Intrepid - Please Limit Testers Game Knowledge

As an idealist, I feel like your worry, while valid, is the opposite of how you should be thinking about it.

The sort of person who has some sort of advantage due to their ability to understand systems, or overall intellect, will figure that sort of thing out, in a modern MMO, so quickly, that it's irrelevant to 90% of the playerbase.

If you were thinking of yourself as one of those people, your concern is very altruistic and commendable, but if not (or even so, honestly) your better bet would be to find any imbalances faster so that you could tell the Devs so that they can tweak or remove them.

This is even more true if you're concerned about 'a poor community developing because of it'. That community type is a symptom of something, not caused by something. The only benefit you'd get would be that the ignorant masses (no disrespect to them, that's the literal definition) have a higher chance to be wrong when they are being 'best only' min-maxers.

In Ashes, that wouldn't even work out properly because 'hey guys this is the optimal node to raise' would be easily stopped by 'a band of people who are annoyed at that, attacking the Node'. Or just an army of 'casual' players who like some other Node better visually or something.

The big worry point would be if the full game lacked content. Not 'that there is no gap between Beta and full', just that full has little content.

So don't worry about testers 'figuring out that you can make tons of money hunting wolves in winter because the respawn on wolves is too high compared to the value of pelts'.

Worry about them NOT finding that, and it getting into main game, and breaking a whole economic system across a region because a single huge guild with a savvy economist realizes it first.

Not everyone can learn just by watching videos of someone else doing something, but so far, there isn't a single system, nor any indicators of a system, that would imply this can happen (ruining of surprises).

If you just 'need a ragtag bunch of crazy people who don't value efficiency above all else', those exist. I find it's best not to worry about it too much, you only need to find one stable group like that, and after that, you don't have to care.

As for the Alpha Island thing, the current build is 9 nodes within a space that would normally hold twice as many , so even the individual zones of influence are gonna be different.

This probably can't be true for Beta, but Beta is supposed to be shorter.

There's been talk of a lot of reactive content in the world, too (example below in the spoiler is mine, but I remember hearing something similar) and reactive content has two benefits. It can take long to trigger, and most parts of it don't need to be tested as strictly since it 'failing to trigger' isn't gamebreaking.

Imagine a node in a forest where it develops high quickly and now there's so many gatherers that the trees are always camped and chopped down instantly, some number of 'trees cut' racks up until it spawns a Corrupted wandering boss "Eater of The Forest's Rage". But this couldn't spawn until literally months into the game, and therefore wouldn't have spawned in Alpha or Beta.

I have formulated systems for adding their content type before, it benefits from a specific thing. You don't have to have 'a long list of Node specific quests'. You can have a 'Metropolis node quest template' with different parameters to fill it out, and players will take months to see any of them. By the time they have raised a Metropolis, sacked a Metropolis, and raised a new, different Metropolis, not only might the quests seem unfamiliar again, the Devs would have had time to make new stuff.

They can literally 'react to this in real time' on the Quest maker side. If they see you pushing a City up toward Metropolis level they can focus on building new unique quests for when you manage, a month in advance. Maybe quests and emergent content may be bugged, but you sound like you'll be happier with that possibility, as long as you get to react to the world.