Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Phase III testing has begun! During this phase, our realms will be open every day, and we'll only have downtime for updates and maintenance. We'll keep everyone up-to-date about downtimes in Discord.
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 III testing has begun! During this phase, our realms will be open every day, and we'll only have downtime for updates and maintenance. We'll keep everyone up-to-date about downtimes in Discord.
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.
Comments
yep, which is why we havent seen any good change so far and the only feedback that was implemented when some friendly guild people cried about lawless zones.
didnt he punish a guild cuz they didnt want to participate in a war by force against an exploiting guild where they had almost no max lvl player and probably no gear instead of the exploiting guild...
like surprise most people dont like pvp and the ones who dont mind it dont want it shoved down their throat when they dont want to do pvp then you have ..well whatever state the systems are in ashes and yep doing pvp is out of the question lol.
a full open pvp without putting a limit on the pvp and have balanced and safe places and systems that players can do will never work and also not by making every system a tedious chore where even inventory having you walk 30-1hr just to put some material every time ur tetris bag is filled with junk
It's just contradictions on contradictions. Game is in deep alpha and is a moving train - but it's totally fine to advertise it to a bigger audience. We're testers and not players - but the grind in each and every whole of gameplay prevent majority of people from testing majority of things, while also coming off as "play"ey, because if you're just grinding mobs to level up to a point where you might test caravans or something - you're playing the fucking game, cause that sure ain't testing it.
It's just a mess.
its cooked when a test server have its own test server yet people cry its alpha bro why you treating it like a ready game when the company itself treating it like one.
thats what we get when people give feedback or complain about some horrible system and all they get is"its alpha" or "its not made for you" well apparently the game is not made for anyone outside of maybe toxic sweaty tryhard guilds i guess
And " this " is why i wait at least until November or later, when finally my dear, beloved Summoner is FINALLY making it's well-deserved Appearance.
I am running in circles in Verra,
i'm getting Burnout,
i'm getting the feeling that i want to delete "myself" instead of the Millions of Goblins i am genociding just by killing them over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and again,
but hey AT LEAST i got to help a little bit with mentioning a few Bugs, Issues - a damn annoying Tree that was blocking the South-West Entrance upwards to the high Plateau of Winstead and so on,
it is good when i realise i might have helped out a bit just by being there and testing. And i already noticed "SOLO" i don't even need to get anywhere in this Game. I either get myself some People who help me, or i am more busted than i ever was in WoW Vanilla.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
I am in the guildless Guild so to say, lol. But i won't give up. I will find my fitting Guild "one Day".
no amount of deodrant is removing the sweat
Don't think anyone upset about that.
Depends, but mostly likely not, because the nature of oop. Adding in abilities, stats, ect should be relatively easy if they have a plan for it. If they didn't plan for it then it'll be a lot of shuffling around code. Codes not perfect your first try, you rework it and rework it and rework until you get it to work close enough to perfect to be bug free and function.
It's a lot of assumption I'm making so don't take it as fact for the devs (i've never made a game beside school assignments decades ago). But we see the shake up in the hiring and the talks on the dev updates. Something is going on and that's normal. But I still think they should stick to their guns and make the game they planned to (if they had a plan), if they don't have a final plan they need to lock that in yesterday... Shifting to the whims of the players is a recipe for failure. Core systems should be locked in, but listen to the players on the bugs and playability.
I've seen a ton a great ideas too. It's easy to be an idea fairy though, it's hard to be the actual person making it happen. So I feel for game devs, gamers are a picky whiney bunch, myself included. Most of the things I read can be done, have been done before, and they could do it if they wanted too as well.
I do think their big brain programmers are working on core systems like networking, sieges, wars, settlement performance and so on. Which is kind of fair, they game won't be what they planned without those. I just don't get why so many things on the character side where left so unfinished. It kind of feels like they're in the planning phase, 8? 9? years into it.
Maybe it's their idea of 'trying' things to see what works. But that takes work hours and it takes away from the final product.
sure lets say they are working on those things and lets say the development can be unpredictable so there might be slow downs but these things were supposed to be done years ago and why do they keep adding broken unfun stuff to the game while ignoring feedback on previous core systems even ones they reworked multiple times while using 0 of the feedback they had which only made them worse everytime and the only "feedback" they seem to have listened to and did quite fast too is from a very tiny amount of players (that we all know who).
like you have core systems , you reworked multipile times and took 0 feedback from the players that just wanted to make said systems actually fun and engaging and the only thing they did is making them worse, hell the artisan stuff is constantly called over-complicated,over convoluted and horribly tedious in like almost all of its steps and what did they do, they made these parts even worse instead of better ..like that must be a joke.
people can cry and call this game alpha all they want (even tho they dont treat it like one lol) but at the end of the day game systems need to be fun even in their most basic forms was it in an alpha,beta,delta,sigma or whatever you wanna call it and when thats fun thats when you can build on top of them and add more depth and mechanics to them SLOWLY AND PROGRESSIVELY not needing 100 steps and a 1000 gold and mat and travel time ...etc to make a lvl 10 item
Yes. But if you have to kill like a "MILLION.(!!!!!!!!!) Goblins" or so - to reach like i'don't'know LvL 15 to 20 or so, then something is wrong.
I don't remember clearly but i think between LvL 8 to 11 or so, i killed ONLY. GOBLINS. with someone else - near Winstead and southern from it or so -> near a Lake.
After i was "done with it", so was my Brain.
Fried. Like fried egg or chicken.
It hurt so goddamn bad that i felt more like i "suffered" instead of levelling. (lol)
And for the first Time ever -> it did NOT FEEL like it was worth it. Hell that was pure Torture in a way and sense. Maybe i am simply getting too old for this.
