Indeed I agree completely. A lot of testers expected to have a good deal of time with balancing and tweaking and pacing. Trying to find strategies that could "break" the game. Put the game through it's paces etc etc. Internally this might not seem like that big of a step when mechanics are falling into place and the code is flying because values can always be gone over and tweaked later. Honestly though, (and I kinda feel like I'm gonna get yelled at for even saying this..lol), but I think the Lack Of This Phase Of a Beta is the Exact Reason why so many people complained that the game was being "rushed" (notice I wasn't one of those people). Still, I think that's what a lot of people expected. Honestly, back when the beta started, that's what I expected too which was why I was glad the other phases were going so slow, so that the balancing and tweaking phase would go slow too and we'd have time with it. That phase isn't so much in a Devs eyes, but in the players eyes that phase IS the Game. It's the game-play, the meat and potatoes, the heart and soul of the game. In most major projects I've been a part of how-ever, most of the "Game" was hammered out on paper (virtual paper) in the design phase while the engine was being built.

This time around the chips didn't fall the way we all wanted when it came to what kind of time we'd get with certain parts of the game. In future betas though I think it should be something that's planned for from inception to keep precisely that thing from happening. Of course there's always going to be a small population in any game's beta that will Never say a game is ready. I think in Elemental's case though specifically that it could have been avoided if there was a longer "design testing phase". With business agreements being what they are it was unavoidable this time, next time though it should probably be something that's planned for.

You, you not argue!? Hah! Excuse me, I think i better wipe up the water that went flying across my desk at that not.  
I've been in this area for going on 20 years now. I've never seen a single female employee in either of the two stores at my mall. I don't think they will hire women, and they're still terrible. It has nothing to do with gender and everything to do with the fact that GS doesn't care enough to train their employees. They just want their cash, their exclusives and for people to trade in games to get a 50 cent credit.

maybe where you live. But in my town all the game stop employees are avid gamers including the most the girls that work there. We have alot of female employees for the measly 4 gamestops we have. I think theres 1-2 female employees at each store.

I'm not making a sweeping claim on the Entire female gender, dear. Just the ones here in Deland...lol. I am known not to argue on occasion

Trolling eh?  Did you bother to look up Australia EB?  http://www.ebgames.com.au/search?title=elemental

No I didn't think so. 

It's a good game, and it's a shame it hasn't been flooded more in game circles.  But it won't sell well if people don't know about it, nor can get it.

Hell yeah!

Or maybe it will reach those expectations at day 0, since no open beta tester played the final version, who knows?

Anecdotal evidence from one person is not a "statistical fact". You don't have a statistic at all, and if you tried to gather one the sample size is so small that it'd be completely meaningless.

Furthermore, the "gaming population" isn't relevant. EB doesn't limit their hiring to the gaming population. They'll hire anybody who is available and can sell used games to people who come in for new ones (particularly around here where the job market is reasonably strong and people have other options).

Around here, I can go in and ask ANYBODY about an obscure PC game and they'll have no idea what I'm talking about. Doesn't matter what gender they are or how good looking they are. PC games aren't the focus of the store, and they don't hire people on the basis of their knowledge of the industry. (Hell, I had to tell them once that they had The Witcher: Enhanced Edition in stock, because they didn't know. He went back and sure enough it was in a box they hadn't gotten around to yet.)

Frogboy you had said that a modder could remake Ultima IV with the modding tools for Elemental. Could someone recreate Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic?

Well AOW:SM IMHO is the best Fantasy TBS game to date. And I even like it better thant Ultima IV and MOM. So that is the reason I'd ask because I would like to see it recreated.

Fairly new here and only recently found out about elemental through Impulse's "coming soon" section. I'm an old school veteran of eagerly awaiting games and reading beta reports. My unfortunate experience has been that 100% of the time when the final beta that the testers get to play with was buggy and unfinished, then there will always be dramatic claims about how much better the internal beta is and how much is being fixed between beta and release. However I have never actually seen a case when the final release didn't turn out to be a disaster.

Anyway I hope this will not be the case here, and maybe as some say this is just a Stardock thing. I do like them as a company which gives me some faith. But every other failure I saw had similar arguments made about how this was all to be expected and normal as well, so you can understand a certain skepticism on my part. But I hope I'm wrong, and that in the future I can mention this game as a ray of hope among all the other disasterous launches I've seen.

What I do have faith in though is that even if the game has issues at first, it will eventually be good or at least decent. If it is released unfinished a lack of publicity may be a good things because it will let them fly under the radar until it's done. When a game website writes a review they do it once with the current version of the game.....they don't go back 6 months later and review the fixed version (or at least they rarely do).

As a side note, I played MoM through every patch and despite our fond memories of it, that was also a game that was released way too soon with major bugs, balance problems, and horrible AI. Even the final version was deeply flawed, though that didn't stop me from playing it all the time.

I think "not obvious to Most" would be a better wording there, chief. I think a lot of us expected access to that stage of the beta when we pre-ordered. I know I did. A lot of us buying into the beta had expectations of having just as much input into balancing and tweaking as we've had with the rest of the game and it's mechanics as well. Without public (I wouldn't exactly call it "public" since we bought our way into it) access to beta 5 we don't have any idea what the launch balance will be like.