I understand how they deffer from the players perspective, but from a developer

Our internal goals of closed and open beta are different, mostly due to the logistics involved. Closed beta is primarily about gathering feedback from testers and fine-tuning the player experience. Open beta is about primarily about stress-testing our systems to make sure they can hold up under load.

Closed beta is when we are carefully controlling how many people are playing at any given time. We're purposely keeping numbers lower in order to keep the total feedback we collect actionable - the more people there are, the harder it can be to organize and direct them to specific goals (e.g. this week we're testing the PVP, next week we're testing the dungeon matchmaker). When there's too many players, we lack the manpower to parse and deal with all of the feedback we get. It's not unlike a popular nightclub - we have limits on what a good experience will be, so must keep the number of people inside within those limits.

Open beta is when we open the floodgates and anybody who wants in may play. Open beta isn't for gathering feedback from players, there's way too much being generated to parse through. Instead, what we're doing is testing our system limits - will the game systems be able to stand up against thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of players all trying to use them at once? Will the systems we built to sort and match make between all of the players of varying skill levels work? We can only ever test with limited numbers in closed environments, so open beta is the real world test of these systems. In open beta, we're primarily looking at our system stability under heavy load. We want to see if things can keep working when there are lots of players.

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