Hopefully I'll be able to help, progression-wise. I have quite a bit of experience theorycrafting, as I've mentioned before, so I should be able to help squeak out a bit more healing/DPS for most classes.

And I'm sure having experience in a high-end progression guild in WoW will help, too.

I'm not worried progression wise as long as we can get people to show up we'll progress I've ran raids back in WoW the hardest part was getting the same people to keep coming back learning a fight is easy but when you keep getting different people coming to the raid you get stuck on the "learning phase" also when people don't show and you have to pug it can get annoying but I'm sure our guild will have more then enough people to do operations

I've been in the same boat: The hardest part of raiding was getting the raid together and together on time. My guild was small enough that missing 2 people meant we had to cancel and we could rarely make people sit out for being late, which caused attendance issues.

Alright, so the first large scale beta tests will be taking place on the first weekend in September. No one knows exactly how many people are going to be invited, but it has to be a significantly higher number than previously.

This means there's a higher chance of invites, but let's not get our hopes up juuuuust yet.

Aye, I sense a disturbance in the forums. It's as if millions of ponies are about to cry out and refuse to be silenced.

P.s. Not our forums mind you.

This interview on Darth Hater appears to show details on how the Beta Weekends are going to work

http://darthhater.com/2011/08/30/pax-2011-david-bass-interview/

Quote :

You guys talked a lot about Game Testing Weekends in the panel. Can you give us some details about what to expect? When is it going to start ramping up?

Well, like we said at the panel, we're starting the first one this coming weekend -- September 2nd. We are going to invite a huge batch of brand new players who have never been in testing before. We're going to bring them all in on a brand new server for one weekend and we'll see what happens. Who knows? It could catch on fire!

...

There are different series of tests each weekend obviously. Once people are invited, are they going to be in for the entire thing, or is this different sets of people every single week?

I believe that it is going to be an entirely new group of people every time. The goal of that is to get as many of the 1.5 million people who have signed up for testing in as possible. We really want to get people's hands on the game because we talk all the time about the game, but the thing about it is you're never going to fully believe us until you get your hands on it. That is what convinces people that this is the BioWare game they've been looking for.

So if I can see that properly, it might be a new group of testers for each weekend and for only one weekend. What do you guys think of this?

Wow, I already mentioned how how the beta weekends were going to work, but I had no idea that they were attempting to get everyone in the beta at some point. I still wonder if guild testing is at all related to these beta weekends or not. I'm starting to think that this is not the case. Still, that just means that we all have two possible ways to be chosen for the beta!

BlastingGravy wrote:

Wow, I already mentioned how how the beta weekends were going to work, but I had no idea that they were attempting to get everyone in the beta at some point. I still wonder if guild testing is at all related to these beta weekends or not. I'm starting to think that this is not the case. Still, that just means that we all have two possible ways to be chosen for the beta!

Sure sounds like it. Not that I'm complaining; the more chances at beta, the better!

BlastingGravy wrote:

Wow, I already mentioned how how the beta weekends were going to work, but I had no idea that they were attempting to get everyone in the beta at some point. I still wonder if guild testing is at all related to these beta weekends or not. I'm starting to think that this is not the case. Still, that just means that we all have two possible ways to be chosen for the beta!

It all depends on what they're looking for with the guild testing. If all they want are quick spurts of testing guild features, then these beta weekends would be perfect to test features out. If they're looking for long-term trials and comments on changes of guild systems then they probably won't want to mingle the guilds with the massive influx, and just introduce the guilds into their own servers.

Personally I think it's a bit of both, from my perspective these floods would be great to introduce guild features and let people play around with them. Then after a while bring some guilds back into the fold by placing them on a separate server for long-term testing of the guild features. But that's just all speculation, and it would seem kinda silly for them to announce that guilds are going to get their own special servers for beta testing if this is how they're going to implement it.