Forums » General Pantheon Discussion

Pre-Alpha/Alpha

    • 9115 posts
    August 4, 2017 5:37 PM PDT

    Mathir said:

    Kilsin said:

    Liav said:

    It's not inaccurate to say that we paid to be testers. However, internal testing always comes before consumer testing. This has been the norm for video game testing for over a decade. It seems really bizarre to me that people had such unreasonable expectations as to when we would have our hands on the product.

    We will be testing a mostly finished product. The majority of the people who paid for testing aren't educated enough on the technical systems behind the scenes to provide meaningful feedback. If we had access to the build commits from a day to day basis, a lot of it would probably look like jibberish to the majority of testers. As it stands, there isn't really a practical reason for us to have our hands on the game right now. Aside from telling a dev "it doesn't work", I doubt I'd be able to debug why the code behind opening and closing doors doesn't work, the same with most people.

    The pre-alpha testing phase will likely be a nearly finished product, lacking some polish. Alpha will be a more polished version of that with targeted testing of specific features. Beta will likely be 95% stress testing, 5% fixing relatively small scale bugs from reports collected by a large number of simultaneous users.

    No man, you won't, you will be testing a buggy, glitchy pre-alpha game. This isn't early access, it is going to be like old school alpha/beta where things go wrong, the server drops out, bugs prevent you from sometimes seeing or moving on your character etc.

    I just got out of a testing session with some of the dev team and within the first hour we identified several bugs that need to be fixed before we can even launch testing, some graphical, some server side and some character based and were talking about how there was only 6 of us and how crazy it will be when hundreds of you are in here multiplying the issues by a large amount and the how much work it will be for us, this is what we are preparing for currently.

     

    Thought you guys were hiring quite a bit of new people to help with stuff like that?  Did that not pan out?

    Our staffing was for the most part, in areas like Art and DB which we were severely lacking so while we do have more help now, it is still a huge job. Just remember that your Activision's and Trion's of the world have hundreds of employees with hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal, we have a small skilled team spread across the world with a few good people in each area. ;)

    • 470 posts
    October 14, 2017 6:11 PM PDT

    Larr said:

    Aatu said:

    No Alpha yet. They are in "Pre Pre-Alpha"

    More like pre pre pre avante-alpha alpha

    seriously can we as a community please stop using the term pre-pre-alpha. And any derivation of it.

    I move that instead we all start using closed testing, VIP- testing, supporter testing, open alpha, and closed and open beta. 

    When people complain about how they have a terrible selection of dances, just say, 'man were like 7 phases away from launch'

    please I beg you all to consider this!

    Or as they used to call it: Friends & Family Testing. Really that's about all that's testing atm, the devs and their friends & family. But hopefully we're getting close to that whole pre-alpha phase so we can breath some new life back into these forums. Yeah, I know, the testers can't talk about it but you'll see both old and new members coming to join the chattery once it starts.

    • 151 posts
    October 14, 2017 7:13 PM PDT
    Perhaps instead of pre-pre-alpha we could back it up to Zulu, Yankie, or Whisky testing. I think we would all could benifit from Whisky testing.
    • 1120 posts
    October 14, 2017 10:33 PM PDT

    Hyperium said: Perhaps instead of pre-pre-alpha we could back it up to Zulu, Yankie, or Whisky testing. I think we would all could benifit from Whisky testing.

    best quote ever

    • 470 posts
    October 14, 2017 11:35 PM PDT

    Hyperium said: Perhaps instead of pre-pre-alpha we could back it up to Zulu, Yankie, or Whisky testing. I think we would all could benifit from Whisky testing.

    Members of my guild would support this. There's no dungeon running like drunken dungeon running.

    • 11 posts
    October 15, 2017 1:50 AM PDT

    Kratuk said:

    Hyperium said: Perhaps instead of pre-pre-alpha we could back it up to Zulu, Yankie, or Whisky testing. I think we would all could benifit from Whisky testing.

    Members of my guild would support this. There's no dungeon running like drunken dungeon running.

     

    I fully support this. Back in the old days of WoW we used to raid molten core drunk and we would have rules like everytime the main tank died we took a shot or everytime one of the pullers died we took a shot. It escalated rather quickly once when the healers stopped healing just to see who would die of alcohol poisoning first :P

    • 84 posts
    October 21, 2017 2:55 PM PDT

    Before the holidays! Finally! :)

    • 20 posts
    October 21, 2017 2:56 PM PDT

    Woohoo!

    • 1120 posts
    October 21, 2017 3:00 PM PDT

     Which means alpha early 2018!  Time to save vacation!

    • 80 posts
    October 21, 2017 3:04 PM PDT

    Porygon said:

     Which means alpha early 2018!  Time to save vacation!

    But full game end of year!? Save ALL vacations for 2 week binge.

    • 1921 posts
    October 21, 2017 3:39 PM PDT

    Porygon said:

     Which means alpha early 2018!  Time to save vacation!

    They could have 8 months of pre-alpha, 3 months of alpha, and 1 month of beta.  I wouldn't count on alpha until Q3 at the earliest, given the timelines of the past three years.

    • 84 posts
    October 21, 2017 4:04 PM PDT

    Hoping all stages are long. Let's get it right. Sorry those waiting on Alpha.

    • 287 posts
    October 21, 2017 4:08 PM PDT

    2018 major testing coming up.

