Quote Originally Posted by Valmonte View Post
They use them to find and squash thee Elusive bugs. at the Beta stage its always the more the merrier, as the common in your face bugs would have been steamed out in Alpha, Hopefully.
lol. it's not 'the more the merrier' you can have too many in beta.

you want a happy medium. the alpha tester are generally people who know what they are doing. they can find a problem. figure out how to replicate the problem. pass it to devs adn then get them fixed.

Beta testers are not necessarily this skilled. Often times they are not. I can generally tell what a company is after by looking at the beta sign up sheet.

As an example Mech Warrior online closed beta doesn't ask for any info really. they ask you some questions about how familiar you are with the lore and that's about it. they don't ask for your PC specs. So they aren't filtering by PC specs yet. Closed beta seems to be more about content and how close the game is to the traditional lore. IE: what do the hardcore fans want.

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For FFXIV there was a rigorous application and they wanted very detailed information on your system. IE: hardware compatibility testing. the game was essentially running in debug mode so you needed a serious rig to play in the beta. these people are also generally more tech savvy.

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When i beta tested Hellgate London and TSW there was really no application. they just said 'do you want to beta?' if you checked yes you got thrown into a pot.

This is a server stress-test beta. you want a lot of people to see what kind of load your servers can take.