If you don't get in to a beta you have to live vicariously though an NDA that doesn't allow people to post about what's going on. You read each forum post thinking to yourself "I wonder if this is some random idiot, or if he's in beta and knows what he's talking about!" Or alternatively, "I wonder if this is just some random idiot in beta that wouldn't know a good thing if it bit him in the butt!"

Either way, it's painful. Wanting to follow a game so closely and not having information and knowing that someone else does is so hard. You go from concept art to exclusive screen shots shared throughout the game community and wonder if that's what you thought it would look like, and how it will look in the game world.

You wonder what specs the screen shot machine was running at, if you’ll need to upgrade your computer to get it to look like that, and wish you at least knew how long before you had to start shopping for a new PC.

You read nuances into every community manager post, and check daily for new posts, and discuss what the old posts might have meant! It's just the next to worst thing you could do.

The worst thing? Actually getting into Beta!

Now don't get me wrong, I've beta'd a lot of games, and I rather enjoy it. But a lot of people have the wrong idea of what a beta is.

I watch people zoom up in level without testing the low level stuff, which is fine I guess. But if you're there to get a head start on the launch of the game, you're there for the wrong reasons.

Me? I'm the idiot running into zone walls checking for "pixel integrity". I'm trying to fall through the world, climb trees where you're not supposed to be able to, and my bug reports tend to be wordy and normally I have to reword them since most game companies allow somewhere around 12 words per submitted bug report.

That doesn't mean I make a good tester though. My idea of how the game should be is often entirely different than what a development team is looking for. It's hard to test something when you have such a different, dare I say it, "vision"(tm).

Guild betas I find even more unfair, personally. Gamers today can't become a part of the community enough to test out high end things as we somehow figured out how to do in the "old days". Companies now let one or two "uber guilds" in so they can do it? Please. That's not community, or in the best interest of the players. Of course, I'm speaking strictly from a player’s perspective. But if studios are designing a raid for the best people that have worked together for 4 years, have each other cell phone numbers for that 2am raid wakeup call, I don’t really want to play your game, and honestly, neither does the average player.

On the flip side, beta can be fun. There's a sense of purpose, and community that you normally only get on test servers. There's a sense of doom as you repeat bug reports every time a patch is made and patch notes repeatedly have no mention of any of the 300 bugs you've reported since day one. There's a bigger sense of doom a year later as the bug remains. Don't laugh. It happens. There's a sense of priority that only the devs can give to their projects.

Beta can be awesome. Impacting a game by being intimately involved with the early community and the developers can be incredible fun. But it's a responsibility to those around you, and to those who come after you.

Have you ever beta'd a game and made a dev change his mind on why something should be done differently? They'll rib you for the rest of your gaming career, but you'll be the person they call when they need a players input on something. It's a fun feeling.