Sean Dahlberg posted on the forum in regards to the “hidden launch website“, confirming that it is indeed a game tester login page:
You have indeed found the login portal for Game Testing. That said, this is not a new page and we are not ready to make any additional announcements about our Game Testing Program. When we are ready, we will make sure The Old Republic Community is the first to know!
If you haven’t signed up yet to be a tester or wish to learn more, access our Game Testing Portal.
And a little later he posted some more answers:
A couple of quick answers:
- Yes, it is indeed called the Game Testing Program and not anything else. As when we originally announced sign-ups, Game testing for Star Wars: The Old Republic will be rolled out in several phases over an extended period of time. These test phases will begin with smaller, tightly focused test groups, and later tests will expand.
- We thought about waiting until it hit 2,000 posts but figured it was more important to get the information to you sooner than wait.
- Good insight, Skyewauker.
- In regards to swtor.bioware.com, just know that we’ll always keep the TOR Community updated here
- I would have posted the announcement sooner but I spent too much time working on this (not really).
The site has probably been around for a while, maybe as they were working on setting up the portal in advance, maybe for running demos at conferences and for publishers and such, or maybe for internal testing. Either way it’ll likely be what’s going to be used by beta testers and such as well. But with the launch at least a year away it’ll probably take a while before they open it up to the first players.