Originally Posted by Aberdash
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That sounds like they just have "official" playtests scheduled at certain times, but that doesn't preclude them from keeping Beta in general 24/7.
I'm no developer, but I would think it'd be in their best interest to have the Beta 24/7 from the start to give the testers the most possible opportunity to test things out and look for bugs etc whenever they have time available.
Then the TOS you accept when you signup for Beta could say something like "there will be scheduled playtests at certain times during Beta. By agreeing to participate in Beta you acknowledgewill make a 'best effort' to attend all official playtests. You are free to login and playtest on your own during other times 24/7, but be aware that the servers may go down at any time for patches, etc."
This is kinda how the test server in PS1 worked, at least post-release. When they put a test build on the server they did schedule official playtests but you could still hop on whenever you wanted to try things out.