I'm a game QA tester with a degree in Game Design and I took some notes as I played so I'll share them here.

In the positives section, I definitely enjoyed the alpha despite its shortcomings, particularly in connection issues, and am excited for more It was an awesome time, but you hear that from tons of people, I'm sure. On to the finer points though, here are my criticisms, I hope they can be put to good use:

Learning to play

Learning Curve: I felt that playing the game was definitely the best way to learn. There was an interesting dynamic in that at first, it was easier to play against people, because everyone was pretty new to the game, but then as the hours went on, some people really got the hang of it, myself included, at which point bots were a more likely win than humans, but the bots were definitely a more frightening challenge at the start of the alpha.

Breaks and Dodges: One thing that was particularly difficult to get the hang of was using the breaks and dodges. I often found enemies dodging backwards away from me to avoid my break attacks, and it took quite some time for me to understand that it would often work best to dodge forward toward a locked enemy before using a break as to avoid being too far away and leaving myself open as long. Learning this skill was counter intuitive largely because the move is described as a dodge, which lead me to believe that it wouldn't move me toward the enemy further into harms way.

Stamina: I knew stamina was a thing, but after my initial run through the tutorial I forgot about it (there was a lot to take in there) and didn't figure it out again until around level 11 playing the warden almost exclusively. Apparently, it wasn't too necessary to pay attention to it until I was ready to challenge higher skill level players, because I didn't have too much trouble with most people. Of course there were some who clearly outclassed me when I was unaware of the intricacies of stamina, but that was not the majority of my opponents. I think it might be beneficial to make the audio and visual cues for losing stamina more apparent. For a while I was seeing the screen gray out to show I had no stamina, but I couldn't tell where the bar was to see its state. Perhaps if it flashed or had something to highlight it when stamina is low.

Attack animations and rhythm: Once I started getting better at fighting, I found that knowing how long your attacks were going to take was important, and thus knowing how long the attack animations were going to take, was important. Without being aware of these things, it was very difficult to get a feel for the rhythm of my movements as well as my opponents during battle, this was also exacerbated by the fact that a lot of my attention was spent looking at the guard direction UI and not the actual combatants. IT might be helpful, at the very least for learning purposes, to have some kind of flare or other indication of when an attack animation ends, so that casual players can pick up on it more easily.

Feats: Feats were key in my gameplay strategies, and they weren't really explained anywhere. I thought for the longest time that to use them, I had to press R3 as indicated for selection in the menu to select feats, and then once I'd figured out that the D-pad was the proper method of use, it took an additional couple of rounds to figure out that the feats needed to be gained through playing. I'm still not totally clear on how those work, but working a way to practice using them into the interactive tutorials.

I'm sure playing the single player campaign will really be a help in learning a lot of these things, but I think a lot of people are interested in this game for the pvp aspect which won't teach these things

Gameplay notes

Locking on: I often felt that when running up to other players in 4v4 dominion the L2 lockon feature was not working as fast as I felt it should, so sometimes I'd end up swinging and missing the enemy entirely, only to leave myself open to attack. This could have been player error, but might be worth investigating?

Congratulations/ chat in duels: Now we can't have anyone cursing each other out in the duels, but I found myself wanting to say great job to people who completely owned me, but I didn't have a communication avenue for that in the quick chat system. It might also be cool to have options to rile up the enemy as well in duels. Probably less inflammatory things that fit the context of the game, like "I'lll gut you like a pig!" or "Taste my steel, you dog!"

Faction battles?: I feel like there might be something like this in the works already, but I would really love to play as a part of my larger faction, Knights vs. Samurai vs. Vikings, with a map to show who's winning and in control of different parts of the world as determined by the cumulative gains the different pvp types of matches fought in the name of their faction. Of course, I assume that the Dominion matches fought for faction would include each faction being restricted to only the heroes of their faction.

Calling for help: The option to call for help with the use of the quick chat system was great, but difficult to use during a fight and even more difficult to read during a fight. I was thinking that it would be cool if players could literally shout over the din of battle to on another when in need using the same method. Their voice audio could be prioritized and played above the rest of the sounds in game.

Editing loadout during loading: Right now, there's a lot of down time in loading screens and I would love to be able to adjust my equipment while waiting, at least feats and maybe my gear.

Anyway, that's all of my notes, I hope they're useful! Keep up the good work!