Ok here is the question of the ages

[Master_of_Power]

Did opening beta testing to the public actually help us in this, or was it a mistake to open it to the public?

In my opinion, even though there were quite a few people involved, I think that, well, it feels like not many people were worried about helping stamp out the bugs, but instead take advantage of jumpstarting on their newest show-off material.

[Lotus_Eater]

I haven't found any bugs other than the ones already found. But I feel that there isn't a problem with using it to jumpstart my own quest. Anyways, I can't continue my quest past a certain point without the new version anyways, all I am doing is compiling a tileset and playing with the various features seeing how they work now. So if I find a bug, I am obviously going to say something.

[Revfan9]

Meh. If you asked me, it was a bit of both, fluctuating back and forth between the two, but staying mostly on the side of people just using the betas to make quests.

[Dart Zaidyer]

It was hoped that opening betas to the public would expedite the bugfixing process and help catch bugs that would normally recieve almost no attention at all, especially if it only happens in certain circumstances that only one tester would ever be capable of trying. Without public testing, this would result in the bug being blown off until the public release when it turns out that yeah, it's actually a problem, and whoops, the public tried things we didn't!
We did not want to release another 1.90 or 2.10, which were never fully tested.

Pretty much the only real problem with open testing is signal-to-noise ratio. Some people don't quite understand how bug reports are supposed to work, and others are actively coming in and ranting about what they think should happen because it's supposedly good for everyone. (Incidentally, just remember that these impatient people could easily have been responsible for ensuring that we'd never, ever see the Roc's Feather in ZC.)

[The_Amaster]

Well, I tried to report bugs, but several times I would see bugs in the bug forum that I had run into earlier, but discounted becasue I attributed the problem to my incompetence at ZC.