Posted: 2007-06-29 15:33
Adding to what everyone else has said...
The 0.6 beta has hardly affected the number of people playing 0.5. Your choice is the current, stable, less buggy release (0.5) or to help us test 0.6.
We have a closed testing group as well - but with the huge changes in gameplay we've made we need to be able to have full servers testing out how each map plays. Getting 64 people together from a small closed group is a logistical nightmare. There's been a lot of closed testing throughout the development cycle, before the beta was released - 5 full versions along with a whole load of patches to each and constant server side updates. This enables us to get rid of most of the bugs and to try out new ideas - but once we get to a stage where we're near being ready for release the large scale tests a public beta enables us to do are invaluable.
The 0.6 beta has hardly affected the number of people playing 0.5. Your choice is the current, stable, less buggy release (0.5) or to help us test 0.6.
We have a closed testing group as well - but with the huge changes in gameplay we've made we need to be able to have full servers testing out how each map plays. Getting 64 people together from a small closed group is a logistical nightmare. There's been a lot of closed testing throughout the development cycle, before the beta was released - 5 full versions along with a whole load of patches to each and constant server side updates. This enables us to get rid of most of the bugs and to try out new ideas - but once we get to a stage where we're near being ready for release the large scale tests a public beta enables us to do are invaluable.