can actually kill other players, now, there are a few ways I can think of to fix this - either don't have the flagging system enabled until level 3~5, or simply DO NOT let people delete their character if its corrupted, and get a timer of like 4 hours to make their second character after they have made the first one, something like that,

as a PvP player myself, that loves and looks forward to the flagging system and open world pvp, I don't see any reason to have it happen at the first 2~3 levels - also, just to point out, making the starting area a safe zone is NOT the way, these will be abused in the future with players running there when being attacked.

- Enough guild slots, if the plan is to have a cap of 300 guild members, at least let us start with 150, so annoying if we have to split into 3 or 5 guilds at first, two is fine, so starting at half the max cap would be great.

- Have a basic Duel system in place. This is something that helps both with community and guild-driven events and content creation, as well as more in-depth pvp testing, I think would be such a waste to not have a duel system as we could organize pvp tournaments, make content about it, practice with our guilds, and just have fun during testing with a easy to implement system, and please make it right, no death penalties and when your HP goes to 1 the duel ends and your HP goes back to where it was before the duel started, also, having group or a different number of participants in the duel for 2v2 or 8v5 shouldn't be too hard to code and implement.

- DLSS 3 Frame Generation, I think this is a no-brainer, and should be extremely easy to implement with 5.2 I see no reason not to have it at the start for better performance and showcase.

- Grace period, this is a Must. If we are spending time on a queue and after 30 minutes we finally get in - and the game crashes, we SHOULD have a 5-minute grace period to log back in and skip queue, I don't understand how this is still not a thing in some games.

- Small daily/weekly in-game survey with 2~3 questions max for feedback instead of a 5-page survey with +20 questions. Players don't have a big attention span, when developers do testing they 100% should send out a small survey to actually get people to read it, I believe 1 to 2 questions, max 3 is ideal to get actual answers instead of random selection just to skip it and get whatever reward it comes with.

- Please for the love of god have a screen when we first open the game and choose brightness settings to also let us set the audio level before you blow our ears out with music

That's it for me, I'd like to ask you guys are there any other (reasonable) suggestions you guys have for the start of Alpha 2?

I like the popup idea.

In general I like the PK idea but don't think this will happen. Why draw the line at 1? What about a level 5 versus a 40?

Agree with guild spots.

While I don't personally care about duels, this would make sense.

Yes to a grace period especially when DCs are likely to happen.

Feedback requested will be very specific when asked for I suspect.

GrappLr

I was ready to hate on this post, but very well argued overall!

I think I agree with almost everything except:

1. I don't like your solutions to level 1 PVP. I can't think of a great one atm, and it might not even be that big a deal, that it requires a solution. We'll have to wait and see.

2. I love the duel idea. Only nitpick would be NOT to recover people to starting HP after duel ends. Duel should end at 1hp, and people should have to heal back up manually. I say this because I can already think of multiple exploited behaviors one could use the duels for, in order to get burst heals in specific PVE or even PVP scenarios.

Other than that, very well thought out post. Well done.

Liniker

GrappLr wrote: »

2. I love the duel idea. Only nitpick would be NOT to recover people to starting HP after duel ends. Duel should end at 1hp, and people should have to heal back up manually. I say this because I can already think of multiple exploited behaviors one could use the duels for, in order to get burst heals in specific PVE or even PVP scenarios.

so, theres no way to exploit it because it has been made in other mmos and works fine

its basically a different HP bar for duels, so if you are at 80% and you start a duel you go to 100% and when the duel ends you go back to your previous 80%

if you get a hit from another player/mob/heal outside the duel it immediately ends and you go back to whatever real HP you had (80% minus whatever dmg you took)

having to heal after duels and getting to 1hp is really, really bad,

lord_flacko

Liniker wrote: »

As we get closer to Alpha 2 testing, I think it's a good time to leave some suggestions that over the past 2 years myself and my community have been discussing to make Alpha 2 better both for testers and the wider audience that will be watching,

These are not complex or big changes/new systems, but simply some minor adjustments and ideas that might help make the experience better from day 1

- Have a big ass pop-up as soon as people start playing saying that clearly says "Press Z at any time to switch from Action mode to Tab-target mode" and have 2 images on the screen to force the player to choose their default mode between Action mode and Tab-target, like Sword of Legends online did in the following image

I can't stress enough how important this is, don't do like in Alpha 1 or Guild Wars 2 where theres just a tooltip or people don't even know that they can switch camera mode, I knew a lot of players in A1 that were playing in tab for days until they find out they could play in action mode, this is important and should be there as a mandatory selection in the UI as soon as we login for the first time or even after the character creator.

You have a nice point here. I support.

Liniker wrote: »

- Have a basic Duel system in place. This is something that helps both with community and guild-driven events and content creation, as well as more in-depth pvp testing, I think would be such a waste to not have a duel system as we could organize pvp tournaments, make content about it, practice with our guilds, and just have fun during testing with a easy to implement system, and please make it right, no death penalties and when your HP goes to 1 the duel ends and your HP goes back to where it was before the duel started, also, having group or a different number of participants in the duel for 2v2 or 8v5 shouldn't be too hard to code and implement.

Wow, totally! This has to be there, it's the minimum for a game that has been in development for more than five years. Of course, there may have been some failure in the schedule, forgetfulness, etc., but at least implement this in alpha 2

Liniker wrote: »

- Grace period, this is a Must. If we are spending time on a queue and after 30 minutes we finally get in - and the game crashes, we SHOULD have a 5-minute grace period to log back in and skip queue, I don't understand how this is still not a thing in some games.

Same opinion as above

Liniker wrote: »

- Pequena pesquisa diária/semanal no jogo com no máximo 2 a 3 perguntas para feedback, em vez de uma pesquisa de 5 páginas com +20 perguntas. Os jogadores não têm muita atenção, quando os desenvolvedores fazem testes, eles 100% deveriam enviar uma pequena pesquisa para realmente fazer as pessoas lerem, acredito que 1 a 2 perguntas, no máximo 3 é ideal para obter respostas reais em vez de seleção aleatória apenas para ignorá-lo e receber qualquer recompensa que venha com ele.

I didn't participate in alpha 1 so I didn't feel the drama of the 5-page survey with +20 questions, but I would love for it to be as you suggested. Maybe even every day, the first time the player logs off (taking into account a minimum time logged in, like at least an hour) there will be two or three questions? It wouldn't be bad either.

Liniker wrote: »

- Please for the love of god have a screen when we first open the game and choose brightness settings to also let us set the audio level before you blow our ears out with music

LoL. I support this.

As for pk at level 1, I haven't reached a conclusion yet. Then I reread it to understand better.

Iuri

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