Xbox Is Giving You A Chance To Join The 'Alpha' Insider Program

I've been in the Alpha Skip Ahead program for a couple of years, and it's been mostly awesome. Occasionally you end up with a silly bug that won't let you join parties or something, but the majority of the time the builds are stable with new features.

I've loved it!

Any chance you explain exactly what the program is, please @FraserG? I get that many people understand what it entails, but there are probably some (such as myself) that don't know what it's all about. Thanks...

Apologies, @FraserG. I should have thought of that!

I was on the Insider programme a few years ago and it was a 'mostly' stable experience. The one thing that often annoyed me was the 'text' which often had funny characters. In the end, I left because of a 'bug' that was causing issues with Party chat which was impacting too much on the game modes I wanted to play at that time...

Nowadays, I'm happy to wait for the Insiders to 'test' the updates and new features, send back feedback so that by the time it goes 'public', it works as expected with no issues. Some features would be 'cool' to have early - like Game Pass Streaming to Console but nowadays, I can wait until they are 'ready' for everyone.

@PopularCorpse Same here. It's fun when a feature that you've had for months finally hits the public build, and people are talking about it. The weird thing that'll happen to me in it is the updates section gets broken. It'll just sit there spinning check for updates and not show anything, and when there are updates in the queue it only shows one at a time so you have no idea what's getting updated.

If they want me to product test, they can pay me.

@BAMozzy Only thing putting me off entering this is that I heard if you leave the insider stuff, your xbox has to be formated or something like that. Or you may lose all your settings etc.

@Snake_V5 Certainly didn't happen to me. I guess if you 'dislike' the current OS build you are testing and want to roll it back to the older 'public' version, that may require a Complete reset to factory and then obviously, you update that to the latest public version but if you opt out, you stop receiving those 'Alpha/Beta' versions and eventually, when the Public build surpasses the other, you just end up getting that update and have that as your OS.

Even if you do want to reset your 'system', its only your settings/preferences that change - something that takes a few minutes to fix - unless you have spent a LOT of time moving things around from the 'default' - pinning friends etc to your home page...

The rest is just setting up the Console for your preferences - like whether you prefer Eco friendly start-up or quicker start-up, what colour scheme or backdrop you like and what type of Display you have connected...

Its not as if you lose all your game saves and/or installed games either so you don't have to reinstall everything...

If I remember correctly, I did do the factory reset because the problems I was having with Party chat was stopping me from playing the games I wanted. I was someone who loved Destiny Raids and you need to be able to communicate. That game had weekly resets and I played 'everyday', initially for my weekly rewards and then to help others through to get theirs but that required Party Chat. Therefore, the only options for me were to opt-out and 'reset' OR wait until MS fixed it which may not happen for weeks.

Yes its great to get access to things 'early' but you also have to remember that you are testing to see if they work across a much wider variety of set-ups. The actual console hardware maybe the same, but the software and all the apps, all the different peripherals and displays and even they way people use their Hardware differs so they are using you essentially to test for much wider compatibility issues than they can in-house. Some issues only affect a 'small' portion because the rest don't use their console that way, don't have the same software/app or peripheral plugged in etc...

At the end of the day, its a choice so if you don't think its beneficial to you, don't join up - if you want to be 'first' to trial new features etc and feedback any issues to help MS to fix it ready for Public release, then go for it. Its not an 'early access' reward system, you are volunteering to 'test' these knowing that these are still not quite ready to go public and prepared to accept that there are going to be more issues and instability to tolerate in general.

We used to do the Destiny 1 Raids together, @BAMozzy. Back from when we were all friends from the Official Xbox Magazine. You were always a great help to me. You remain on my friends list to this day....

@Fiendish-Beaver Yeah those were some Great Days and what makes playing online with others so great - overcoming the challenges in front of us co-operatively, everyone as important and everyone pulling together, willing to help or willing to learn...