The First Beta Test is Complete: Director's Letter
Heroes of Armantia,
Hello everyone. I'm the CEO of Challengers Games and the Producer of Second Wave, Tamura Koji.
I hope everyone is doing well with the new season and all the changes that come with it. I'm certainly not. I still haven't gotten over my cold for a month now... (cough, cough)
Well, anyway. First and foremost, I want to say thank you to everyone.
To everyone who participated in our first Beta Test from October 6th to October 16th, thank you. It's been almost four months since we first showed you our Alpha version of Second Wave on May 27th, 2023. This Alpha test was incredibly instrumental. We were able to gather some amazing feedback from the Alpha players, and it helped us steer the game in the right direction. The view on this ship during our adventure to create Second Wave was a little foggy at times, but your feedback allowed us to see more clearly and resulted in bringing some really good changes to the game.
It wasn't easy, I admit. The entire team put their heads together and we had many, many, many discussions about this feedback. We spent days analyzing player feedback, and after a pretty brutal company meeting, we were able to figure out how to incorporate your ideas and feedback into Second Wave.
This opened up a lot of good conversations for us. We realized that there were countless challenges that had come up in those discussions that we needed to deal with. I have to admit, we did our best to resolve these challenges in the best way we could with the time we had.
Yet you stuck with us and played our game.
With Second Wave, we opened our servers on three continents and three different platforms. You gave us your trust and played Second Wave with more enthusiasm than we could have ever expected.
In the 10 days that we had our beta, we were blown away by the number of people playing. There were a total of 37,442 matches.
Domination was 85% of those matches, Three-Way Battle was 9%, and Stone Grab was 6%.
The number of active players was 18,991, which we really didn't expect. There were 4,466 players playing on our US East servers, and 3,782 players on our US West servers. In Europe we had 4,400 players and in Asia we had 6,343 players.
Our goal for this Beta was to be two steps better than the Alpha we released in June. Unfortunately, it wasn't as good as I thought it would be. My team and I were disappointed with the quality of the result. It didn't meet our expectations.
During the Beta, we found a lot of problems. Matchmaking issues, connectivity problems, social bugs, frame drops, and so on. The list is quite long. We were devastated.
Before I continue, I would like to say that we truly apologize for splitting the matchmaking pool between Eastern and Western North America, which resulted in a smaller matchmaking pool. We will do our best to improve this for the next test so that we can test the game, all together, without splitting the US East and West playerbase, and maintain good latency numbers.
It feels like we didn't fully do our homework after our Alpha test. We sincerely apologize for not bringing you a smoother experience.
As I was writing this Director's Letter, all I could write was that I'm really sorry to everyone, which made it difficult to continue writing this letter for hours on end.
We apologize from the bottom of our hearts.
However, we'd like to thank those of you who enjoyed the game despite the bugs and problems.
As for the results of this Beta, rest assured that they will be used to feed the upcoming second Beta.
Starting on October 16th, we will begin to prioritize all of the technical issues we've encountered in this beta.
For our second beta test, here is a list of what we will be doing starting today.
Whether it's TCP, UDP, packet loss, or library related issues, our first and primary goal is to have NO technical issues.
Improve Domination.
Rework and refine both Three-Way Battle and Stone Grab modes to make them even more appealing and fun than they currently are.
Introducing our Training Grounds feature, Custom Matches, and Bots/AI Matches.
Refining the game controls to make them even smoother.
Finding the right solution for the lack of hit feedback. We want you to really feel the game.
Improve the sound quality.
There are many more fixes, improvements and adjustments that are part of our goals to bring to everyone, and they will be added. We are thoroughly analyzing all of our data and finding the right solutions.
Thanks to all of you who put up with our shortcomings and still had fun playing. We PROMISE to do better next time. We know you want a date for our next Beta, and what I will say is that the next Beta will be as soon as we finish our work and can bring you the game you deserve.
I have said it before, but I will say it again. I truly believe that in order for us to continue our precious developer/player relationship, we must start by keeping our promises to be and do better. So in order to continue to earn your trust and keep our relationship sacred, we will start by keeping our promise.
