People not on the official testing team are more like playtesters.  They play while they test.

Actual testers actually test.  They do it as a job.  They don't play to see who gets the highest stats or for roleplaying, they test to see if something is broken.

It's broken up, in my mind, like this:

• Players: They play the game, having little or no interest in reporting bugs, but just play the game.  I'd imagine PS has few of these people, but they are here.  This type of player might also complain in a non-constructive way if they don't get what they want.  They do help advocate the game a lot, though.
  
• Playtesters: They arise by begin a player, but also report bugs and may frequently or on occasion test different aspects of the game.  They usually also give constructive feedback from time to time, and is a prime way for the devs to notice something might be wrong in an area.  This is what the OP was doing.  Sometimes devs from commercial professions may sanction playtesters from the casual crowd to see how the average person will do things.
  
• Testers: These are people actually sanctioned by the dev team.  They test the game.  In many games (I don't know about PS), they keep journal and documentation of what they did and how in order to give very specific feedback that the devs need.  Testers do not, in theory, play while they test.  This is not to say that testing is a boring, strict thing to do.  It can be fun, but it is expected that a tester does an honest effort.

Note this is only how it works/should work in my mind, and that all dev teams are different and the playerbase may have different thoughts on the "ladder".  Also note that nobody is necessarily restricted from one group to another, such as me, for example.  I might switch between being a player and playtesting.

Ubuntu Linux 32-bit.  I'd be playing it on Source Mage GNU/Linux if I weren't too lazy to compile everything from source again.