We are hoping to sqeeze in the Metaverse support into beta 4.  Originally this was going to go in December but because we have to submit the game for ESRP rating prior to December 1, we had to get this part going sooner. So you may be able to play the game via the Metaverse right off in beta 4.

There is a pretty good chance, however, that Beta 4 will get delayed until this upcoming Tuesday to give us a little more time to tweak things and fix bugs.  There's a lot of new things coming together in this beta and it won't do anyone any good if it's unplayabily buggy.  Most of the issues are very easy to resolve, it's just the typical result of moving in big modules into place and having to deal with how they interact with others.

For instance, this week we've put a lot of time (and continue to) to deal with the computer AI building fleets.  This in turn seems to make the game unstable after awhile since the AI tends to build and eliminate fleets a lot more often than a human would.  So these are the kinds of things we have to resolve prior to beta 4.