I personally would be more than fine with the dev's making the other factions available now, under the premise that bug reports concerning the other factions would be ignored until such a time as they are patched up to an acceptable state.

Goddamn i'm impatient. My own personal fault i guess.

edit: Second page snypa!

one thing they are not doing is rushing, i agree with the OP, every Beta i have ever played has been the full game, and it is released to look at the impact of the game on different pc specs as well as to sort out balance and bugs. 

Saying its a beta but not letting you play a fully feature complete game, albeit with lots of bugs and other issues (which is the whole point of a beta to sort these out), is misleading as it less of a beta and more of a demo.

Please look up what a software beta is, as well as why exactly they're staggering factional releases, which has been fully explained numerous times.

I think, if something is unfinished and incomplete, rather than bugged, its more alpha than beta. I am not game-dev, though, so maybe i am wrong.

Right you are, Timmy, which is why I then direct us to this:

The only reasons we've had glimpses at the other factions was to people circumventing the system, Beta 1 is the TEC Beta, this was made abundantly clear from the start.

Eventually we'll most likely have the Advent Beta and the Vasari Beta and then finally the full Beta prior to release.

Until then, the other two races are in Alpha.

While I appreciate the eagerness people have for playing the other races, as was mentioned by others, we need focused testing to get good data. 

That said, don't be surprised if an update shows up late next week with two more factions... 

When you say Advent beta and Vasari beta, do you think they would disable TEC in this betas? Did not think about it this way, but its possible.

Personally, although it clearly makes sense to do it this way, i do not you can test balance this way. I mean TEC Loyalist vs Rebels balance is irrelevant, as long as you do not take other factions into account. For example you balance these 2 factions perfectly, but then you find out, one of them is overpowered against lets say Advent Loyalists. So you change something to account for this imbalance, but in turn you break the original TEC loyalist-rebel one. 

@Yarlen> Oh God, yes please. 

Right that's it, I'm getting rid of this dot in my name, I'm positive it's causing all these attempts at quoting me to fail*.

And I agree, which is why I brought up a final beta, but if that post up there by Yarlen is to be believed, then perhaps I was wrong about them disabling TEC

*Edit - Or not, apparently we can no longer have spaces in our name, and MrHaze is taken, how troublesome.

I would like to see all the races now but would rather developers just take the best path they think with sorting all this out. There are enough games out that have turned into turds because of rushed betas.

Huzzah! Now I can look forward to bashing the TEC and Vasari at the same time as Advent!

"two more factions" You mean advent rebel and advent loyalist or vasari and advent ? 

Wait... What was I thinking? I think that he means that both of the Advent factions are going to be released. The Vasari still have a lot of work ahead of them.

Yeah, that's why i asked, i was surprised.

"generally begins when the software is feature complete"

"a feature freeze on the product"

 meaning that if 2 of the faction are not complete the game is in alpha, 

the term "perpetual Beta" cannot really be applied to Sins Rebellion as it is available for "pre order", if it was a "perpetual beta" product then there would be no need to a) describe it as a pre order and it would be publicly avail from the preferred distribution method i.e Steam.

As for the staggering of the factions, it makes no sense however you look at it, balancing a faction based on how well human player perform vs the AI will result in the TEC being unbalanced due to how superior the human is compared to the AI. Even if they release all the factions together to make make playable the full roster of teams the TEC will need rebalancing to compensate for the differences in the Advent and Vasari being played by humans and not the AI. 

If they release another faction as the single playable faction in the next release then, as Timmaigh pointed out it will break all balance done to the TEC in the first release when changes are made to the TEC.

The only way to properly balance a game, especially an RTS game, is to make all balance changes on a player vs player basis using all teams not one or two. 

Also there may be other complications when humans controlling the advent or vasari are introduced. 

So this leads to two possible outcomes

A) the game is no where near finished and this is all they got to release

staying on the current balancing strategy the game will be woefully unbalanced upon final release 

All this is doing is artificially lengthening the time until final release. Basically Rebellion is to Sins what Forged Alliance was to Sup Com, but that came out 8 months after Sup Com not 4 years and counting. 

Not that im not looking forward to it and ill still buy it, Sins is a great game and me and my friends have had some good games over lan at various peoples houses, but i fear Rebellion has the smell of Duke Nukem Forever about it in that it will never be as good as its development time leads us to believe. But we can still hope. 

Please lads, let's not get lost on the definition of a "beta"; it's quite a waste of time. After all, even if it's being labeled as beta or not, it's still the same bloody thing.

I am (and was) very well aware that some parts within the factions are in alpha stage. However, I'm impatient and I read that some people here on the forums have managed to mod the game to play all races. If they did it and their game is "stable", it would have been fun, if well, we'd had the same thing.

As for the bug reports, I'm also aware that this forum would get spammed with already acknowledged bugs. However, an easy way to circumvent this is to make a pinned thread with the current bug list. And whenever someone tries to post a bug report, send him to the said thread where he'd be forced to read it before posting.

LOL, i made the same mistake. Automatically assumed those factions are going to Advent and Vasari, when most likely Yarlen meant Advent subfactions (though maybe we are in for surprise and it will be one Advent and one Vasari faction, most likely the Rebel one - although i doubt it).

BTW when i saw those Advent "centered" screens on RTS-guru yesterday + thought about the recent update related to Advent Mines, i had the feeling, the Advent are going to be unlocked soon.

