Torment of Velious beta is active?

Another reason casuals don't do beta. Casuals have to preorder for access. Though to be fair I don't see the same incentive for casuals to do beta as raiders have in general. Casuals aren't racing to beat other casuals in content. Well not as guilds some individuals might enjoy doing that.

I do hope we see more preactive work on balancing the group game in the first month after release.

I do appreciate the work those who do get beta free though. It's nice to see those who get free access to beta are working hard to ensure they report as much as possible in regards to bugs etc.

I suspect getting special access gives incentive for people to actively bug test too. If it was open for free to everyone at the same time people might start taking beta access for granted.

Though it does add another reason that devs have to be careful in balancing the group game. Some start the expansion with group progression nailed down to a science plus being raiders are much better geared then the average player. That is NOT a criticism of raiders. Just a fact devs really need to keep in mind.

Teach us, Triconix!

When beta breaks your custom UI it could take a while to get working depending on your technical skills and it has been a long time since I have been in a beta where my UI was not broken at the start

Don't forget that you need to rename all the files (replace server name with "beta") and make sure they point to the right directory and all that jazz.

tips for /beta
https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/tips-for-beta.252133/#post-3711740

Rather less I would imagine.
Less hair

To be fair you get more also
More WTF
More grey hair
More frustration

So it all balances out

#customUIpower!

Making everything point to the right folder is a pain in the butt...

GINA, Gamparse, [Unmentioned 3rd Party Software] (if you use it) ... all takes time.

Wish that they not be accessed only through Google!

A good way of doing it is this:
Load try to /loadskin the broken UI. Look at the bottom of the uierrors.txt or whatever it's called. It will talk about things that are missing or not referenced. The animations and templates files are often the culprits.

From there Notepad++'s compare plugin can help find the missing parts between the default and custom UI's files, and you can copy them over to to the beta-copy installation's UI files. Keep doing /loadskin and copying missing things until it works. Make sure to copy the actual relevant tags though since Notepad++ likely won't exactly highlight what you need to copy. Notepad++ can also search the entire default UI folder to find the names of the missing items, so you can tell which files you need to fix.

The reason I use the compare plugin and not just find to copy the relevant sections is that the compare plugin adds a bunch of blank space where the stuff is missing, making it much easier to just copy/paste the missing data into the same part of the file the change was made. It probably doesn't matter what order the stuff is in, but keeping it similar to the default layout makes fixing it much easier the next time.

I'm sure for some more severe changes it's way more complicated than that, but when they just added new windows and such that's all it takes. Once the key files are fixed, it will just take the missing files from the default folder.

You are correct that is a good way of fixing it but that does not mean everyone has the technical skill to do that. And the compare won't always work depending on how the UI maker did the file as other things may have been removed/added that will make it hard for the compare tool to get an accurate diff.

We know. That is why the top guilds complete raids on day one. They already have detailed knowledge of the inner workings of all the events.

The main reason casuals don't do beta is because they're casuals, they have stuff to do on live and they get to keep that progress.

I kinda want to go do all my preorders and jump into beta WOOOO but at the same time I kind of don't want to.

Yep, and even people who aren't casual players in a mid or low tier guild has to worry about their guild so much as surviving, much less fielding the players for beta testing. That's not any observation praising or bashing anyone, but it's the truth.

That's true however I suspect there are people that could figure it out that don't know. I should have put more emphasis on the error log and find than the compare feature. Compare just makes it easy to keep the structure similar if the custom UI was already ordered like default.