Let me explain what Alpha means to people who don't know.

Alpha game is still in development game. The engine might be almost done, the main game still in development strongly.

That means game can be buggy, slow, skills and characters, NPCs are not tuned yet.

There should be a release candidate or open beta after. That game considered 80-90% done, with some bugs but most of the tuning should be okayISH.

Then Open Beta or full game release.

This is a strong alpha game so far. Drops and dps and skills and movement definitely not expected to be tuned as final.

Please consider this when posting anything. I think suggestions and experience, both negative and positive is important in this phase.

But please for the love of god, try to give logical and statistical explanation. Overheated cursing topics are seriously useless ones. No matter what you love or hate, but rather try to explain what's your problem with it, why is it bad or good. Just because its different than D4 or PoE1, it doesn't make it bad.

...this is not an alpha?

That's amazing, what game are you playing that's in alpha? PoE2 has gone past Alpha and Beta testing, it's in early access which is completely different than Alpha. If you want to "tell us" something, at least get it right.

ROFL

As someone who has worked in game development, you clearly don't know what an alpha is, so maybe try not to mansplain video game development to people in the future.

Alpha's usually mean sound and graphical assets missing, placeholders, bugs galore, incomplete mechanics.

This is so far from an alpha. It's Early Access. The way Early Access works, is they typically try to polish up the bits they have complete, and deliver it to paying customers with the promise of more content to come. Then have their own build of the game they're working on behind the scenes with all the rest of the incomplete content that's a work in progress. As certain parts of it near completion, they can begin to port it over to the Early Access version of the game.

What they don't want in Early access is anything that resembles an Alpha. Yes there will be lots of content missing, and gamers who buy into Early Access should be well aware of that. But they don't want random crashes with error codes that reveal source code, they don't want invisible monsters that kill you, they don't want spells that are missing animations, they don't want enemies that crash the game. Because that's the kind of stuff you'll find in an Alpha.

Strange, I could swear I read that the early access is alpha. I was trying to find where I read it, can't find it right now.

Okay then, it's early access.

Polish? Definitely not polish, still a lot of stuff need to be worked out as I read the forum. It's a strong Closed Beta (due to being pay walled I would say closed).

Early access also considered Beta to say the least hope you agree, with this updated "mansplaining". :)

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brgmns#3811 wrote:

That's amazing, what game are you playing that's in alpha? PoE2 has gone past Alpha and Beta testing, it's in early access which is completely different than Alpha. If you want to "tell us" something, at least get it right.

Past alpha, but not beta. We are in beta testing phase by definition, closed beta to be exact.

P.S. just adding that EA (early access) is a very general expression and may mean anything from pre-alpha build all the way to open beta stress testing. By broad definition EA is a game in "playable state but may not be feature-complete, or may still have several software bugs to be found". Referenced from wiki.

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H0PE#8755 wrote:

Alpha game is still in development game. The engine might be almost done, the main game still in development strongly.

That means game can be buggy, slow, skills and characters, NPCs are not tuned yet.

There should be a release candidate or open beta after. That game considered 80-90% done, with some bugs but most of the tuning should be okayISH.

Then Open Beta or full game release.

This is a strong alpha game so far. Drops and dps and skills and movement definitely not expected to be tuned as final.

Please consider this when posting anything. I think suggestions and experience, both negative and positive is important in this phase.

But please for the love of god, try to give logical and statistical explanation. Overheated cursing topics are seriously useless ones. No matter what you love or hate, but rather try to explain what's your problem with it, why is it bad or good. Just because its different than D4 or PoE1, it doesn't make it bad.

That's not what alpha means tho. You are describing a beta.