Kevin "Q-3PO" O'Hara (CRM) has posted another weekly beta update to the forums of SOE's/Lucas' Star Wars MMORPG's website.
This is what it is about: What it means is, we needed a group of people we could sit down in an IRC channel and have them break down for us as a focus group, what they think of, say, character customization. Remember, we are going to be running phase 1 (and probably large parts of phase 2 as well) as unit testing. Meaning, these guys are not going to get to PLAY. They are going to get one subsystem at a time, and often in isolation from the systems with which it interacts.
What do I mean by that? I mean "here's Tatooine. We've turned off all spawning and AI, removed the cities, and disabled pretty much everything except chat. Now, we need four hours of you trying out movement. Questions to be answered: turn radius, movement on slopes, are any of you getting motion sickness, how's the camera feel, how do you think the map layout is..." And at the end, we pull them into an IRC channel to discuss.
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