Its dead wrong to go after beta testers. The state of Poser 5 is borne by us. We take responsibility for that. That's why we have a patch due out on the 30th of this month. And as needed, subsequent patches will be released.

There isn't a single beta tester responsible for the final state of Poser 5. They are all volunteers. Not "insiders". No special deals. They are skilled or professional users of Poser from this and other communities, they are artists that can push the features deeply, or just good solid communicators that can verbalize and document the sometimes twisty steps that allow us to re-produce a bug. They were logged on to our beta forum with their real names, and many met each other for the first time using those real world names, even though they had been communicating for years in the public forums under screen names.

A little detail about the beta process at Curious Labs-
We had over 80 independent testers working outside Curious Labs, contributing to bug threads, category by category on an internal testing forum hosted on our server. The beta testers sign non disclosure agreements (NDAs) which bind them before and after the test process. These NDAs restrict them from discussing the process and the beta versions of the application, during and after the testing process. The only reward that the testers receive is a copy of the shipping version of P5.

The job of testing is a challenging one at best. The application is in a rough state. There is very little final documentation; there isn't anyone to hold hands with the testers. They have to rely upon a lot of personal ingenuity to go through an application as deep as Poser 5. Some testers wrote up dozens of bugs. Others found one or two. I assure you, the testers did not specifically see or report the crash issues that have been chronicled here. If we had seen these, they would have been addressed prior to shipping. Many of the testers reading this know first hand how the beta crash bugs that they found were taken very seriously by our engineering and QA team. For the most part the beta testers were all looking for those killer bugs. Some testers found a lot during the beta. And thats how the bugs get fixed. Unfortunately, there is no a perfect system, and some bugs simply dont turn up until the product hits the real world of users.

The best thing we can do at this point is to take responsibility, and deliver timely fixes to the problems.