Hey - turns out IRC is out and something a little more modern has taken it's place... A little thing called Discord!
Join our community @ https://discord.gg/JuaSzXBZrk for a pick-up game, or just to rekindle with fellow community members.
Originally posted by Mark Rein
Interestingly enough this build was an IHV test version for hardware vendors and other partners to help us track down bugs and help them test new hardware and drivers. It was specifically designed to communicate back to us system & network configuration (yes, including IP address, computer ID, driver details and server name) and engine/game state details when something goes wrong internally or there's a fatal crash. This information was useful to us to help us identify whether the problem, or crash, was ours or theirs and identifying which computer was the source of the bug was paramount to figuring out what board version (a lot of times they're testing different revisions of unreleased boards or chips) was involved.
Originally posted by Mark Rein
So I'm sure this creates the question: are Epic/DE/Infogrames going to go after a bunch of users who have the build? No, that's silly and a pointless use of our time and Infogrames' time. We've been begging and pleading (and maybe Infogrames has made a few threats when needed but that's their perogative) with various webmasters to take the links down and help us stop this version from circulating further.