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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.
Wipe or Fresh Start in Nov?
Gardosien
Member, Alpha Two
Be nice to know , so I can hang the game up till than.... If they do, See you in Beta! To much untested for me, for a wipe and or fresh start.
1
Comments
I haven't heard anything official about either, just rumors of a fresh start.
I'd be surprised if there were either. No point in starting afresh anywhere until the major bugs are ironed out, and the new economy system is put in place.
They're also not going to tell us in advance, as they generally see a massive drop in tester numbers, which means that we're stuck in the "We have to assume it won't wipe" mentality.
discord.gg/lod
I guess folks with stacks of the legendary gear will still have it, it just won't be sellable for the mad inflated prices anymore.
If the other option is to lose everything, that seems like a reasonable halfway house.
The exact time to Fresh Start is after the first pass at Augments, to me. Maybe a month after. Sure, you can test Augments/Secondary Archetypes on PTR, but it will not be the same at all, and people will be much less salty about any mistakes or bugs at the end of a sub-phase.
If Dynamic Gridding isn't fully in yet, then absolutely I don't want to see a Fresh Start before both of those things together.
Developers have a hard enough job as it is without all the perception pressure. Let them push out the Augments they were planning to do for this phase, we jump back on (well, those of us who could even get on) to test them, and they do PTR fixes on that while players who already have level 25 characters aren't as stressed about getting their time to try them.
This is even more true if Intrepid plans to allow us to Augment Passive Skills in any way. Elite had a 'huge problem' with this back when they added Engineering (Augments) and Throne and Liberty is about to have one, I'd put money on it, because the combat style of that game isn't going to allow for a lot of additional Active Skills while maintaining balance, so they're probably going to give Passive Augments in the next big expansion.
The problem I see with Passive Augments is that in both TL and Ashes, they have to 'scale with the content' properly, which means they are either going to be multipliers of some kind, or things like turning a passive that buffs your healing when you take damage, to also reduce the Cooldown of a defense skill (for tanks/healers), or even more ridiculous stuff related to detargeting/momentary stealth on Rogues/Assassins/Spellblades/whatever.
In TL this works out because if you try to 'change loadout' and 'juggle passives' in combat you can't use the skills anyway so multipliers and esoteric Cooldown Reductions don't 'do anything'. In Ashes, they need to instead find every way we can break those and then maybe even overhaul underlying structures. I don't personally see this as a job for just Internal QA or 'a thing you put on just the PTR timeframes'.
Give us Augments first, let us break the entire system for them every which way, and only then would I perceve a Fresh Start as 'not wasting Dev time'.