In less than 24 hours, the first Project Astral Alpha test will begin.
The test will run for 30 hours, and the main goal is to gather feedback, test the core systems with real players, and collect performance data under actual player load.
What will be fully available during the test?
The main systems are ready for testing.
Astral Tree
The Astral Tree currently has 1187 skillable nodes:
- 829 Tier 1 nodes
- 258 Tier 2 nodes
- 100 Tier 3 nodes
This will be one of the main things I want players to test during the Alpha. Skill nodes, unskill them, try different paths, check the pacing, and give honest feedback about token costs and progression speed.
Astral Gems
The Astral Gem system will also be fully available.
At the moment, there are 19 different Astral Gem families, and each of them can currently be upgraded through 6 tiers.
Later on, this system will expand further:
- Tier 7 with TBC progression
- Tier 8 with WotLK progression
During the test, I would really like players to try the gems properly, test different procs, socket them into gear, upgrade them, and report anything that feels broken, unclear, too weak, or too strong.
Molten Core
If players level and gear faster than expected during the 30-hour test, Molten Core will be open on normal difficulty.
Thanks to the Flex Raid system, you can enter Molten Core with as few as 11 players. For every additional player, the raid will automatically scale up.
So if people manage to become raid-ready in time, there will be raid content available to test as well.
Mythic Raids
Systems like Mythic Raids and the connected Mythic Item Upgrade system are already integrated and functional.
However, they are not planned to be tested during this Alpha.
Because of that, the upgrade database for Mythic items is not filled yet. Mythic will become important later, where players will be able to earn additional tokens, Mythic rewards, and of course normal raid gear through harder content.
For this test, the focus is not Mythic progression yet.
Why is the test running on the small dev server?
The Alpha will start on the small dev server on purpose.
The reason is simple: I want to simulate heavy player load and push the current setup as hard as possible.
If crashes or performance drops happen and they start affecting gameplay too much, the server will be moved to the release server immediately.
The release server is already fully synced and ready as a fallback. It can be booted within a few minutes and is prepared to handle well over 1000 players.
So if the dev server reaches its limit, the release server will replace it quickly to give players a better experience.
What is the purpose of this test?
This Alpha test has two main goals.
1. Player Feedback
Players should test the Astral Tree, Astral Gems, token gain, progression speed, and the general gameplay flow.
I want honest feedback about things like:
- Does the Astral Tree feel too slow?
- Are token rewards too low or too high?
- Do Astral Gems feel useful?
- Are some nodes too strong or too weak?
- Does progression feel rewarding?
- Are systems understandable enough?
This feedback will be very important for balancing the next test phase.
2. Server Performance Logging
During the full 30-hour test, the worldserver will be heavily logged in the background.
This includes module performance, Lua performance, and general AzerothCore performance.
The goal is to look back afterward and see exactly when the server peaked, what caused it, which systems were involved, and where optimization is needed.
This will make it much easier to fix bottlenecks before the next test.
What happens after the Alpha test?
After the Alpha ends, the realm will go back into dev mode and will only be accessible for development again.
All account-wide progress will be purged server-wide after the test.
This means the Alpha is only for testing, feedback, bug reports, and performance data.
A small thank you for Alpha testers
I want to thank everyone in advance who takes part in this first Alpha test.
As a small sign of appreciation, every player who participates in the Alpha and reaches 100 total Tokens by the end of the test will receive something special at the full release.
It does not matter if the tokens are spent or unspent. Both will be tracked.
I am still deciding what the reward will be.
Maybe an achievement?
Maybe a title?
Maybe a mount?
Maybe all three?
Whatever it ends up being, it will be unique to players who helped test Project Astral early and will not be obtainable again later.