That's a very odd way to put it. Of course the idea is the same, it's testing.
And don't get what we do now mixed up with Alpha testing, this is playing with a side note of "Oh look I found a bug...I'll report it next time".
In fact, don't get what we do here mixed up with professional testing at all.
While Alpha testing you get tasks, thousands of them ranging from two minutes to over twenty four hours long. It's testing that the new features work and that the old features haven't been messed around too much.
While Beta testing you get a Beta task sheet, which is about four pages long with more detailed tasks but much fewer, this it testing to see that optimization hasn't messed around with the playability.
They are the same idea, it's testing, but in the realm of testing they are completely different.
Added to which, in Planeshift, we are mostly stress testing, which is completely different, we never get around to soak testing...atleast as far as I know.
I'm 18 so I have a limited amount of experience concerning testing but don't get open/closed beta mixed up with professional testing.
Edit: I'm sorry for shooting this thread so far off topic.