It makes no sense to me why they would have a fully functioning beta with all of these new features, and only lets ms workers play it. Its very frustrating.
And on top of that we have hackers playing it, who will do nothing but leak this info out and in the end give no feedback to 343.
There was an internal Microsoft beta for Halo 2 where disks containing the multiplayer and several maps were given out to around 10,000 employees. The Halo 3 "Epsilon," containing several multiplayer maps and one campaign mission, was released to thousands of employees. It allows the developer to test the network code with a large amount of people across the entire world without having to worry about specifically creating a build for the public, which can take weeks to do followed by months for that build to pass through Microsoft certification. And after all that, a large amount of the complaints from the public will be about things that have been fixed in builds since the one that was forked off for the beta.