Daniel Erickson confirms no open beta

However he did say the release date is still pointed for 2011

How annoying.

I'm glad. As much as I'd like the honor be being in beta - open betas just don't do games justice.

^^

Makes sense - they don't want everyone playing through the story for free.

plus there is still a lot of work being done and balancing an content being developed . anyone thinking this game will get released before pax east is dreaming . I would say pax east is prolly a good time frame when you may hear a release date announced . But ... an I say But , I wouldn't want to bet the farm on it mates .

Say what? i'm confused here

First you need to become familiar with a few words and definitions.

Closed beta - an invite only opportunity to help with gameplay testing and feed back prior to the release of a game

Open beta - usually used for stress tests and final fine tuning of a game before it's launch, requires a registration only and then people may play the game before the final version ships

Thus, the game will stay in closed beta (invites only) but they will be increasing the number of people who are in closed beta. They will NOT have an open beta.

Stress testing is an important aspect of beta. If bioware had a history of designing MMOs, they would know this. The end result is that the game will be unplayable for the first two weeks while they scramble to figure out why the servers are overloaded.

If they are running beta on one server right now, then they will have stress tests done on specific parts of that server while probably not the whole. They also have multiple people from other MMO launches for data and information on how to avoid tie ups and login issues without offering the chance to play their precious piece of work for free.

Is that enough? I guess we'll find out.

Hard to imagine launch going smoothly yet so many lessons from other launches have been learned it is hard to imagine their launch going as badly as say SWG's launch.

Its been proven time and again that the only way to know if your server is going to blow up under load is to put it under load. Everyone wants to talk about how they ran this number and that number and this should be able to theoretically do that. The fact is that until you actually try to put 10 pounds of you know what into a five pound bag, you really don't know how bad its going to be.

Which isn't to say you actually need an open beta to do that. You can invite as many people as you like to closed beta, you can use thin clients combined with actual people on a normal client, etc.

So long as your log in server survives launch (which is what normally dies), you can lock individual shards when and if population raises too high on them. I pretty much expect them to do exactly that given the entire guild reservation system in place.

True, you can load a server to death if you have enough people in beta, but you can't just tell 10,000 beta players we are doing a stability test today, half show up, and now you think you are good for 10,000 players on launch day.

I find this very disconcerting...