Hey dudes,
Found this on a site i frequent https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/132765

"You'll need to create an account with Curse and then redeem the key.

Beta Period: From Friday, February 7th at 12:00PM EST until Monday, February 10th at 11:59PM EST"

Free sign ups are able to take part (just tried it then myself - still unsure if i want to try it - its a 20gb+ download)

and its only access to the game during the weekend which is actually a stress test for the servers and the developers wanna hit a new record with most accounts online during a beta weekend so even if u download it u wont have much fun with most likely long loding times, high latency, huge lag spikes and a whole bunch of disconnects as i doubt their servers are up to the task theyve set them

ive had a code mailed to me for the weekend which also seems to work for multiple people

Anyone else concerned that with just two months to go they have no forum connected to their main site? There's a single forum over on the bethesda site with no subforum for guilds or anything else you'd expect. There's no real support of the community from them. This is stuff you see with most MMOG's a year before release.

It's like they think they're just making a single player game. To me personally, I find this a bigger issue than the current issue many are having with the imperial race CE bonus and the play any race in any faction bonus for preordering.

Sooo, this is what Curse does?

Well, they are.

Read:

Give us your e-mail-address and sacrifice your whole weekend for the permission to do Bethesda a favor and test their software and servers for free.

Meh. Not that I would say no to trying out the game, but I won't let them organize my spare time for me. Three days is much too short to test an MMO, especially considering that it would take me this long alone to download 20gb. :P So, no thanks, I'll pass. But I appreciate the heads-up all the same!

From the email invite to the weekend beta stress test:

"Explore Tamriel and share your feedback. We're also excited to let you know that if you participate in this weekend's beta event, you'll be invited to continue to advance your characters in the next beta test."

yes next beta test which will prolly be stress test weekend number 2 judging from my beta testing experiences which in return wont be much more stable than stress test weekend 1

Last stress test week-end ran extremely smoothly in my experience. Technically it was a perfect performance (the only big bugs were interface/interactions related, so really not something game-breaking once you know how to deal with it).

Ha! :P Anyone ever notice how these stress tests never seem to prepare these games for launch week?

Beta access all weekend this week.

Desire to keep playing: zero.

As a fan of TES (yea I know you are too), I'm quite tempted to try it out... But then I have not played a genuinely bad TES game in ... Well, ever, and am kind of afraid online version will ruin that

It's a direct WoW clone attempting to pretend it's Elder Scrolls. I thought it was pretty terrible.

This game is developed by an unrelated studio (Zenimax Online Studios) so its impending failure is not the fault of the developers of the single-player games.

I haven't tried it myself but I'm not really surprised by such a verdict. You'd think they would have learned from the dozens of failed WoW clones that preceded this. Brand name alone can't save a MMOG (as Star Wars: The Old Republic demonstrated).

Maybe after this fails they'll introduce some basic co-op functionality in the single-player games which is what fans would have preferred to begin with.

Probably, but on the other hand knowing consumers they could easily fall for the Elder Scrolls coat of paint on the whole thing. Putting in a fully functional first-person mode was smart on their part, you can almost pretend it's not a WoW clone.

Co-op would inherently change a lot about the games. I wish people would stop trying to shove co-op into my singleplayer games.