Registration for the First Login Test

Dec 9, 2018

On December 15th, at about 10 in the morning eastern time, we’re going to conduct a login test with Ship of Heroes supporters and devs. In 2017, we gave a group of supporters a chance to try out the first version of our Character Creation Tool (CCT). Earlier this year, we did a series of team combat Alpha runs. Now we’re about to conduct our third Alpha activity: a large-scale login test in which up to 100 players can log into Ship of Heroes simultaneously.

In order to help control the event, we’re limiting the login test to supporters who have previously donated at least $25 to the development of Ship of Heroes, and devs.  Right now we are planning our first full login test for Saturday, December 15th, and the cutoff date for donations to count is the 11th. The likely time would be around 10:00 AM EST.

In preparation for this new Alpha, we have completed a set of technical improvements and conducted multiple FPS tests, which seem to indicate that we can have up to 100 completely unique heroes in close proximity and maintain good FPS.  For us, good FPS is 30 or higher.  Of course, FPS depends on many things, and some of our supporters may have older computers than the ones we use, so results will obviously vary.

In some ways this may be the most boring alpha test any game development team has ever conducted. There’s no character creation, no combat, and not much in terms of powers testing.  The players will be constrained to the area under the Arch, so that we can gather data with a lot of characters on the screen at once.  But we think it’s smart to test at higher numbers, with real-world conditions, before we move on to some more complex stuff.  We hope we get enough volunteers to fill up the test.  The results will help us plan out raid sizes, teaming, and other factors in our actual game, including how much effort to put into further optimization.

Still, there will be things to see.  Every character in the test will be unique; we’ve created them using the exact same tools that you will be able to use in-game.  Chat will be working, so you can talk to your friends from the forums.  And for our dev team, it will be a great chance to finally walk and talk with some of our community members, under the Arch, in Apotheosis City, for the first time.  If you would like to participate, the link to register for the event is here: https://shipofheroes.com/login-test-sign-up-start/