Intel Depot

Arma 2 Beta is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It may be updated often and we use it to verify that a bug we are tracking has been fixed. This semi-automated release pipeline was designed primarily for our various external QA teams but we believe it makes sense to keep this open and transparent to the entire user community. However, please understand that it's released for advanced users only and for those who would like to give their helping hand with the testing and further development or simply to see what future versions of Arma 2 may bring.

If you're not interested in testing beta patches (which of course is completely understandable), please just ignore this message and act as if you never read it as there's simply no reason for you to bother about the beta builds at all. There is no need to start complaining about the open beta release policy as we believe it's doing no harm to anyone and can only speed up the entire development process. The complexity of Arma 2 has reached a nearly critical level, especially with all of the user addons and modifications, that testing of the game also requires a more agile approach and this is our attempt to address it.

We have evaluated the Arma 1 public beta versions system used in the past and tried to improve it, not only to allow much faster cycle but also to avoid unwanted userbase split in multiplayer (we will try to maintain compatibility between various versions in multplayer to achieve this).

We make the beta builds for testing only, but it will also allow community developers to test their own content in new versions of the game before it's released officially in stable and tested patch form. For the public beta patch, we write code and post the results frequently, so anyone can join our testing process and report bugs. However, Arma 2 Beta might introduce some new problems from time to time and may not even start properly, so please do not download Arma 2 beta builds if you're unwilling to put up with problems to help with the testing of the game and stick with the latest official release instead.

We tried to create the whole beta program in as user friendly a manner as possible, but feel free to post your suggestions here.

More over at  Bohemia Interactive's Developer Blog