After days without any new information, a post on the official Diablo 3 forums sheds some light on Blizzard's plan for the upcoming beta.
In a recent blue post, Blizzard poster Zarhym commented on the current state of the Diablo 3 beta. According to his road map, we are looking at a period of small additions being made to the current friends & family beta (such as the auction house, which was added two days ago) before they will open the flood gates and roll out the first wave of public invites.
From the looks of it, it seems like we can expect the beta to start in the not-so-distant future; take that with a grain of salt however, as Zarhym made sure not to specify where exactly they see themselves on his schedule at the present time. For what it's worth, if you're itching to see the new content, the beta is not under NDA and thus there is plenty of footage to be found on Youtube. The complete announcement can be found below.
» Source
Zarhym posted:1. Start with a small sample audience to test stability
2. Take bug and crash report feedback; act on them quickly
3. Release new patches to make some very necessary changes in the small test environment
4. Keep testing stability while adding new battle.net/infrastructure components
5. If everything is running incredibly smooth after steps 1-4, invite people from the general public to open the flood gates on stress testing and get focused gameplay feedback/bug reports
This is a very layman's description, but the point is we have to slowly throttle in more people to test the game as we continue to create new builds and work out new battle.net functionality. Once the environment is stable and many of the core features are there, we then start to invite the masses.
I'd feel remiss in not mentioning this: we absolutely want everyone to play this game as soon as possible. But to make that a reality, we must first excel in both content and deliverance. (So let's put on our classics and we'll have a little dance, shall we?) ;)
