PvP Queues, Faction Salt, and an Alpha That Shows Its Seams — May 7, 2026

If you wanted one snapshot of where Scars of Honor is right now, general chat had it covered: half the room was trying to log in, the other half was trying to figure out why battlegrounds wouldn’t pop, and somewhere in the middle a fresh argument erupted over whether one faction’s leveling path is simply better built than the other. That’s a pretty honest technical alpha, really. Not glamorous, not tidy, but extremely revealing.

The mood swung wildly all day. One minute players were dunking on the ghost-town PvP server and begging for cross-server queues; the next, someone was praising a big world-boss scrap and saying balanced gear made it a blast. There’s a game here people want to test. There’s also a pile of friction between that game and the players trying to reach it.

Sacred Order vs. Domination Turns Into the Day’s Petty War

The faction argument started small and immediately became very MMO. A few players insisted Sacred Order’s zone feels thin on quests compared to Domination, while others swore they’d heard the exact opposite. Then the knives came out.

One side argued the blue faction has the cleaner experience by a mile, not just in quest count but in the things players actually feel minute to minute: town placement, vendor access, resource nodes, chest locations, and the pathing of the main quest line. The red side, according to that camp, is just laid out worse. The pushback wasn’t exactly gentle, but it also wasn’t hard to see why this stuck. In an alpha, players forgive missing polish faster than they forgive a leveling route that feels annoying on purpose.

That said, another thread kept undercutting the whole debate with a shrug: quests barely matter if you can grind mobs for huge experience anyway. A couple of players flatly said the current best answer is to stop obsessing over quest flow and just farm. That doesn’t make the faction complaints disappear, though. If one side feels smoother to move through, gather in, and navigate, players notice even when the optimal route is “ignore the quests and kill things.”

There was also a smaller but telling jab that Domination’s chain feels “thrown together” compared to the Order side. So even within the same day, chat managed to produce both “blue side is way better” and “red side feels slapped together.” Which sounds contradictory until you remember how often MMO players are really talking about different slices of the same experience: early quest density, map readability, travel friction, or where the useful NPCs are hiding.

What matters is that faction parity is already under a microscope. In a two-faction game, that’s not side chatter. That’s structural.

Battlegrounds Are Here, and Almost Nobody Can Actually Play Them

If there was one recurring punchline in chat, it was the battleground queue timer. Fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes. Forty-six minutes. An hour. Players kept asking whether BGs were broken, whether they were cross-server, whether they were available at all, and which server—if any—actually had them popping.

The answer, most of the time, was some variation of: not really.

A lot of players landed on the same conclusion fast: battlegrounds need cross-server queues if they’re going to produce useful testing data. Right now, too many things are working against them at once. Population is split across servers, one PvP server is in the EU, some regions are asleep, faction balance looks lopsided, and plenty of players in a technical alpha simply aren’t interested in sitting in a queue to test organized PvP when quests, crafting, and basic login stability are still wobbling.

That led to one of the sharper debates of the day. Some players took the empty PvP server and dead BGs as proof that PvP diehards are a loud minority and the developers shouldn’t bend around them. Others fired back that this was a terrible read on the situation because the test setup itself is sabotaging PvP participation. Releasing battlegrounds and a dedicated PvP server at the same time, on an EU server no less, was called out as a recipe for splitting an already limited audience.

And honestly, that criticism lands. It’s hard to declare a mode unwanted when the test conditions make it awkward to access in the first place.

The bigger fight: should PvP even matter this early?

That queue problem fed straight into a more philosophical brawl. One camp argued PvE should be the clear priority right now because that’s what will carry the game at release. The other camp was having none of it. Their point was simple: this is a technical alpha, the game has PvP, so PvP needs testing too.

Some players missed the older “everyone flagged” direction and said it made the world feel alive. The current setup, to them, feels too safe and sleepy. Suggestions came quickly: stronger guards, bigger safe zones around bases, contested world bosses, PvP zones, honor systems. The common thread was a desire to avoid hard separation between PvE and PvP servers and instead build a world where both styles can coexist without one strangling the other.

That’s the more interesting argument, because it’s not just “PvP good” versus “PvP bad.” It’s about what kind of faction-war MMO Scars of Honor wants to be. If your whole fantasy is two sides fighting over the world, players are going to notice when the world feels oddly unbothered by that premise.

The Alpha Defense Is Real, but So Is the Frustration

General chat spent a lot of time litigating a question every early test eventually drags into the open: how rough is too rough?

A few players were bluntly unimpressed. Some compared the current build unfavorably to WoW, GW2, SWTOR, Neverwinter, or even private-server-style alternatives when the conversation drifted toward what to play instead. Others said the game has potential but is currently hard to enjoy, with combat feeling off, mobs hitting too hard, loading issues, and enough quest bugs to make progress feel like a coin flip.

Then came the counterargument, repeated often and with increasing exasperation: this is a technical alpha, not an early access soft launch, and people treating it like a polished live game are setting themselves up to be mad. That sentiment had some bite to it. Several players basically said disappointment at this stage says more about player expectations than the state of the build.

