How do you (and CIG) define "Alpha Testing"?Most of us have "Alpha Access" and most of us seem to be pretty unclear about what that actually means.Does CIG see us primarily as stress testers of mostly finished assets, or are we going to be actually testing the unfinished version of the game and bug hunting?asked by Viperion

You'll definitely be testing the unfinished version of the game because we're releasing the game in these modules that are only part of the functionality of the final game.So the Dogfighting Module is coming up, before that we had the Hangar Module, and then we'll have some other ones like for first person combat and on the planet-side.The primary point of having the community play it is two-fold. One, for people to play it and we get feedback in terms of "Yes this is working," "No this is not working," "These are the things we would like to tweak." So it's like a super massive focus group.And then there's stress testing, bug testing, so we have our own dedicated group of testers, but of course on a game this big with this many things you can do, it's impossible, even if we had a testing department of 200 people, to cover it deep.Luckily we have a testing department of 200,000 people at the moment. That obviously makes a big difference because the amount of people banging away at it means that we'll probably flush out most of the problems, most of the bugs, most of the issues, at a much earlier stage than you would normally do in game development.Normally in game development, it only goes super wide once the game is released, and then it's already out there and then you start to see some things that you didn't even see in your own testing.So hopefully we'll be flushing that much earlier in our process, which is why we have the whole early module and the whole alpha testing.I would say it's a combination of feedback and stress testing, and figuring out bugs we haven't seen. Now that doesn't mean once someone finds a bug in the community that they write up a full bug report or anything like that, 'cause it's probably not practical with that many people, but what it does mean is it's a good place to find problems and then we on the development side can put our dedicated engineers and our internal test staff on it and go "Ok, that's a bug we need to fix, we didn't see that before." It just gives us a great head start.And we'll probably build in some sort of automated bug report tool at some point. It won't be on the Dogfighting Module v1, but down the road it will.