Well, I've been saying it for a while: there won't be any serious, heavy-duting testing as long as people have to grind for their XP and camp mobs for their gear. A few people will try, but the amount of time that has to be spent just enabling characters to test - even with 10x XP - is simply a waste. A week of freeform beta gameplay was fine, two weeks has been questionable but oh well. If it's gonna continue, it's just a stupid waste of time.
I don't put much faith in the Oct 28th date. Yesterday in IRC, Rogean said he'd just now started to even look at the bug reports. If nothing has actually been done in the first two weeks, it's hard to expect the server to be ready in another two. Can't slight Rogean for being a busy man, it'll all happen according to his schedule, but I don't see any reason not to provide people with the tools needed to test the things that need to be tested. So far, the beta has yielded little more than useless killshot screenies and incorrect bug reports. Pretty much no tangible feedback for resists and such. Most people don't want to spend two weeks grinding and gearing up on a beta server, and the numbers reflect that.
All of the very minor feedback and the handful of non-retarded bug reports would have been provided anyway, it's not as if automated levels and gear would mean people wouldn't have found out about shit like the bugged dynamic range system or the fact that resists are screwed up. People would still want to PvP, and it would probably be a lot more fun and popular if everyone could just pick whatever class they want to try for the day and go fight some other goons of the same level and gear range. I expect that would get a lot more people on the beta server, a lot more PvP activity to cover everything imaginable, and a lot more feedback data. Right now it's just a bunch of magicians and shamans dicking around. I haven't seen any mention at all of like half the classes.
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