OBT Preview - Loca changes & IP Restrictions

Greetings, Astanians!
As you no doubt have seen, the Open Beta of ASTA has been announced for March 2nd, which leaves us with roughly 2 weeks until you can finally log in to the game again!

The time since the first announcement of Webzen signing a licensing agreement for the game seems to have flown by. While we are at a stage where we feel confident that we are ready to go into Open Beta, the game is by no means “done” yet, and we will work to continuously expand and improve its contents.

And while we have made massive progress on this front, please be aware that an Open Beta is still a Beta and meant to iron out the kinks in the game. The localization work is not yet completed (with especially quest texts still being worked on), and you will encounter the unfortunate inconsistency here and there, just as we will see some technical issues or gameplay bugs popping up.

In our internal QA sessions, we’ve reported some 80 bugs, ranging from minor cosmetic inconveniences all the way to critical game-breaking issues, yet we can of course never be sure that we have found everything (nor do we claim to). Therefore, we will be offering rewards to players reporting bugs using the template provided in our forums, with a dedicated announcement for our reward scheme following soon.
Localisation updates

As outlined in multiple previous announcements, you will see some noticeable differences between the IBT and OBT versions. This also extends to the game’s localization, where you will see changes such as:
    • The “HP” & “Critical” base attribute being renamed to “Vitality” & “Impact”
    • The “Ogre” race being rechristened as the “Doka”
    • The admittedly confusingly named “Jeweler” NPCs (the ones that add sockets to items and gems to sockets) being changed to “Socketers”
    • Factions and races being referred to as such (previously “realms” and “tribes”)

Please note: some of these changes might not make it into the OBT client for the March 2nd release, but can be expected to follow shortly afterwards.

Updated region restrictions

There are unfortunately also some bad news regarding the Open Beta that we feel we have to share with you: Polygon Games have asked us to once again tighten our region restrictions and only allow access to IPs in the “area of service” as defined in Webzen’s contractual agreement with them.

While we previously had to restrict access only from regions for which there are conflicting license agreements, these new restrictions will unfortunately also affect IPs from areas where this is not the case. Access will restricted based on IP geolocation, meaning you will only be able to access the game if the IP you use to log in is registered as being from one of the countries listed below.

European countries

    • Albania
    • Andorra
    • Austria
    • Belarus
    • Belgium
    • Bosnia and Herzegovina
    • Bulgaria
    • Croatia
    • Cyprus
    • Czech Republic
    • Denmark
    • Estonia
    • Finland
    • France
    • Georgia
    • Germany
    • Greece
    • Hungary
    • Iceland
    • Italy
    • Latvia
    • Liechtenstein
    • Lithuania
    • Luxembourg
    • Malta
    • Moldova
    • Monaco
    • Montenegro
    • Netherlands
    • Norway
    • Poland
    • Portugal
    • Republic of Ireland
    • Republic of Macedonia
    • Romania
    • Russia
    • San Marino
    • Serbia
    • Slovakia
    • Slovenia
    • Spain
    • Sweden
    • Switzerland
    • Turkey
    • Ukraine
    • United Kingdom
    • Vatican City
North American Countries

    • Canada
    • United States of America
We know this change will be a disappointment to many of you and we wholeheartedly apologize about any inconvenience caused. Since our contract specifies the countries listed above as our service region, our contract partner has the option to request that we exclude any other region from our service.