Ithirahad
Arana'Aethi
Seems to me that the patch-cascade process from minor mechanics corrections would require less work and time than maintaining two separate branches of the ships and dependent mechanics, the development branch of which would require the cascade process anyway (albeit less as the expectations for a dev branch are less, so some rough bits or ships that don't work will not matter much).More information known. Lessons already learned. Late alpha would/could signify learning what you could from earlier play tests. Ideally you do want fail early/fail often as silicon valley likes to put it. That's what alpha is for.
The other thing is, unless all systems are overhauled to work in some completely new way with the first new update, and the new systems are just far better from the start, the majority of people and servers will remain on the old system except for messing around, as the old system will probably be perceived as "better" and nobody wants to refit all their stuff.
In the end, the only way to properly test this is to force it on people after the initial dev build cycle. :P
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