Road to the 3rd Public Playtest

Road to the 3rd Public Playtest

With the 2nd playtest wrapped up, now it is time to prepare the next big milestone, the 3rd Public Playtest! During the playtest we received a massive amount of suggestions and bug reports, and now it is time to analyze and prioritize them. There are several pain points to address, and some of the most important are listed below. Note: If you are not in our Discord already, you should really join! https://discord.com/invite/Ncmftxfp9V

Improving the onboarding / tutorial experience for new players

While we do not want to handhold players too much, a bare minimum is needed for the first steps.

Crafting & refining are too punishing.

We believe the main issue is that there is no marketplace or way to buy materials from other players yet, so we will wait for the 3rd playtest and see how it feels with marketplace + trading features before balancing those systems further.

Kill stealing / Mob competition / Selfish solo play

We will implement mechanisms around mobbing and kill stealing. Right now it is the wild west, and we cannot just tell players to "behave"; the game should help enforce that.

Balance & classless system problems

Lots of players like the current classless system even though balance is not really good yet, while many others prefer class-based systems. This system will be iterated on each playtest, so stay tuned for 3rd playtest changes!

Lack of content

This problem is more about expectations and communication. I feel we are doing a terrible job communicating the early stages of the game, and having no roadmap does not help. This is not easy to solve because content takes time, so we will simply have to wait for it.

Performance & Lag

• The 2nd playtest only had one EUW server, so players from the US, South America, Asia, and other regions had huge ping issues. Our goal for the 3rd playtest is to have at least 2 servers (America & Europe).

• The server struggled to handle 150+ players. One of the most important tasks for the 3rd playtest will be to radically improve server and client performance. We have already started working on this.

New features!

• Player vending / marketplace

• Chat improvements (channels)

• Player trading (1 to 1)

• Party improvements (settings, XP range sharing, loot modes...)

• Autoloot? Let us see

New content!

• The 3rd playtest will include a new island with everything that implies (monsters, drops, secrets...)

• New archetype

When?

• Let us say in 3 months!