[Question] What does it mean to close the public beta?

Where did you see that at?!?!

As for closing a public beta it often refers to not letting anymore new Beta testers in. Becuase to much feedback can be a bad thing. Some people don't bother reading the proper method for submitting bugs even though it's a sticky with the title "Please read before posting" which ends up cluttering up forums. Which makes it hard for the devs to both sort through and track down the issue.

There are a ton of things I could mention that people do which kinda undermine the process and even if it's only a small percentage of the community the more people there are the more people doing bad things there are. Most don't do it intentionally it's mostly they are being lazy but it makes the devs job harder to track down the issues that person is having.

Also the devs only have so much time to read the forums so if there are like 10 threads posting the same bug instead of 1 thread with everyone simply replying they are also having the same problem it's hard to sort. This is one of those bad practices people sometimes do though it can be unintentional as the more people there are posting the more threads get pushed back a few pages.

I'm not saying that's happening much now but in 1Z most of the reports stayed on Page 1 for a build. Now it seems like we are getting into a few pages of threads for each build and growing the more they added. It can be hard for them to read all that in a timely manner plus it work done on the game.

That could be 2 things:

- new preorders don't have access to the beta

- no new builds for beta testers

That is usually refered to as the End of a Beta. Not the closing of a beta.

considering that beta 4 will most likely be and ongoing testing of new things from stardock i.e.

it could simply represent the end of beta testing things for the "gold edition" or even the availability of an open beta rather then a closed beta heh heh..

It is said that stuff will be done after the public beta has ended in this official post: https://forums.elementalgame.com/385450 (at the end of "ITEM #1: Making the sovereigns distinct from one another" section)

"For instance, the Warlord starts the player off with 2 sentinels.  But right now, the Bard only starts you with a stat boost to hero cost. Boring. The Adventurer gives you an extra move. A okay start but still boooring. This will be an area that we will be spending time on after the public beta endsd." (they have a typo )

Also they reference about it happening with another of one of their games in this official post near the end: https://forums.elementalgame.com/385559

"In the first Galactic Civilizations beta (2003), the starbases were suggested by beta testers and didn’t make it into the public beta (imagine GalCiv without starbases). We ended up loving the idea so much we put a picture of a starbase on the box and implemented them after the public beta closed."

Near launch the public beta will end. They probably won't shut down the game/remove it from Impulse, though dont quote me. But we won't receive any new updates and the finished game may be quite different from whats in the last beta.

I'm fairly confident that 'closing the public beta' means that we no longer get to participate and they continue testing internally only. This will happen once the game is nearly finished and they need to do some final tweaking that we are not that useful for. Also, it's much faster to develop when you don't need to roll out betas to many people, so having an open beta running during crunch time might not be that good of an idea.

Regardless, there won't be that big of a gap between release and closing of the beta, if there will be one. The game is going to be released in two months.

Brad was referring to the point where we stopped releasing beta builds to the public testers. They can continue playing the outdated build up to release, though.

Yay  !