Ok to get a point of reference on what is a beta test and when we might be in beta... you need to understand what testing a program usually entails. There are traditionally two major steps in testing.
1.Alpha, this is where all the major parts of the program are in and functioning but there is still a lot of programing and finalizing going on, but the program is functional.
2.Beta, this is when all the features are put in to the program and your major goal is to root out bugs.
In most games or any programming type thing, alpha is done ?in house? as is the first beta, later you may offer the beta to a select group of screened people so they may try it out and give you feedback as to the user interface and color schemes, and any bugs they may find. And usually lastly you have open beta where you let the masses and the brave (or stupid) try it out on their own and give their findings, though in this there is usually such a mass of feedback and much of it already known that it is more often the computer version of a Screening in movies or a taste test for food, or a focus group for commercials and adds... as well many other lovely things, like level 3 testing of medication. Most often not many changes will occur at open beta.
In our little project :-P, we will be doing open testing throughout. We are prealpha because all we have is a lot of networking done, and some 3D work.
All in all we are not even at the 50% done area, more like the 10% done.
What still needs to be done, you might ask... well if we where baking a cake, we have a mud stove built and we have flour, sugar and we have the recipe to make sweet bread. What we need to do, is a lot of pipes and metal to make a metal stove, to do a lot of trial and error to figure what goes into a cake, and to formulate the recipe for it. Then bake it. And once we are there we will be about in alpha. Then we will make an electric conveyor belt oven, and figure how to formulate instant mix of the cake, and we will have to learn a whole lot about frosting to make the cake not only taste ok, but taste great look great and be easy to reproduce by us.
Luckily this team is surprisingly good at what they do . And we are not building the oven on our own there are many other people focused on that, but in many ways we need to modify it to our needs. The frosting side... well we are a little behind there. But once we are done with our conveyor belt cake maker thing, we are not done... content will be added to the game hopefully for much longer then it took to make the game originally.
As far as my production test area concept lies, faster progression, no swipes may seem like sufficent, but it is not for our needs, I have watched what other games have gone through. And we have to face the facts...in a test are there will be times where you have to A, restart, or B take a step back (two weeks of progression loss) and I have not seen any game in production have enough people playing their tests servers.
