SWTOR beta canceled this weekend, larger beta events planned for future
If you were planning on playing around in the SWTOR beta this weekend, you should probably make alternate plans, like playing another game or participating in underwater sock darning. Whatever it is you crazy kids do these days.
According to community manager Stephen Reid, the weekend events which started last week have been canceled for the time being, and he cannot guarantee "further beta testing weekends during September."
"The weekend that just finished was really our first dry run of beta testing weekends as a whole, and we have plenty of data to crunch, and decisions to make before we start things up again," he said on the official forums. Further to that, we are about to roll out a major new build for The Old Republic. That build won't be ready for this weekend. Just as we did not feel it was a good decision to ask potential EU testers to download our client only to have to download it again, the same applies for this weekend."
However. once the larger build is rolled out, it doesn't mean the beta testing will start back up immediately, as the firm needs to get feedback from internal testing and its "ongoing Game Testing program before rolling it out to a massive audience."
"That process takes a while, and that time varies depending on how testing goes," said Reid. "We rolled out this previous weekend as a relatively small scale event; from now we will do bigger and bigger events, but that doesn't mean it happens every weekend. When we do resume, we'll be inviting many more people in."
Reid closed his post with the news that Bioware has prepared a "comprehensive FAQ regarding Game Testing Weekends as a whole," along with some details about the weekend that just happened.
You can read the FAQ through here.
EA said yesterday that it is tentatively planning to announce a release date for SWTOR next month.