if i may......
When beta testing something that
of people overlook is simply hitting the icons in the briefing, making sure that the ship type that pops up is accurate to the icon representation. i don't know how many times i have discovered that the icon was the wrong ship type....ie a freighter icon, and when i hit it...it pops up as a hercules mk II.
Something else to be aware of, if you have any fred ability at all, open the mission in fred and copy and paste each page of briefing, debriefing, and each spoken line of events into a word processing program to spell check....please don't fix the problems....simply make the powers that be aware of them. otherwise we will have 900 versions of a mission running around.
Also....when beta testing, do the unexpected. If you are supposed to protect a certain ship...don't do it, and see what happens. There should always be ramifications to this sort of thing, and if we have forgotten it, invariably someone will find it after release and we will have egg on our faces over the deal. Beta testing is probably the most underrated segment of building a mod, as it is always one of the most important steps.
play the missions on more than one difficulty setting. This will allow for a broader range of balancing issues to be detected.
last but not least....check loadouts. it was stated a long time by Ace i think, that one problem with homemade campaigns has always been the ability to fly the mara (terrans) in a given mission.....this is a pet peeve for more than one of us, and should Never happen...so if you see this...red flag that mission automatically.
Just my two cents on beta testing, so that applicants know what they are getting into, and what is expected of them.