I hope there will be some nice dev commentary, faction - introducing video again, if not new cool teaser. 

it does not matter if ur impatient the game cant be rushed just cuz u and other r impatient and want everything out now. the devs need to keep doing what they r doing and get everything working right and not rush it and possibly messing up that game

I think you seem to forget where you are.  This is the forum for Rebellion.  Rebellion is currently in BETA.  This "IS" where the bugs get reported.  They dev's are under no obligation to open the full game up to you just because you want to play the full game.  I will repeat it.  This is a beta.  The purpose of a beta is to test various elements of a game under varied circumstances to locate, replicate, determine the cause and fix bugs in preparation for release of a finalized product.  The dev's have the right idea for their testing methodology.  First you test the one faction exhaustively and methodically.  Then follow the same methodology for the other subsequent factions on their own.  This method allows them to focus in a particular area allowing them to find more bugs faster and more accurately for each faction.  Once done with each faction, you then unlock them all for full game testing.  Then you find and squash any remaining and new bugs.  Once confident that all bugs within your control and/or awareness have been squashed.  Start game balance testing and tweaking.  Don't tell dev's that in order to solve your impatience problem they should create another section just for the real beta testers.  The game hasn't even been released yet.  This is the beta section.  You're in it, now.  This isn't some right you're exercising right now.  It's a privilege.  How many games have you pre-ordered lately that have given you early access to the game before release?  The people here who are properly beta testing this game are taking this seriously because we want this game to be as good as it can be before release.  As do the dev's which is why they are giving us this opportunity in the first place.  Rather than waiting for it to come out and hoping everything will be fixed later.  Which is more than we can say about most game developers.  You should feel lucky to be getting the opportunity.  You should feel lucky that you at the very least haven't been asked to agree to a non-disclosure agreement, which is common industry practice.

I'm all well and fine if you're just wanting to see the other factions and having a discussion about it.  It's a completely different thing when you start telling the dev's what to do with this forum.  Because that's when you've started to completely miss what the whole purpose of this forum is for.  Don't tell them to make another section just for the beta testing.  They've got bigger fish to fry like DEBUGGING THE GAME.  Welcome to the Beta section.  I hope you enjoyed your stay.  Oh and one more thing.  Before you decide to make yet another request of the dev's (you're at 2 now.. If you don't remember I'll enlighten you... 1. Open all factions for play ... And 2. Make section for beta testing... not the way you worded it, but it is what you essentially just asked for.) maybe you should consider contributing to the beta test by actually testing and reporting the bugs you've found with detailed descriptions.  Maybe then you will get a little more respect.

Hey you know that screen that shows up while loading. the devs put a message into it for you.

Calm down mate, it's only a suggestion. I'm not telling anyone what to do.

In my opinion, having a list of the known bug and being able to test/play the game with both 3 factions (no matter whether they're completely done or not) would be beneficial. I might be wrong, but then again, I don't think so, hence the SUGGESTION. I'm not threatening/forcing my will on anyone here. (Like you seem to be doing with your "enlightening" opinions").

Besides, I did PAY for the game. Having access to the beta is NOT a privilege (as you suggest), as it was very well mentioned when I bought the game. It's the very idea of a transaction: one side gives something against something else, usually money.

Now, I don't care for your respect nor do I care for your so-called "enlightening" recommendations.

I quite simply made a suggestion, leave it or take it, but please, don't go on bragging on how I should act in these forums unless you're a moderator or an admin.

P.S: I haven't stumbled on any bugs yet, apart from one which is already here in theses forums.

For gods sake pin one of these threads so we can point people to that!

i take back all i said, even the AI can only be TEC rebel or loyal. What a waste of time. im all up for involving the player base in testing and what not but this is a joke. This isnt a Beta its 1/3 of an unfinished game.

Check-list 

balance - cant be done in this kind of half finished game

stability - ran fine on my pc

bugs - none i encounter in 3 games

performance - fine, no lag or excessive resource usage on my PC

Now move on and finish the other 2/3 of the game and stop stalling for time.

the point of having the races split up in each beta is to balance to game with each other and find race specific bugs then to bring them all together and balance them together

and can we plz stop with these useless and pointless threads

Or you could stop being so incredibly self centred and realise that people have been reporting issues and bugs since beta began, plenty of which were TEC exclusive and have been fixed internally.

I'm actually going to defend the OP's opinion that all of the factions should be unlocked, but from a different perspective.

As it is now, the faction restrictions have split everyone capable of playing the beta into three groups:

Group 1; Currently plays the beta with TEC only as designed.

Group 2; Plays the beta modded to unlock the other factions. (May also be playing old release of the beta because they disabled updates to avoid breaking faction unlock)

Group 3; Went back to playing Trinity to play all factions.

Of these groups, Group 1 is the only group they are getting good feedback from, drastically cutting down the bug reports etc they receive.

If however they unlocked all the races, all three of these groups would almost exclusively be playing the Rebellion beta. Even if they instantly threw any bug reports mentioning the Advent & Vasari factions in the garbage, they'd still be collecting far more useful data overall of the area's of the game they want to test just because there would be so many more people playing it overall.

It's not like the other races are in horrible shape to the point that they'd cause problems either. There are basically two unfinished ships, the Vasari Loyalist titan, and the Vasari corvette. And even they work well enough to be used if players want, just missing some graphical stuff. Other than that it's a few FX here and there not completed. As someone who has unlocked the other races, there is nothing about them that's unfinished enough to prevent them from being usable in the beta. I'm currently in the middle of a 10 player FFA w/9 CPU's with all the CPU races set to random, and have not experienced any more issues than I did running just w/TEC.

The unfinished state of the other races has been greatly overstated, and uniting all the beta players together would do far more good than adding the other races would cause harm.