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Just a small preface for the beginning, I started playing Albion online at the start of closed Beta 1 and I know I haven’t played as long as some of you veterans. (Pls go easy on my guys). Because of this I can only speak from my experience with the past 2 betas.
The first thing I wanted to talk about was the switch from fame grinding to gathering grinding, last beta it was obvious that the progression block for most players was with combat fame and not with the ability to gather resources. This worked well because it was fun to grind dungeons/hellgates/portals with friends and encounter some small group pvp (with the occasional zerg). This beta the roles seemed to have flip flopped and now I have to spend most of my time gathering resources. I don’t know about most players but I’d rather grind dungeons with friends than run around with my horse hitting rocks.
The second thing that I wanted to talk about was the push from the developers towards zerging. While I understand that the blackzones are supposed to be dangerous and filled with fights I don’t see why you have to be rolling with 30+ to even have a chance at some fair open world pvp. Some of the most fun memory’s that I have in Albion online were small openworld fights with 3-10 players. Even with the new gathering changes these “hot spots” will just be a competition of which guild can pull the most numbers at the time to control it.
My third bone to pick is the map size. I know that SBI has stated that the map was built for a larger population but that still doesn’t explain why they couldn’t scale it down for the number of players that would be in the beta. We can’t truly test the game if the environment is completely different from what the final result will be.
My last piece is about GVG’s. So far GVG’s this beta have been pretty fun even with the balancing problems (Claymore!). But there is still much that needs to be changed such as respite periods for defenders. At the start of beta we were defending the same territory twice a day and winning both matches up until we couldn’t make one of the gvg’s because our members had to attend to irl stuff. There is much more that I could say in this category but I think Vortech mentioned most of them in his thread.
Albion Online: PvP and PvE Roams, PvP Solo 