Merge EE and alpha - or start pre EE by making alpha persistent


Pathfinder Online

Grand Lodge Goblin Squad Member

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Please let me explain before I get flamed here.

Issue 1 from a player perspective:
A lot of players don't play alpha (don't play it anymore) because whatever they do is not persistent and therefore what they do isn't meaningful.
Issue 2 from a player perspective:
EE can't be started because of desynch issues.

GW tries hard solve issue 2 to enable EE and solve issue 1. But they are in a catch 22 until they are able to solve the desynch issues.

But what truly prevents GW from purging the alpha asap and make it persistent now? I would guess the main issue is customers not willing to pay while issue 2 isn't solved. There would be an uproar from customers as it isn't yet MVP if it isn't stable and they need to pay. And of course there is the issue that it was said 'alpha is not persistent'.

Alpha not persistent made sense - a few month ago. But maybe it is time to revisit.

From my point of view alpha in the current state becomes less and less useful as the most important data GW needs (stress test - how much users can they handle) they don't get prior to EE.

So what prevents GW from going into the next stage - call it alpha 2, pre-EE or whatever. It certainly needs a new name as it isn't alpha (as we know it) and isn't EE (yet).

So the easy solution in my view is:
Wipe everything, start fresh and make it persistent - with a disclaimer to possibly wipe it if the experiment isn't working out.
And call it something different to EE or alpha - I'm sure some people will respond here with better ideas as Pre-EE or alpha 2.

So what would it be?
It is still alpha as people don't pay.
It is still alpha as you have a disclaimer that you reserve the right for a second wipe just ahead of true EE
It is alpha stage 2 (or pre-EE or whatever you want to name it) as it will be persistent if the experiment works
It will become EE (paid for) as soon as GW feels that desynch has been solved to a good enough degree

From my point of view this is a win-win for customers as well as GW. And it should be possible to do that ahead of the Christmas season as a Christmas present. And the only bit you need to ensure apart of persistence is that XP counts as well for people joining at 'true' EE at a later stage.
But some plans around these lines to ease users in had been planned already 8 weeks ago - so this shouldn't truly change anything.

Positive in my view
a) GW gets the necessary numbers to truly stress test
b) There will be a more gradual build up (2 waves) as compared to a single wave if you directly start EE helping desynch and stress test
c) GW will better know if the game is truly ready and this will move EE forward to the earliest possible date
d) It will prevent GW to start EE and then to backpaddle if EE isn't ready
e) It will allow settlements to build up an economy and solves the chicken & egg problem of players only wanting to start proper play once at least a basic economy is there
f) It will motivate players again to play as it is (likely will be) persistent
g) It will motivate players again as the game won't feel empty and you don't feel lonely

Neutral
a) GW doesn't lose anything compared to carrying on with alpha. You don't earn money now - so there is no loss - there is no win either as you don't earn money doing this
b) Players not willing to start won't lose anything either

Negative
a) Settlements not willing to start this stage of the game will be at a disadvantage
b) There is a possibility for a second wipe if the experiment doesn't work out - especially if EE is not 'weeks' but rather still month away
c) We stop higher XP / tier testing - I have just started doing tier 2 crafting which I never planned - and that would be wiped now

I'm interested in feedback from the community. Please keep it constructive. If you dislike the idea then please post reasons why - I'm sure I overlook some aspects.
But I feel PFO needs to move on and the wait gets too long. And it seems I'm not the only one reading some comments from KarlBob and Edam in another thread.

This pre-EE could be as short as Christmas to 1.st January or longer. I don't know how ready GW is. But I hear about New Year Eve PFO marathon and would like to participate AND would like to have it persistent if I do so.
It also helps if it is not official EE if things go wrong around the Christmas time as all of GW deserves a break and I hope they have a good time with family.
And it might be a Christmas present for them and morale as well as they would see PFO moving to the next stage.

Goblin Squad Member

mmm with the threat of a wipe, and how difficult the desync problem has been to solve/some other stuff not solved, I'm not sure how many people they would actually gain.

But the idea is something to wet, it surely is, as the current state of the game is.... meh...

Hopefully there will be a good tasty patch today giving us everything we want and dreamed of!

Goblin Squad Member

I think I am in favour of it. It would take us out of this terrible limbo we are currently in. I am still weeks away from T2 crafting, I therefore expect the great wipe to occur just seconds before my first suit of T2 leather armour is due to be birthed from the crafting vats.


From what I can tell, the stress/desynch issues have to do with population within a hex boundary. As I understand it they have separate server processes for each hex to work on that hexes people and activities, and the previous/current state of the code gets overloaded.

