Aw, I would have beat him to it, but I was writing a longer post….

I generally spend at least 2 hours every day reading the forums (that includes the beta forums but not exclusively – sometimes I’m here more, sometimes there). My goal is to post at least once a day on these forums. I wish it could be a lot more, because you’re right, these forums need the attention. Unfortunately we are in a very awkward time here. Many of the good posters (certainly not all, but many) have migrated to the beta boards. We’ve given out about as much information as we can until we lift the NDA. We’re also very focused on getting the initial release finished and polished. You guys are coming up with good ideas, but we’re past our lock-down date. While we still think there is value to some of the new ideas proposed here, we just can’t address them until after we release.

That said we do have 3 full time community reps who moderate the forums. They close bad posts as soon as they can after the post gets reported (or that they find themselves). They also forward on good posts to the Dev Team.

As for the beta, we will have some more slots to fill. I’m afraid I can’t invite anyone under 18 until after the NDA is lifted and even I don’t know for absolute certainty when that will be.

As for the Beta CD process: When someone gets an invite, they order the CD from the Station Store. The CD comes with an Account Key on the package. At the request of some Powers That Be, we more recently added a download option so that invitees could get into the game quicker. Because this decision was made after the Beta 3 CDs were already stocked in the store, we needed to grant an extra key during download. This is why many testers have 2 keys. Technically, they are not allowed to share this or sell it. We have generally turned a blind eye to the sharing with friends because we didn’t anticipate the second key when we originally made the CDs and don’t feel it is worth policing friends playing with each other. Please note, anyone launching the game agrees to the NDA every time, so the friends are legally bound by the NDA. We do not feel it is appropriate to sell keys though and aggressively close threads that claim to sell them and work with websites such as EBay to close those auctions.

The term “Buddy Key” actually came about for another reason. When we made the Beta 3 cds with the account keys attached, we were aware that Beta 1 and 2 people (who already had active accounts) would get a new key. As a reward for helping us test, we encouraged them to use that second key to bring a buddy into the beta.

Now pretty much anyone can download the game, but without and account key you can’t do anything with it.

-Kevin O'Hara
Community Relations Manager