Alpha-1 testing

Hail and well met glorious Ashes of Creation testers. My name is Sean Farrens. I am the manager of quality assurance on Ashes of Creation and on behalf of the Ashes QA team I would like to extend a deep and heartfelt thank you to everyone who participated in testing Ashes of Creation during the weekend of May 14 through May 16th for our Alpha 1 build. In spite of instability and uncertainty you have all proven to be invaluable in regards to your feedback and bug reports; and for that I cannot express my gratitude enough. As many of you know, developing an MMORPG is an epic endeavor that is filled with trials and tribulations that no other game will ever encounter; and your illustrated dedication has proven to our team that we are on a high road to the best MMORPG gaming experience to date. During this most recent testing period we received over 2,600 bug reports, which have been an absolute boon to our testing process. We review each report individually and I continue to be impressed with how detailed and helpful each of these reports has been. Like seriously you guys give repro steps and everything. Super duper handy. I greatly look forward to your feedback in the future and hope you enjoy our content so far, so thank you so much everybody. – Sean Farrens

While we will have specific spot tests for certain systems as we develop them post the Alpha one month, it should be expected and understood that after this Alpha one month there will be probably a significant amount of downtime where there won't be spot testing as we break apart a lot of systems, take what we learned from alpha one month and implement and iterate upon those learnings. So there's gonna be several months probably worth of significant downtime where there will not be access to spot testing, where we are going to go in and really rejigger a lot of systems – Steven Sharif

Phase	Release	Estimated/Actual date
Alpha-1	Alfa-1 korai betekintés élő közvetítés.	March 27, 2020.
	Alfa-1 korlátozott minőségi teszt (NDA).	May 28, 2020.
	Alpha-1 kiadás (NDA nélkül).	2020 ősze.

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The term "alpha" is a tricky one, and it typically has 2 meanings in gaming. The development meaning for alpha is a point in the process where we are ready to test the fundamental systems in their core form, without polish and without much of the content. Then, there is the external or "marketing" term for alpha. This is typically applied to Eastern-ported MMORPGs, when in fact that is a completed game being localized for a region, and not really indicative of a true development alpha. As you may know by now, game development has many stages - from the initial tech demos to the pre-production and pre-alpha states, then on to the alphas and betas and eventually launch. – Steven Sharif

I want to make emphatically clear, our alphas and betas are true development alphas and betas, and some have said I am crazy to allow these phases to be seen without an NDA…maybe I am crazy? lol… But I am trusting the community of gamers out there to get a glimpse into the process, and understand the long road ahead for what will eventually be worth the wait. Given time and talent, amazing things can happen, so make sure you help us in communicating that we are in open development which means people get to see the bare bones before the meat. And look, I know people see our 4K footage and say, "This looks better than most released games!", but trust me when I say, you ain't seen nothin’ yet. – Steven Sharif

Alpha-1 release schedule

Phase	Release	Estimated/Actual date
Alpha	Alfa-1 korai betekintés élő közvetítés.	March 27, 2020.
	Alfa-1 korlátozott minőségi teszt (NDA).	May 28, 2020.
	Alpha-1 kiadás (NDA nélkül).	2020 ősze.

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Alpha-1 NDA

Alpha-1, Alpha-2, Beta-1, Beta-2 releases are not covered by NDA (non-disclosure agreement).

• Alpha-2 testing prior to the full release of Alpha-2 will be under NDA.
• Alpha-1 testing prior to the full release of Alpha-1 was covered by NDA.
• The developers will not necessarily announce when NDA testing starts.

We may not always announce when the NDA testing is, because we're not definitive how that testing is going to influence the future testing schedule; and we don't want to set the wrong expectation from a broader audience perspective on what they should be expecting with regards to testing. – Steven Sharif

Participation

• Alpha-0 had over 2,500 participants.
• Alpha-1 testing had approximately 9,600 participants as of August, 2018. There were slightly over 13k participants as of May 31, 2021. There were 5,300 unique logins during the 3 day weekend test of May 27, 2021.

• Alpha and Beta participation is expected to grow with the sale of pre-order packs.
• Alpha-2 is expected to have over 100,000 participants.
  • Previously Alpha-1 and Alpha-2 were expected to have 10,000 participants.

Ez a szakasz frissül, amint a fejlesztők elérhetővé teszik az információkat

• Beta-1 and Beta-2 are expected to have 27,000 participants.

Alpha island

Map of Alpha-1 testing zone. Kép jóváírása: Axiom: Angelcry

The Alpha One map including nodes, dungeons, quest givers, POI, teleporters, and camps will be explorable! Note that this is only a small portion of the world of Verra.

Alpha-1 testing tropical zone featuring a war beast and a tribe of pigmy goblins.

This is a rather large tropical area; and what we use some of the creatures for is establishing character for different parts of this tropical place. So that even though it's the same biome, it feels different when you are going from place to place based on what's there and how those things are interacting with the environment. – Jeffrey Bard

Alpha-1 testing took place in a zone to the north west of the world map. This zone has many islands and a mainland area.

• The Alpha-1 starting area is set in the ruins of an Pyrian divine gateway.
• There are 12 different (sub)zones in the Alpha-1 testing location.
• The Alpha-1 map was approximately 70 km² of playable area.
  • This was previously estimated to be approximately 100 km² in size. This was about 17% of the total world size.
  • Previous estimates range between 20-25% of the map.
  • Traversing the width of the zone (10 km) on a mount would take about 30 minutes.
• Alpha island (also called Alpha-0 island) was the first open-world testing zone for Alpha-1 participants.
• There are approximately 4 biomes in Alpha-1: Flood plains, Desert (Desert), Snowy mountains, Forest.
  • A tropics biome was added for the December 2020 Alpha-1 preview tests.
• Temporary teleportation points will be present in early tests until ships are introduced later in the alpha testing.

Továbbiak

• Alpha-1
• Kiadási ütemezés
• Ashes of Creation