I haven't gotten into a closed beta but have gotten into a couple of limited "open"  betas with MMOs (I seem to have better luck with web services and online software).  

I have unfortunately found that they make it such an unmeaneable job just to report a possible problem that most people stop doing itIts not in anything near beta butit is always testing its new features, but a great example of this is EVE-Online  To report a bug you have to run a logserver in the background while the bug occurs (a real pain if it is an occasional bug) do a set of dxdiag tests, send in a comprehensive list of your hardware and sometimes your software, and sometimes a detailed report on exactally what you have done in game recently

because of this few people do bug testing on the test server.

This mess is actually better than the hoops that were on the betas I was a part of.

If they would do some of the things in the article and others like bounties of game time or ingame prizes for first and confirming reports of  bugs and problems, you would probably get alot better testing data from players.  

After all you have to remember , this is a game and if the testing kills the fun or players are not acknolaged for the trouble they went to to help you make it better for everyone.

I was going on old information. When the Idea was first being introduced it was being bandied about at 5 to 7 bucks A MONTH. I just assumed that that $10 fee was going to be monthly (also conversion to my currency didn't help, and I did that wrong in myhead too D'OH).

$10 bucks a year isn't so bad. Use TS for a few months putting a few bucks aside and you got it for a year. Thats assuming it is stable and better than most cruddy integrated voice.

If the company was smart they would charge $3.40 every 2 months and if you didn't miss more than a total of 4 months, after you had paid three times you got the rest of that year for free.

For that extra money I want audio effects like radio squak, background noise in dedspace and electronic combat, AI comm, Station comm, communication jamming eqipment, eavesdropping equipment, and other ingame functionality. Also I would have to have garentees that ISP packet shaving would be NO issue. And even then if this became a major requirement of the game, officially or not, I would have to consider if playing this game is now too expensive for the expirience.

1. See the post above yours
2. The Headshots that are your character are also refered to by many as avatars (general term).
3. many players are having problems with missing or altered facial images
4. As for the map, lines aren't dark enough and aren't always displaying the proper information.  If I am in one regon of the galaxy and I want to zoom in on another I have to select a star in that region, and if I click on the wrong thing it zooms me back to my location on the map.  if I goto check info on themap as I fly in space  it takes me to system view (practically useless) and to zoom out to galaxy view I have to search a galactic loacation and zoom to it.  Map look pretty.. Work Baaaaaaaaaaaaad.
5. As for the White flash being a cosmetic thing, for many of Us players they are so bright after about 5 or 6 they really start to hurt the eyes.  When trying out the new map system, I had to watch over 20 on a dark background.  Headache soon ensued.  I am far from the only person complaining about this as being more than "minor annoyance"

1. When I went to update and it told me to do it manually, it kept telling me to download the patch for the test server, which this time was diffrent from the usual.  The night before, I decided to download the patch manually and install a second version of the EVE Online client to get a sneakpeak while they were rolling out Rev I on the main server.  after patching my main client, niether would log in, and niether would tell me I had the wrong version.  It just told me to download the same patch I had just installed.
   
2. When I uninstalled my clients and mistakenly redownloaded and reinstalled the test server patch, because that was the EVE Online page it kept sending me to, it told me I needed to download another patch and install it.  It sent me to a page that just listed what version the patch would update to.  It didn't say that you had to be using the previous client not updated with the test server patch.  If I hadn't downloaded it in the background and launched it automatically I would have noticed this because IT WAS IN THE NAME OF THE PATCH  (D'oh! that one still burns).
3. It took uninstalling and reinstalling the old client and patching it 3 times before it would let me back in. (yes I tried redownloading the patch each time)
4. One of my alts wouldn't switch to so i could check the diffrences for a day and a half.(Patch day Syndrome... no biggie)