Let me make an assumption here.

The purpose of beta-testing is finding out bugs, errors, exploits and stress-testing.
So it would make sense if they want us to test everything out from the very beginning. They also said that they do not want us to continue updating our characters otherwise the transfer into the 2.0 system would be impossible.

So i'm going to guess we're going to have to make new characters for the beta, if we make it into the beta.