Betas don't need to be January 2012 polished. November would be better. 

I'd rather get the same asap, and cure the cancer.  The game will be ready when it's ready, but the beta is before it's ready.

This one does. Betas are considered demos by many, and after the failure of WoM, they can't afford to not wow everyone with the beta. They need to start FE off with a bang.

People not understanding cannot be a valid reason. They just need to keep the beta to the prepaying guys and perhaps have a notice about what exactly beta means.

I suspect, at a minimum, they'll want the beta to be WoM-level (as it stands now); other than the design-specific changes.

Well, if the game is polished enough to be at demo level, what the hell is the point of a beta? Really don't like it when companies use the term beta when they mean publicity. I know Stardock would never do that. And BTW, I think FE has already surpassed WoM in every way imaginable. I would guess that right now they are just doing UI, dealing with multilayer compatibility, fixing memory leaks, and getting the AI up and running. The part where we become useful is almost here guys. 

There's different kinds of beta, some do it just for advertising, some for balance, some do it for bugsquashing or stress tests, and very rarely some do it for "deep" feedback. To be honest, a public beta that is meant for deep feedback is pointless. It is much more important that the design is good from the start, than having a lot of random people try to tack on some mechanic they feel fit the game.

E:wom had some "deep" feedback, some things were openly discussed and added and they listened quite a lot to what we wanted. And it ended up quite poor. I'd much rather FE holds a late-stage beta for balance and bugsquashing. I trust Derek Paxton and Jon Schafer to come up with a good design much more than I trust the players of E:wom, or for that matter the people who designed E:wom at Stardock.

I really don't think we were listened too all that much when it came to WOM, which was a complete departure from how SD handles things normally, and how they've handled things since then.

I agree that a late-stage beta is best for a large public beta. But you have to admit that there are alot of great ideas and general intellectual power on this forum. WoM is just not a great thing to compare this one to. It has a much larger workforce and huge budget. I think we are close to being useful in a bugsquashing fashion. I want the beta because it's that special kind of cancer that makes me feel warm and cozy (I think it's in my endocrine system). I really just want to see the new xml, though I will post bugs in return. 

Here's what I expect from the beta:

1.  Lots o' bugs.  Bugs, bugs, bugs.  We'll be finding bugs all over the place.

2.  Performance issues.  EWOM had a ton of performance issues and I suspect we'll still be trying to iron out the memory issues in EFE.

3.  Poor AI.  We already knew this would happen.  The game mechanics have to be built first so the programmers can tell the AI how to use those mechanics.  The AI has had the least amount of time on it.

4.  Poor UI.  Here's where I really hope they listen to the forum.  I gave them a hundred suggestions on improving the UI (we all did) and none of it got implemented.  While I do see some improvements in the EFE screenshots, I think the UI still has a ways to go.

5.  Incompleteness.  We've seen dev journals on the world, magic, items, tactical battles, and tech tree so at least we know they're working on those areas.  We have not seen dev journals on diplomacy or quests.  I'm worried about those two areas being incomplete.

6.  Cancer.

I think it would be healthy to get a post clearly defining what the devs want from beta testers. Keeping the process useful to development was one of our biggest problems in WoM. 

I am currently wrapped up in a blanket, while at my PC, indoors, and I think I saw a mammoth outside. So the beta can come any day now, since "insert Ned Stark quote"

I am amazed that more companies don't take advantage of this free resource (aka crowd sourcing).

There are a lot of posters with a lot of great ideas, especially in this forum.

Many, if not most, of the folks with the great ideas in this forum would probably be willing to trade their ideas for having their names in the credits of the game.

With the exception of WOM, SD has done a very good job of this in the past, and will be likely to do so in the future.

You can have my ideas as long as you don't include my name anywhere in the credits. I am currently trying to erase myself. 

Coming up with ideas isn't that hard. Every gamer thinks they can be a designer. Coming up with ideas that actually work in practice and finding a way to implement them is the challenge.

I really don't think anyone at Stardock is floundering about, saying. "If only we had some new ideas we could make a great game!" They have plenty of ideas, and also the ability to create a fun game from those ideas.

At this point in FE's development, we are well past the time of new ideas. The best thing we can do to contribute at this stage is to give feedback on the tidbits of information that they release, with the caveat that we will be giving feedback in a vacuum since we can't see the product as a whole and haven't played it. Once the beta comes, we can give lots of useful feedback on how to tweak  things here and there, but it will be too late to make major changes or implement big new ideas. After we see FE, we can start throwing out new ideas on how to move the series forward because at that point it will be time to start designing again.

That's exactly it. It's fine to want to get the beta, but nobody should expect that they're going to re-design whole concepts at this point. Bugfixes and polish.

My biggest agenda is to make sure that the modders are given the capabilities we need to make the game our own. So far we are doing great. The only problems are possibly prestige and a few other things being hardcoded into the game. There is little feedback from the devs about how they are planning to implement the features we have been shown. Quests should really be addressed first I think, since it was one of the least open things in WoM. I am not overly worried though. Frogboy said much of the storytelling will be done in quest format, leading me to believe that it has changed for the better. 

I am very excited to show off the quests I have written over the past year. I have over 200. They are split into 3 stories, each set with story arches for the quest level. It has been a long time coming, but I still think of Elemental as essentially a user created content game. 

Did you explore the single player campaign anything in the XML? There was a much deeper quest system embedded there - the drawback was that it wasn't "dynamic", if you built it for one map it wouldn't work on another.

It is stupid to ignore how masses react when doing anything, arguing that it's "not the way things are supposed to be".

To sean's question: "Well, if the game is polished enough to be at demo level, what the hell is the point of a beta?":
The point is to find bugs that they missed, and polish areas that get most complaints.

I asked frogboy only about the sandbox mode and his response was that questing would become a major aspect of storytelling. I am admittedly running this dream on fumes, but that is what Elemental is all about. 

Personally I think quests as a concept are doomed to fail, particularly in sandbox. They give almost no replayability because they're the same every time. The game needs to provide custom-generated quests of high quality (a challenge if I ever heard one). Otherwise I fear - no matter how good the quests are - that we will end up like in E:wom. Of course I can't speak for anyone else, but when I play E:wom I just straight up ignore the quests (except my own dungeons from the artifact mod).

Good. If there is one modder I don't want to compete with in questing it's you HF. 

My quests play out like stories. There will be about 30 total quests. 20 you will always get, 5 you will most likely see eventually, 3 you will see after a few games, 2 you will see after years of playing. They made the chance to get a random event able to be very very unlikely. That is the key to replayability. I think that if the stories are compelling enough and the loot is desirable enough, people will want to choose adventure every time. 

Or they might just suck.

Oh no, I didn't say I was going to do it. Just what the game needed in general.

I don't think it is a problem, given time and effort:

If the questing system doesn't inherently allow for branching and random numbers, then the "same" quest could be created multiple times with different ways of progressing.

So when you get the quest-hook "There's a message for you at the Black Boot Inn", you don't know whether it will turn out to be the rescue-maiden quest or the betrayal-at-inn quest. Even then, if you see it is the rescue-maiden quest you don't know if it is the one where the maiden ran away herself, or whether she was genuinely held hostage by an ogre. Even then you don't know if the ogre and maiden have since fallen in love or not, etc.

It really just comes down to the effort and creativity of quest authors involved.