One of the best-looking and most anticipated games of the year has easily been Battlefield 3. As you can imagine, with the Battlefield 3 beta opening up to any willing participant across all playable platforms (PC, PS3, Xbox 360), eager fans are going wild with the opportunity to test the game's multiplayer out early.

Unfortunately, for Electronic Arts and DICE, this hasn't worked out as planned. Even though this is a beta, the experience is not earning the love and praise warranted by the game's hype and expectations and instead, many users have flooded forums and online outlets with complaints of connection issues, graphics, bugs and other not-so-positive comments.

There are still the majority of fans who are enjoying it and some who are trying their best to defend the BF3 beta, not the least of which is EA themselves, who released the first Battlefield 3 patch on Saturday, followed up with a forum post from a DICE community manager crying out that the beta is a "privilege" and that "ungrateful people" have no idea how much "hard work" is going into the game. This is a very, very bad sign and none of that matters.

What matters is the quality of the product and the delivery of said product to the expectations they set. Don't waste time with telling us how much hard work went into your game - all developers should be working hard on their game.

Fortunately, DICE is working hard on the beta and today, DICE General Manager Karl Magnus Troedsson posted a second update on the official Battlefield blog to explain the purpose of the Open Beta and to address player concerns.

The Open Beta is a true Beta

The Battlefield 3 Open Beta is based on software that is more than one month old. We need to test the new back end dedicated server structure we’ve built. Not only have we built a new game engine, but an entirely new back end system so that everyone can enjoy the benefits of dedicated servers on all platforms.

Just like normal procedure when releasing a game, the Open Beta has had long lead times due to testing, certification, and setting up. This means that the code you are now playing is actually quite early and not representative of the final game.

We had to do this in order to have as many people testing as possible, in order to ensure a top quality experience when the game is released. However, we’re confident in the Battlefield formula and confident that our fans will support us in order to make Battlefield 3 better.

Dedicated servers require dedicated testing

The biggest reason for running the Open Beta is to stress test our servers and back end. Already, we are seeing 6 times the number of simultaneous players in the Battlefield 3 Open Beta compared to the Beta for Battlefield: Bad Company 2! The fact that Battlefield 3 is clearly our biggest game launch ever by a magnitude of 6 makes it doubly important to test everything.

He followed up by explaining that they're going to tour around to give journalists hands-on time with the final product in hopes to bring back the love. Checkout the Battlelog trailer if you haven't already for the game's social network and stat-tracking features.

Have you tried the beta and if so, which platform are you testing it on?

Battlefield 3 releases October 25, 2011 for the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

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Source: EA