I personally think/hope/want -> that we can also get and add' EXP to our levelling Bars, by chopping down Tree's and also mine Ore's and so on. Like in World of Warcraft.
Or that we can do so by fishing - well - Fish.
Everything. EVERYTHING just not these soul-crushing, mass-murder sized Genocides on NPC Mob Populations. I think not even the Hyperbolic Time-Chamber from Dragonball Z would be this much of a Torture to level my Character inside with ruthless Training.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
I am in the guildless Guild so to say, lol. But i won't give up. I will find my fitting Guild "one Day".
Its hard to even read or follow along with. It should be driving players through lore and into other more advanced areas. Telling the stories in a rewarding and informative way. Getting players a fun emotional attachment steps to the world of Verra.
I care more about pve n pvp. And pve is bad but fixable. Questing? The enjoyable lore briefs should have been dropping 3 years ago. Seems like its light years off the mark.
Saying they take 0 input is very unfair. I think they take quite a bit of input from testers. Possibly too much, but then again if there's not a final vision maybe they're not taking enough. Impossible for us to know. It's fair to call it alpha, and it's okay for things to be broken, buggy, unbalanced, unfun, ect. I stopped testing on production realm because the crafting was too tedious, the travel time between the starting work stations is idiotic. It made me not even want to check the balance of material and gold costs. It just wasn't fun to "play". At the end of the day I'm not getting paid to test, so I'm not grinding through tedium just to test the stuff I want. I stick to the PTR when I can. But if 1-10 crafting stays the way it is, it's pointless. I'll just zerg grind to 15/20 or max, I'll wait 2 months after launch and just get hand me down items. I'll back track only if I need to make something. I'll skip all crafting until end game if that's the easiest path like ALL other MMORPGs.
@Ludullu
That could be concerning. There should be a project document, jira, or some project board. Do they not have a project manager? Either way I don't want to speculate too much of the interworking. I'll just hope they're correcting any deficiencies they have. Just thinking about it gives me a headache lol.
Agreed and also I dont. Steven is posturing like he is pushing to launch sooner then what I think content is not really ready for this. If Questing is launched as is, this will be a very large fail. So many people, including myself, play MMOs in large part for Story and Lore. We seen LoreForge just leave the game and being a Lore driven community thats now just gone. IS needs to have these standard fair in an MMO fully working.
Regardless of that, Steven's always implied that his plan was to have the players be most of the Story (not the Lore). I don't think that is just my bias.
Ashes is probably not targeting your 'standard' player who 'needs the questing to take them through the game'. Everything about it seems targeted at the player type who genuinely wants to play a Sandbox (but recognizes that the standard multiplayer Sandbox game tends to suffer from the way most players approach them).
Yes and no, he also promised a deep lore and story telling with Quests. The current questing system is broken and in no way fun but this is just one area of the game thats under delivered but as important as anything else that makes up the core game.
What if I told you that I know people who find the current questing to be fun, not only fun but 'the best form, good nostalgia, the thing they have been looking for in MMOs this whole time'?
What if I went even further and told you that if it changes too much, those people will be upset, possibly care less about the game because it would go against the reason they choose to play a game like Ashes?
What then?
Ashes is a Themebox; not a Sandbox. (It's not even a Sandpark)
Definitely needs to be more than the static quests that are in the game.
Ashes is currently super-static for a game that was promoted to be dynamic.
Nothing wrong with having Tasks as well as Quests, but the Tasks are not what I paid for the devs to focus on.
And since we know that most of that would take longer to develop, be related to Story Arcs, the World Manager, etc, and none of that is working, people wouldn't expect that yet and anything granted to us as 'Quests' would not be related to that pillar.
So why would LoreForged 'leave' knowing that? Did they leave because there's nothing for them to test yet? If so, no point in acting like if reflects on anything in the game.
Point stands.
But y'all know they are Tasks. So 'paid for the Devs to focus on' is barely meaningful here.
I guess I should have gone the route of 'obviously Questing won't launch as is, there are Story Arcs to activate', but that seemed to be even more blatantly obvious and I try not to assume that nanfoodle can't do logic.
I know several people who are waiting to return to testing until the stuff they want makes it into the game.
Also... like... when will the stuff make it into the game?
8 years to get Summoner. Still no Augments in the game.
Mobs/NPCs are static instead of dynamic.
Economy is broken.
No Sieges.
And "quests" are more like New World's static Tasks.
Steven tells people to take a break all the time.
nanfoodle said a nonsensical thing that can only be considered to make sense if they want Questing to be different in some meaningful way that isn't covered by Story Arcs or Commissions.
We know that Story Arcs aren't in yet, and Commissions don't have any Social Orgs yet to attach to so they obv feel like 'Tasks but technically even weaker'.
So to engage with something that sounds like nonsense unless you take it to mean X, you do that. I'm fine with 'oh you just said something that makes no logical sense' too.
Stuff isn't in that they want to test, so... they left until the stuff they want to test is implemented.
if you told me this, i would straight up say you are lieing, literally no one playing this game things the questing is in a good place, quests are suppose to introduce you to the lore, the world, the mechanics of the game, not kill 20 ravens, harvest 20 granite, quests can be long and fun and difficult whilst still being fun not tedious like everything else in this game.
Though even the task quests are quite literally "as it was in the good ol' days", cause that was how L2 quests worked. You'd have a tiny piece of reasoning for why you gotta kill them and then you'd just be pointed towards the mobs. That's it. Commission boards do pretty much that, but at scale, with a fairly low kill requirement (nowhere near hundreds, if not thousands of L2's quest requirements) and they reward you quite a bit better too.
So to anyone who was used to and/or liked those old quests, this would be an incredible upgrade.