This patch was entirely designed by beta testers directly. We just asked them what a minimum amount of changes would be to make dueling slightly better. Devs did nothing but propose the question, and actually implement the suggested changes.
This is a goal we have had for a long time. Easier said than done though, especially regarding the next patch which will essentially change the entire game, not just a few files.
We accept basically everyone that applies to the beta team. However, you are one of the few that were declined for pretty much the reason stated at the end of your sentence there. We currently have over 30 testers. The ones I personally think are up their own ass aren't around anymore and I wouldn't say any of the current testers fit that description.
You're not wrong about gameplay being the most important thing. However, you are wrong about what the UI, Tutorials, etc are. They are far more than the name suggests and its really hard to fully quantify them on the roadmap. One thing that has been worked on in the back end of things has been the entire reworking of the class and spawn system backends. Due to the needs of the tutorial, with the need to dynamically be able to spawn and changes classes as people run through the level, we ran into massive issues with the old spawn system that was just a massive headache to fix. The whole spawning system, and class backend was just completely bonkers stupid. As a result, we pushed the entire reworking of those systems that have been slowly worked on for years to the forefront. That, within the first few days, had resulted in us fixing everything in the tutorial related to the spawn systems, except for some bugs with weird cases like droidekas.
However, what most don't know, is how much this fixes a lot of things in MB2 itself. We don't know the full extent, as we still need to do a lot of cleanup, testing, etc but it has the potential to be pretty game changing. It drastically changes how abilities are applied to classes, which is hard to explain how much of a benefit that is. It basically makes it easier for us to move abilities around from class to class, and modify those abilities allowing us to modify and balance faster. It also makes it so that its WAY easier to make new classes for mb2. We have something like 10 new classes in testing (To be clear here... a lot of them probably wont see the light of day, but several of them likely will). That were all added/created in a massively shorter time than any time we have tried to do that in the past and that number is an illustration of how much better this system is.
All off that doesn't even include what it does for bugs. It reworks even how classes are selected by the UI and communicated between clients and servers, which should result in less join bugs, and maybe even less kyle bugs. I personally haven't seen a single one since it has been fully working but that is not a guarantee so don't quote me on that. It should also make it so theres less weird morphing when things swap between classes, or fix some weird bugs or allow more options to be done in FAs. That little bit should also fix some exploits as well. Reworking the UI also means that from a back end standpoint for us, even just adding or modifying abilities in those menus is a lot easier as well. It also means, you no longer need to overwrite the official UI when running penekepack or anything. You can make it an option to switch between the two in the options menu.
Even just simple things like customization and performance have had quite a bit of improvement. As a result of redoing the class and spawn backends, each class now has a "default" optimized model. Which means we can potentially implement a cvar, that lets people use a "performance" mode that should boost framerates on lower spec machines, and not require people to download those performance replacement packs that replace everything with basejka models. It also means, model replacements are no longer a thing. You can add your own custom models, and those custom models will appear as the default model for that class for everyone else. Some performance optimizations have been done to several functions as well, so just general performance should be better too.
So while gameplay is definitely one of the most important things, what are are working on is still heavily related to improving gameplay, or making it easier for us to adjust gameplay in the future. The patch should include gameplay changes with it, but we might play it a bit safe, so we can iron out any issues with the conversion. We need to be careful about doing gameplay changes with this, as we can run into a situation where we weren't sure if a bad change/issue is due to something happening in the back end, or a balance change that we did on top of it. There are a lot of gameplay changes that are already being built on top of this new system though.
Either way, my point is, that tutorials, ui, etc are far beyond fillers and mean a lot for the future. UI itself was even technically releaseable months ago before the merge of the new class and UI system that resulted in me dumping hundreds of hours into updating and improving it a crap ton further since. Were getting closer and closer every day. I already wrote out a good chunk of the changelog for release and put it in the beta area and it took me at least 3 hours to write it the other day while not including several things that need more info, and not including the list of gameplay changes just yet.
