The Daily Grind: How do you roleplay betas?

I will use a beta primarily as it was intended- to provide valid feedback to the devs on the game in progress. I also use it to figure out how my characters will look, and what kind of story I eventually want them to tell. As far as outright roleplaying, well unless I have been playing the beta with like minds, that is hardly in the equation for me.

I'll revisit this if and when I ever get into the GW2 beta.

I roleplay everywhere, but I generally don't incorporate meta stuff at all. Server reset? Ignored. Character wipe? Ignored. Server transfer? Ignored. The fact that my character got to level 18 in beta and is now back at level 1? Handwaved. Just personal preference; I really don't find anything interesting about tapping the fourth wall beyond occasional IC jokes.

The beta communities tend to be filled with excitable retard trolls, so I've never entertained the thought of RP. I will start to put together looks and story ideas though, sure.

It really depends how much time I have, my mood, who I bump into, and other factors.

Generally, it is hard (for me) to find RP cohorts in a Beta. Betas tend to be a bit of "giddy/fun pre-party" type stuff. You got people commenting on the General channel about their like/dislike over the game, comparing it to other games, OOC stuff and more.

It probably depends how long I am in the Beta: I tend to test out various things, even in an Open Beta, but we don't get much time in an open beta (and most bugs are reported at lower levels). In such cases, I will try to play all the classes and see which I enjoy and make up character concepts to fit. The character may carry over into live or they may be a strict "one-shot" character. I don't think I ever played an ancestor; they tend to be unrelated (a strike against SWTOR Legacy System!).

If I do get into early beta and testing, I may do some lite RP and exploring of character concepts. I may even decide what I like in-game and fit it to the character.

But, I will say, with SWTOR, on my server, there was definitely a mixed group on the server. Some (kids) that couldn't understand RP, but planned to play on a PvE server and the rest; it was a mixed bag and you tend to get that, because servers are not marked (for RP) or you have a smaller choice of servers in Beta.

If an opportunity is there, yeah. But seems more likely that I wind up in a Beta with a shorter time frame than not.

You don't
Betas are there to test the game and its features in order to provide feedback and weed out the bugs/flaws.
RP tends to involve the community more than the actual game mechanics and within a beta you usually don't have much of a community to RP with the people there tend to be there to either test bugs or get as much done before the beta session is over not to RP.

In the TERA storyline, player characters are the second response team to the Island of Dawn after the first response team mysteriously disappeared pre-game.

I and some others decided to RP members of the original response team who (presumably) got killed at some point. Morbid, but fun!

I use Beta to feedback and as a personal demo to see if I will purchase the game. Roleplay in beta...I don't see the point.

I agree that beta should primarily be for testing not for RP-ing but at the very end of betas I sometimes find it it amusing to start RP-ing as if the end of the world was about to happen.

I had one character go insane, spend all their money on ice cream and run around giving it away to others. One time my paladin openly forsake his vows, get drunk and dance naked in the streets (not that he was noticeable in the end-of-beta party). Another time a priest went around offering spiritual consolations that the world that was to come would be even more glorious :)

End of betas are those truly unique experiences and it's enjoyable to throw in a bit of RP-ing for fun.

Role-playing in a beta just feeds into the self-indulgent idea that betas are there for your entertainment.

If you want to role-play in a beta, I say the same thing to you that I would say to anyone who just wanted to PLAY in a beta: get out, and let someone who is willing to beta-test have your slot.

Generally I'll make the same character, or a similar one at least, for the beta, but generally wait until the full version for any real rping or anything. Though I have done something like this on a MUD once, in which my character was deleted for inactivity like 4 times and I got so used to it happening that I just wrote it into his backstory. Basically anytime he dies for real, as opposed to just his hp hitting zero, he basically resets to level 1 and wakes up with partial amnesia. I never really did anything with it, just a little explanation for why I had to keep starting over.