Quote Originally Posted by Cynthis View Post
I'm the first one to admit that this is hard to write clearly, never mind think off clearly. So if I understand you correctly your theory is that the only part of the beta character that would be applicable after the transfer of data is essentially the character creation information and that would be filled in with our progress in 1.x. That would indeed be convenient. Personally I kind of doubt that is how SE will do it, much easier from their part to just wipe all data from beta and have us go through that process again when we "re-activate" our characters.
Yes, exactly! It would indeed be convenient. But what you're saying seems the most likely route they could take. Then again, we don't know. I'd wish we'd start getting information about it since it is getting close to the proposed closed beta and shutdown of 1.0 servers.

Quote Originally Posted by Cynthis View Post
One thing I am curious about is how the beta testing will actually work. I agree with your point that we will most likely start characters from scratch for the first "closed" beta but if we assume that runs for 1-2 month, that means SE should get lots of feedback on low-level content but it would be fairly limited on endgame stuff since even though leveling is fast there probably will not be too many well geared L50 players of each job in any given free company to take on presumably tough content like defeating the new open world roaming primals.
I can vaguely remember how it went but I was in alpha and beta. Every alpha event, IIRC, our characters were wiped out and we had to make a new one. However, I do recall there being LV50s during alpha, so I could be wrong. It's been a long time. As for closed beta, same thing, up until open where it ran for about a week, I think? Anyway, I think that all that was tested was basic stuff like levequests, quests, mechanics, UI, and all that stuff we had at 2010 release. Not sure if we had legit endgame in testing or even at release.

Quote Originally Posted by Cynthis View Post
I am assuming that type of content will primarily be tested in the "open" beta/free-to-play period after our characters have been transferred. If we can keep progress in that phase then I am hopeful the game will really only be "down" (In my definition the game is down if we can't play our existing characters and save progress) during the "closed" beat which might be a reasonable amount of time. I think that's a big if though...
Perhaps. That would make sense since we'll be in the position to test that sort of thing, even if the majority of it is what we have now pre 2.0 (I think). But yeah, big if... u__u