Originally Posted by
Squibbons
As a developer myself, I just wanted to post a quick note for people who may not know what a Beta really is.
Beta testing is the time of a game's life when the game is nearing the end of it's development cycle and nearing ready to release. What stands before the product and the customer are often numerous bugs and in some cases balancing issues. Everyone who participates in a beta are really participating in this phase of the project. Your job as a beta tester is to find bugs and balancing issues and report them. Having a good time obviously is a side benefit, but rarely should you get attached to your character, items, achievements, or what have you. As far as a company is concerned, typically all of everyone's data that participated in the beta is wiped at the end of the phase. Only if they have promised to keep those things post beta should you be concerned about that.
Beta testing does come with some downsides, such as character wipes, achievement wipes, talent resets, etc. These must be done so that further testing can be achieved on those aspects of the game. Often these aspects of the game will have system changes or major database updates that require resets as well. This is the time when developers can make those sorts of changes without fear of real damage to paying customers. While I can't say what the motivation behind these particular wipes is, I can understand them as being necessary. So really, you re-earning those achievements over and over is a good thing for future players, and for yourself.
It seems the most unfortunate thing is that rarely do public beta tests really tell people what they are getting into. It is perceived that it is common knowledge that everyone either does know, or should know what a beta test is, when that obviously isn't the case. I think companies could do a better job explaining this to their public testers.