In the past, I've been an in-house beta tester for 3 retail PC fight sims. I know all about CTW's, Hard locks, accert errors, blue screens of deaths, video card driver probs, video and sound hardware probs, sorting probs, MIP map probs, CPU compatiblily, Windows version probs, etc. It's bascially a 2-3 month bug hunt and kill exercise for 6-10 people before Beta goes Gold and release to the general public.
We're doing the Beta testing whether we like it or not, at our expense. It doesn't exactly sit too well with me.
A new patch and release is good. The old 2.131 was getting rather stale. But, man... work out most of the bugs before release, even if you need to hire a few in-house beta testers or contract out to a beta test house.