Excerpt from Kilsin buried in another public thread.
...right now as we prepare for the second round of pre-alpha ... most of our attention has shifted to the testing phase and our pre-alpha forums where we are sifting through thousands of in-game and out of game bug reports and feedback.
Pre-alpha 2 is nigh and it sounds like the devs are getting a ton of great feedback from pre-alpha players. That's great news on all counts.
Thanks for sharing this - if it was in a public thread not subject to NDA there is no reason we shouldn't all see where things are going.
So pre-alpha is multiple rounds and alpha is far from immanent since at LEAST one round of pre-alpha remains as well as the period (probably at least a month and maybe well over that) between pre-alpha and alpha.
Back to wasting time with LOTRO.
This is NOT a complaint that it is taking too long - a quick cursory pre-alpha process might speed things up but at the cost of a weaker less stable game down the road. Bad trade-off.
Second round of pre-alpha could just be refering to a second build after implementing the feedback from the first round or a second round prepared while the first one was being tested. The third build would then be the first to incorporate feedback from the third build.
When I read "second round of pre-alpha", I think, "bring the pre-alpha players back in for more testing".
They've said several times before that pre-alpha is not a free-for-all, players have specific task to complete.
To me, this just means they have more stuff to test and that pre-alpha testers will again be asked to test something.
coeurdelion said:this is going to be at least one year long beta testing, we will probably not see alpha stage before mid 2018 at best.
And really thats ok, we want the base game good to go for our alpha testing phases. Majority of things will be found with alpha, until then the stability of the game is more important.
Lots of things to do before alpha, thats for sure.
Crazzie said:coeurdelion said:this is going to be at least one year long beta testing, we will probably not see alpha stage before mid 2018 at best.
And really thats ok, we want the base game good to go for our alpha testing phases. Majority of things will be found with alpha, until then the stability of the game is more important.
Lots of things to do before alpha, thats for sure.
You are right, Crazzie. We want this game to be as good as it can be when it launches. However, thinking about doing a moonlight ritual invloving a knife, a live chicken and lots of bourbon just to see if I can help move things along...