CO Lifetime subscription has no love for me or my brother who also paid up.

Lets see how long it takes... if it takes a long time, I will have learned my lesson there

6-month guy here. If randoms get the invite before us, I will be super confused.

Sorry to break the news, random invites have gotten in on this first round before you.

It is bad enough when PR departments give away beta access in contests, but they sold them now. And, of course, that puts a value on the access. Since beta is a limited time event, every day you don't get access means what you paid for your guaranteed access is less than someone else who did get in.

As it stands, you're beta access value has already dropped. My beta access value might be 2 months, yours might be 1 week. Until Cryptic digs out of this PR hole they dug, I am afraid they are going to continue to have unhappy PAID customers.

It is so stupid and avoidable. They could have either not announced the start of closed beta and just invited more people into their alpha for testing. Then there would be no legal obligation to the paid customers. Or they could have not let anyone who paid in and announced a time when all paid people would get access, even if it was vague. But they did announce the start of beta and they already let in some paid customers. So that combination has financial meaning to their customers.

Remember: the purpose of the beta is not to give people early access to the game. It's to test the systems for functionality and fun. So the needs of the game will be given higher priority over who bought extended CO subs.

They probably have a list of specific things that they're looking for in each beta phase. (Such as a certain spectrum of system specs.) From there, they are probably filling the slots with lifetime sub/high forum participation first, 6-month/high forum second, lifetime/low forum third, 6-month/low forum fourth, and so on down the line.

And of course early beta phases will have far fewer invites than later phases.

So even having a lifetime sub, it could still be a VERY long time before you get an invite. And you could even see people with lower sub levels getting invited before you.

Both good points. Too many people these days think that beta access is just an opportunity to play the game early and dont realise you have an obligation to give feedback to the developers.

Otherwise you get a game like Champions Online which has (had?) no idea what direction to take until AFTER release, probably (and I emphasise the word "probably" for the true beta testers out there) due to lack of feedback from beta players.

Most of the CO problems can be blamed on the part time beta that Cryptic ran for it, hopefully they won't make the same mistake twice.

I'd normally agree with this, however this is a different circumstance. You have people that paid you in order to do this, they'd be wise to follow through.

As I mentioned earlier, the problem with mixing beta access and a financial transaction is that once they sold access, it now has a monetary value. The actual US Dollar value of the access is not stated on the CO offer anywhere making it something that would have to be settled by a court or arbitration between Cryptic and their customer if it resulted in a financial conflict.

The PROBLEM is that by admitting access to some and not others, they are effectively changing the value of that access for each customer. Just like if you and I paid for a movie, but they let me in at the start and you had to wait 20 minutes before you could enter the theater. Who gets a better value for their ticket?

Bill Roper has nothing to do with Star Trek Online. He was hired to oversee the development and launch of Champions Online.

The two games were developed separately, by separate teams.

The man in charge of Star Trek Online is -- and always has been -- Craig Zinkievich.