Honestly I'm pretty disappointed in that decision. So many people are having issues with the game (Missing buttons, Inventory and Rooms loading incredibly slow, not able to get in at all, issues with shooting cannons in Pirates), and players either don't get a response from staff (Just head on over to the bugs forum and see for yourself), or if they do manage to squeeze out a response, it's likely "Should work better on the new client, will hopefully be out soon
". So all these players are struggling to run the game, and a possible solution currently exists (Even if it's not a finished product), yet they have to continue to suffer simply because they did not get chosen by staff. I really am having trouble seeing the harm in allowing an open access to the beta client. When most games have a test version or beta version that they limit the exposure of, the main reason is always because their test servers can not handle the capacity. This is not an issue with MyVMK at all, since it uses the same servers as the old client. The point of a beta is to find and fix bugs reported by players. If server capacity is not a limitation, than it's pretty logical that the more players who can report bugs, the better. If you REALLY are concerned about having "instant communication" with testers submitting bug reports, than why not separate players who were chosen by staff as a "priority" tester vs players who opt in voluntarily? You can still have the response time you want to the players you chose, and everybody who is having trouble running the game can choose to try out the new client (being fully aware that it will contain bugs, as well as fully aware that their bug reports will take longer to be responded to). It's a Win-Win for everybody, instead of the select few community members that staff hand-picked.