Brad McQuaid hat im offiziellen Forum neue Hoffnung gesetzt. Nach seinen Aussagen zufolge werden die ersten Betatester aus der Community bereits innerhalb der nächsten drei Wochen die wunderbare Welt von Telon betreten. Da die virtuelle Welt riesig sein wird, werden auch entsprechend viele Betatester eingeladen, aber nur soviele, dass es möglich ist ohne Probleme eine Gruppe zu bilden. Nach aktuellen Aussagen ist zur Zeit die maximale Kapazität an Spielern für eine Gruppe bei acht fest gesetzt. Auch wenn die Welt groß sein wird, so ist in dieser Phase der Beta nur der Kontinent Thestra frei geschaltet.

My guess is that actual beta 1 testers will be in-game either this next week or the week after. It's a matter of approving the first batch, getting the NDAs taken care of, them downloading the client, making sure passwords are set up, etc. Takes a bit of time, but not too much. Then we'll continue to get as many more beta 1 testers in as quickly as we can. Right now we're at the point (hence our starting beta 1) that we need a lot more people in the game to test things, including critical mass. One issue is there aren't always enough people online for testers to find groups, which is obviously frustrating. So we will bring more and more people in until we have enough for now, enough being the critical mass needed for people to find groups and test the content that is there. I don't have that number yet. In EQ we jumped from 50 or so to a number under 500. But with Vanguard being so much larger, we will need more. Right now more than half of Thestra is turned on, and the rest of it will be ready to turn on in a few weeks. As I've mentioned so many times, the world is BIG. So we're going to need a lot of people.