That defense is fair up to a point. But chat also showed why the frustration isn’t just players being babies about an alpha. If you can’t get past a loading screen, can’t talk to a quest NPC, abandon a stuck quest only to lose tracking, or queue forever for the feature you specifically logged in to test, you’re not really arguing about polish anymore. You’re arguing about access.

One player’s mood summed it up neatly: the game may have potential, but right now it feels unplayable.

That doesn’t mean the project is doomed. Another player pushed back on the “failed game” talk and argued the only obvious failure so far is public perception, which is fixable if the team keeps improving the build. That’s probably the sanest read in the room. The game isn’t dead because chat got mean for a morning. But public opinion does matter, and rough tests burn goodwill faster than studios like to admit.

Keys, Streams, and the Awkward Business of Getting People In

Before players can be disappointed by the alpha, they have to actually get into it. Plenty still hadn’t. The key conversation kept bubbling up all day: are keys gone, are they still being sent, why did early signups miss out, and why do so many studios route access through streamers in the first place?

That last point got the most heat. Some players said they hate when games push keys through streams because it feels like forced marketing disguised as access. Others defended it with the practical argument that people who watch a stream are more likely to try the game. Both things can be true, and chat made that tension obvious.

The anti-streamer-key crowd wasn’t really objecting to visibility. They were objecting to the feeling that access is being turned into a little performance. That resentment gets worse when the test is already rough. If you waited days for a key, finally got in, and then spent your first session wrestling bugs or dead queues, you’re not exactly going to become a born-again evangelist for Twitch drops.

There was also a more basic complaint underneath all of it: if the goal is testing, why not simply let more willing players in? One player called withholding access from everyone who wishlisted early a huge mistake. That’s hard to dismiss when the same chat is also complaining there aren’t enough people online to fill battlegrounds.

Bugs, Broken Quests, and the Strange Life of Scars

The nuts-and-bolts testing chatter was messy, useful, and very much the real substance of the day. Players reported login failures, characters hanging after pressing play, server-specific issues, quest NPCs not responding, markers pointing to nowhere, and crafting quests that only completed under oddly specific conditions.

A few examples kept resurfacing:

• main quest progress getting stuck
• abandoning bugged quests causing missing quest tracking
• starter NPC interactions failing
• the basic longsword quest not registering until crafted with better quality
• druid range and cooldown display complaints
• loading and character-entry issues on specific servers

That’s a rough list, but it’s also the kind of list a technical alpha is supposed to produce. Players were even helping each other through some of it—relogging for NPCs, zooming the map for vendor markers, explaining where to get resin and quartz, reminding newcomers to spend talent points and buy starter gear before deciding every mob is overtuned.

Then there were Scars, which sounded like their own little soap opera. Players asked whether scars could be obtained in the current test, complained that world-boss kills weren’t awarding them properly, and later reported partial recovery or reapplication after another boss win. One player said they’d finally recovered their scar, then immediately reported a fresh bug that disabled boss abilities. That’s alpha life in one sentence: fix one thing, find two more.

The world boss itself, though, was one of the few places where the game seemed to briefly click. Players on the PvP server talked about long fights at the boss, balanced gear, and a genuinely good time. Even some who were frustrated elsewhere admitted the boss scene still had people “punching on,” which is Australian-English MMO poetry for “at least someone is actually fighting over something.”

OCE Players Finally Get a Little Good News

Regional support came up repeatedly, especially from players asking the obvious question: where are the Asia and OCE servers? The lack of local options was part of the PvP-server criticism all day, with players pointing out that high ping alone is enough to make a dedicated PvP realm a nonstarter for some regions.

Late in the chat, there was at least one concrete bit of optimism: OCE servers are planned for the next test, though that test will most likely be under NDA. That sparked its own mini-reaction. Some players were thrilled just to hear OCE support is coming. Others immediately groaned that an NDA test means less visibility and, in their minds, possibly tougher access.

Still, this was one of the few moments where chat got a straight answer that changed the temperature. Regional support won’t solve every queue issue or faction imbalance by itself, but it does remove one of the more obvious excuses for why parts of the current PvP test feel half-empty.

What This Alpha Actually Proved

Today’s chat didn’t prove that Scars of Honor is cooked, and it didn’t prove the haters wrong either. What it proved is that players can already see the shape of the game they want hiding inside this build, and that makes every rough edge feel more personal.

The loudest issues weren’t abstract. They were concrete, fixable, and repeated: faction flow needs scrutiny, battlegrounds need a smarter queue structure, regional support matters, and bugged progression will sour any test faster than ugly textures ever could. The good news is that none of that sounds mystical. The bad news is that players have started forming opinions anyway, and those opinions harden quickly.

That’s the real story from the day. Not that the alpha is rough—of course it is—but that the roughness is already steering the conversation about what kind of MMO this wants to be. If the developers are listening, they’ve got plenty to work with. They just probably shouldn’t expect general chat to say it politely.