Vanguard - Beta 5 Preview @ IGN

IGN has a preview of the latest Vanguard beta, written by Sigil's Nick Parkinson.  Here's an early snip:

It has been a long road to get here though. While Beta 5 is our first "public", so to speak, phase of beta we've actually been testing for quite some time. With Vanguard, we opted to have a significantly longer beta period than many games choose to. We started inviting the very first testers to come join us way back in July of 2005 for what we called beta 0, or more commonly known as friends and family beta. Back then, only small portions of the game world were in and we were still trying out a lot of new ideas as far as game play mechanics go. Gradually, over the next year we moved through phases 1, 2 and 3 each time adding proportionally larger amounts of both testers and content.