    • 1584 posts
    October 21, 2017 5:38 PM PDT

    vjek said:

    Porygon said:

     Which means alpha early 2018!  Time to save vacation!

    They could have 8 months of pre-alpha, 3 months of alpha, and 1 month of beta.  I wouldn't count on alpha until Q3 at the earliest, given the timelines of the past three years.

    I highly doubt pre alpha will be longer than alpha/beta put together by anny means, simply becuase they have a ton of things done that normally gets done in pre alpha like the pathng of mobs, the graphics, and a ton of other things, so im betting more of 3-4 month of prealpha, 3 alpha and than like 4-5 of beta, and thats even if they do an actual year of testing granted thats what they said, but like i also mentioned they got a lot of things done that usually gets fixed inside od testing before they even got to pre alpha.

    • 1399 posts
    October 21, 2017 5:47 PM PDT

    A Year of testing, starting now, would put launch just about Christmas month. 

    Good strategy....if possible 

    • 753 posts
    October 21, 2017 8:30 PM PDT

    I wasn't involved in it, but I believe EQ had a long (year or more) set of test phases that directly involved the future player base of the game, right?  Well, I'm as tired as I can be of the current crop of MMO's, and logging in day to day when the servers are up for testing to try stuff out, give feedback, etc... and doing whatever miniscule part of helping to make this game great I can... well... I can't express enough how excited I am about the opportunity.

    • 1281 posts
    October 21, 2017 8:33 PM PDT

    Wandidar said:

    I wasn't involved in it, but I believe EQ had a long (year or more) set of test phases that directly involved the future player base of the game, right?  Well, I'm as tired as I can be of the current crop of MMO's, and logging in day to day when the servers are up for testing to try stuff out, give feedback, etc... and doing whatever miniscule part of helping to make this game great I can... well... I can't express enough how excited I am about the opportunity.

    Not that it really counts for much, but the dev team behind Pantheon is an experienced team, much more-so thatn the original EQ team.  That *MAY* translate into a little bit quicker testing time.

    • 2138 posts
    October 21, 2017 9:23 PM PDT

    Maybe we can see some Alpha streams starring some of the nice VP pledge characters?

    Arradune or Kilsin could be like, in game interviewers/announcers.

    " ah, here's watoosi, you know her as "bloopy" in the forums what are you doing watoosi?"

    -" Hi kilsin, I am forging metal plate"

    "and how is that going?"

    -"well tin, copper and iron are ok, but when I try to make brass or silver I get stuck by..."

    "*interrupts* all well and good, make sure you raise a ticket- and look over here! there is braunschweiger, you know them as "viegates" in the forums how goes it?"

    -" it goes...."

     


    This post was edited by Manouk at October 21, 2017 9:24 PM PDT
    • 48 posts
    October 22, 2017 3:04 AM PDT

    ^^^ I like the previous post's ideas. 

    I'm considering streaming myself (should that be permitted). Actually, I'm working very hard not to fangirl (succeeding, so far) so I can do a solid job at testing and vet my own concerns re: solo play (i.e., I suspect this product will run the same gauntlet over time as did the ol' Verant/Sony/SoE lifecycle, so I'm kind of hoping they reel back a little on gung-ho 'group or die' but it's probably going to take an ugly surprise or two for the message of "times, they have changed, friends" to really sink in). 

    Then again, who knows? Maybe it'll be "the good ol days all over again", but I'm skeptical since, like, you know, no one has really managed to pull that off since, like, forever, and stuff. 

    We'll see. 

    • 627 posts
    October 22, 2017 3:13 AM PDT

    So Pre-Alpha will be in December 2017 as VR anounces in the video from TwitchCon.

    As for Alpha, my guess is 6 months from Pre-Aplha. We will prolly get to test around June 2018. :)

    • 1281 posts
    October 22, 2017 9:09 AM PDT

    Random1 said:

    ^^^ I like the previous post's ideas. 

    I'm considering streaming myself (should that be permitted). Actually, I'm working very hard not to fangirl (succeeding, so far) so I can do a solid job at testing and vet my own concerns re: solo play (i.e., I suspect this product will run the same gauntlet over time as did the ol' Verant/Sony/SoE lifecycle, so I'm kind of hoping they reel back a little on gung-ho 'group or die' but it's probably going to take an ugly surprise or two for the message of "times, they have changed, friends" to really sink in). 

    Then again, who knows? Maybe it'll be "the good ol days all over again", but I'm skeptical since, like, you know, no one has really managed to pull that off since, like, forever, and stuff. 

    We'll see. 

    I suspect that, at least, pre-alpha and alpha will be NDA no streaming or posted pics.  I'd imagine that it will continue into beta as well.  I hope that's not the case, but I am a realist about it.

     

    • 3 posts
    January 1, 2020 5:35 PM PST

    2020 Still no release... Are you still waiting?

     

    • 520 posts
    January 1, 2020 6:54 PM PST

    Suagnam said:

    2020 Still no release... Are you still waiting?

     

    We are still here, aren't we? Huge companies makes their big games for years (TES) . It takes time to create good product and most of us expected that we'll have to wait for quite some time.

    • 1584 posts
    January 1, 2020 6:58 PM PST

    Lol I bet he was looking at Jan 1 3 months ago and be like when it hits New Years I'm going to post this and feel big about myself and pat myself on my back after I write this post. LuL.

    • 8 posts
    January 2, 2020 6:47 PM PST

    What stage of Pre-Alpha are we on now?