It sounds to me, that all they need to properly stress test to facilitate development and progress on the desynch issue is to have people show up at designated times, in large numbers, in specific hexes.

It looks like that kind of thing is being organized, so assuming the necessary amounts how up, that should handle it.

I don't think EE needs to begin or Alpha made persistent to facilitate those stress tests then, because of that.

I think the big Negative you missed in your list - for merging EE or making Alpha persistent, is the potential big backlash from the outside community's perception of doing those things and the negative press it would engender.

The Early Enrollment model already seems to have an amount of people edgy about the concept, messing with it more seems like a bad idea to me.

Goblin Squad Member

In Ryan's words, he can't start EE until he has EE servers. Any case you make probably has to address that. The question should probably be, what can players do to make EE servers? Log in not for personal persistence but just to get EE pushed out the door, like the stress tests this weekend but a lot more frequent.

Goblin Squad Member

I'm concerned that anything persistent becomes "must play" for a lot of people who aren't interested in participating until things are stable but they feel they have no choice. A persistent pre-EE has some upsides, but has the potential to generate a lot of frustration.

If moving to persistence, do they exclude the people who don't have EE access? Right now, anyone with EE or OE access is in. Tossing a bunch of potential people out while trying to increase stress is counter-productive, but leaving people in a persistent alpha stage that will then have a month (or whatever) of persistence head-start over others without advertising it really well is likely to cause more hard feelings, both for those who didn't know it was happening, and for those that paid for EE access and their value is being eroded by giving some early persistence to non-EE participants.

I think it needs to be handled carefully, and I'm not sure that pre-EE persistence is a good idea.

Goblin Squad Member

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I'm still having fun in Alpha. I log in every day for hours. I'm learning little nuances to every combat option, I meet someone old and new, engage in a fight here and there, help a few people out, gather materials, craft pretty much anything Tier 1 I want and make a little progress. Just when I think my goals are complete I find another one to try. I don't see how this will be any different after EE starts. If I had known that Alpha would last for three extra months I would have planned things a little differently, but that's neither here nor there.

Personally I don't care if there's a wipe. I'd rather Goblinworks 'sticks to their guns' though. They said they were going to do something so they should do it. Don't underestimate credibility. Missing a quarter is acceptable; changing plans radically midstream questions competence.

Everyone should log in and help test.

If they REALLY want to get people to play, here is my suggestion:

Offer prizes.

Yes, it sounds silly and shallow but if Goblinworks said 'log into Alpha this weekend for your chance to win some post EE game time, a special temporary perk or boost your Alpha character to level 20' then I think we'd see a population swell. I think it's a better method to achieve what you're trying to accomplish Thod.


Thod wrote:

Please let me explain before I get flamed here.

Issue 1 from a player perspective:
A lot of players don't play alpha (don't play it anymore) because whatever they do is not persistent and therefore what they do isn't meaningful.
Issue 2 from a player perspective:
EE can't be started because of desynch issues.

GW tries hard solve issue 2 to enable EE and solve issue 1. But they are in a catch 22 until they are able to solve the desynch issues.

Didn't read all of this since I am hungry and not patient enough to, but I email Ryan once about the idea of starting EE but having it be free until desync issues are fixed. I was thinking that same idea of "they can't fix desync issues if they don't have players in game to test the issues out." He replied and said that their ability to fix the issues largely does not depend on number of players in game. The programmers have identified a lot of the issues that need to be fixed already; its just a matter of time until they are fixed.

Ryan Dancey in email to me wrote:
We’re actually not waiting on server loads to test anything. The team has a pretty good idea of where the problems are. It just takes time to write the code to fix those problems. This is not a simple issue of fix one bug. It’s a complex series of interrelated issues that are all contributing to the system running with less capacity, and failing in unexpected ways, than the design requires. They’re making steady progress. As soon as we feel confident the system’s issues have been fixed, we’ll be able to go to Early Enrollment.

The tests we do by gathering in settlements is more of a benchmark for their progress than anything else.

Grand Lodge Goblin Squad Member

Thanks for all the feedback so far. I guess it isn't worthwhile if not the large majority says this is a good idea.

So lets hope GW is close. I might have found a few other ways how to keep myself busy and keep playing in a meaningful way.

People reading this thread only now - feel free to still add your comments here.

Goblin Squad Member

It's ready when it's ready.


The biggest argument against the O.P.'s idea is that the desynch issues have allowed item duplication (referred to as duping in the rest of this reply). While my first duping was accidental, my subsequent testing showed me I could do it rather dependably.

I have bug reported this, but allowing the game to become persistent simply cannot be allowed with KNOWN duping problems.

