When are the notifications going out to those who have been given access?? And another question Will there be any sorta of system in place to stop or manage how many people play on one faction vs another?
I signed up on that sign up for beta on the mainpage. I'm guessing I'll be getting an email about it when its ready. I also have steam.
There will be a private beta for about 20-30 players, and any active member of the forum will be invited. It will probably be right after Christmas. It will be a smaller test map and such working out the capture mechanics, edge cases, officer skills and so on. As for managing players as to who joins what side, we are keeping it unrestricted, but it can be made to have caps on how many can be on each side.
thanks that's good to know, really interested to see how all of the information translates to gameplay edit: related afterthought. maybe a showcase of how many people are on the different factions before you lock in to one would be interesting to show. personally i don't like to play with the odds stacked (assuming i could 1v5 with my ship haha )
Fighting against a larger force/against greater odds is where the fun lies. And for any Genari player, that is where the honour lies! there is no honour in taking out a much smaller force, but great honour in either making a larger force expend more ships to achieve their goals or even stopping them entirely. If there was such a display of sides, I'd certainly join the underdog!
I think most pvp-oriented player likes to play the underdog, that is more fun every time... Well, maybe not the whining cowards, but those are cannonfodders anyway~
Its always too early to tell, but I'm banking on the fact that there will be a decent balance overall from what I see in peoples' voting on what race they like. But yes, it is a good idea to implement some sort of # of players per side info before you join the server. But the counter argument of course is that it may skew/influence what people were planning to join. In the end though, every sector that is contested -- all you do is click on it and you can see who is fighting there, what class of ships are there, so you can determine where you'd prefer to do your battles in. It definitely is a good newbie protector, since you won't find yourself against some veteran with massive ships against your lowly corvette. You literally are picking which 'battle room' you want to enter.
Not actually that fond of PVP, tried as hard as I could to avoid it on WoW, and in Elite: Dangerous. Unfortunately I couldn't get away from it entirely in either game, and the trouble I had with pirates in Elite was unbelievable. At least here, it's not as if you can be playing as a peaceful trader, so I am fully aware of what I am going into.
There will be a small group of people who will be involved in the internal beta (no more than 30) which will run somewhere from the beginning of January to the end, mostly to playtest the gameplay and capture mechanics on a small map. The early access beta then will have two stages -- Starting Feb 1st, private invites to play, and a full universe map with everything functioning. Then somewhere around mid-March on PAX East, the full reveal happens with media etc... and the floodgate opens for anyone to join.
Here is the general status: Me and a few insiders are testing the early beta, still has too many bugs to be playable for our first 'outsiders' internal beta if that makes any sense. Just this weekend we logged 87 different bugs. The game I've realized, is so complex with so many backend systems, there's so many variables to every aspect of combat. No offense to chess, but combat in Spacewars has so many more layers to it. The goal is for the game to have as much of its 'game breaking' bugs squashed, and for early access invite-only players like yourselves to start trying out the game at the end of January. It will still remain a small community until the major media 'reveal' and media access in early March, before PAX East. Then the floodgates truly open and the game will be accessible to all. So the Gist: Internal Playtesting all January Internal/Early Access invite only Feb1st - March10th Media Access March 1st-March10th Open to public Mid-March
