How will you spend the 8-12 months of downtime?

[Inaaca]

Nope. Japanese Alpha starts sometime after November 11th then it has to go into NA/EU Alpha after and I highly doubt that's only a 1 or 2 week journey.

Alpha is just going to be stress testing during certain windows, so it won't be an excessive amount of time between alpha and beta unless something drastic goes wrong.