KNOWN duping problems need to be solved, followed by a wipe.

As alpha testers, we need to try and make it to this weekend's stress tests. Fixing the desynchs fixes the only duping bug *I* know of... and duping is standing in the way of any persistence (as well as desynchs standing in the way of MVP).

This is what alpha is about. No one is asking us to go new game mania and play PFO 7 days a week.

But I am encouraging my kingdom (on our website) to all show up for the stress tests. Not only could I suggest we have an obligation to, but having a lot of people on will also allow our vets to answer a lot of noob questions.

Heck, it might also be a good time for those of you recruiting to recruit, and for those of you looking for a settlement to get recruited.

Goblin Squad Member

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The place where PFO finds itself right now is in that "on the brink" place between it's not even close to ready and, its ready.

I was once programing an entire schools schedule, three grades worth, 21 classes and 450 students. For weeks I told the administration that I was 75 - 80% done. They asked, "How could it be, you're always at the same spot?" I explained, "When one class gets moved, it changes the schedule for three other classes." Then on one day, after about 5 minutes of looking at it, and shifting one class.... It jumped from being about 80% done to 100% done.

This I imagine is much in the way that PFO will develop.


While I'm excited for EE to begin, I think it might be too complicated to add steps beyond EE is ready let's start. It is tempting though, I've pretty much moved to the camp of players waiting for EE to log in again. I hope it's right around the corner, but I think the lava will flow over the highway before EE starts (still on island time here).

Grand Lodge Goblin Squad Member

Savage Grace wrote:

The biggest argument against the O.P.'s idea is that the desynch issues have allowed item duplication (referred to as duping in the rest of this reply). While my first duping was accidental, my subsequent testing showed me I could do it rather dependably.

That would be a red card I agree. I haven't seen anyone posting about this issue in weeks - so I assumed it no longer exists.

But if you replicate it in a dependable way then I hope you report to GW how you trigger desynch.

Goblin Squad Member

Takasi wrote:

I'm still having fun in Alpha. I log in every day for hours. I'm learning little nuances to every combat option, I meet someone old and new, engage in a fight here and there, help a few people out, gather materials, craft pretty much anything Tier 1 ...

......

Everyone should log in and help test.

If they REALLY want to get people to play, here is my suggestion:

Offer prizes.

Yes, it sounds silly and shallow but if Goblinworks said 'log into Alpha this weekend for your chance to win some post EE game time, a special temporary perk or boost your Alpha character to level 20' then I think we'd see a population swell. I think it's a better method to achieve what you're trying to accomplish Thod.

I agree with the prize Idea, if we are stuck in Alpha for any more time after New Year's Eve

I do agree with Thod that Goblinworks is not getting the player numbers it needs for testing, Takasi's idea is another option as is Thod's Hybrid idea.

Scarab Sages Goblin Squad Member

Thod, as I read your post, I really liked your idea. On the other hand, the comments since the original post are pretty convincing. Adding an intermediate step between Alpha and EE might cause more problems than it would solve.

Takasi, the prize idea sounds great to me. It would be cool if it coincided with the return of Adventure Time with Bonny. Instead of Alpha Invitations, Moobot could reward lucky winners with pieces of Tier 2 or Tier 3 gear, or even "deeds" for a couple of free Base Camps (to be delivered when Base Camps are introduced).

If the programmers only want us to stress test hexes as a backup check, as sspitfire1 suggested, then GW might not have quite as much incentive to hand out prizes. It would still be a nice way to re-energize the remaining Alpha population, though. The activity on this message board has slowed way down lately. Even more so than low log-in numbers, that demonstrates the level of Alpha Fatigue we've reached.

Goblin Squad Member

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Many are waiting for EE. What you are proposing is giving advantage to those in alpha over those not willing to put up with desync etc. Really not balanced.

Goblin Squad Member

Publicly announced incentives are more than welcome. People usually don't want to do something if they don't get anything out of it.

Goblin Squad Member

I'll turn that around. Entrepreneurs usually don't want to give away something if the don't get anything out of it.

The GW team have already given us free early access to get a feel for the systems and get some experience with how things will work, in exchange for which they are geting a certain amount of data, and daily bug reports from some of us. I think if they need to get something more than they are currently getting, they will offer the incentives they feel are necessary to accomplish that.

Somewhere between their ideal and the players' ideal is where we'll all end up.

Goblin Squad Member

Caldeathe Baequiannia wrote:
I think if they need to get something more than they are currently getting, they will offer the incentives they feel are necessary to accomplish that.

Right, they know when and how to do it if they really needed more activity. No amount of testing will help code their fixes any faster.

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