Anybody know when beta is coming out for this?

(from www.cityofheroes.com)

City of Heroes Closed Beta About to Begin!

It’s no secret that Cryptic Studios and NCsoft have been working hard on City of Heroes over the past months. The game is definitely coming along at a great pace– and now it’s time to enlist our loyal community to help make City of Heroes the best game it can be!

Within the next couple of weeks, the first batch of Public Beta invites will go out to community members who previously registered on the City of Heroes Forums. These invitations are based on a number of factors, beginning with original signup date. A chunk of those first registered for the forums will be plucked from our database, checked for recent activity, and then invited randomly in groups of 100. The process will start slowly and ramp up, but eventually, everyone registered on the City of Heroes forums prior to November 1st 2003 will be considered. While we appreciate and welcome interest in the City of Heroes community and are happy to see new members on our forums, it is important to note that signing up for the forums at this point will have no effect on being chosen for beta testing.

In addition to previous forum membership, testers will need to meet the following system requirements to be accepted into the early stages of testing. Please note that these are not the final requirements for the game – they are just the minimum needed to participate as a tester.

OS - Windows® 98/ME/2000/XP

Processor – Intel Pentium® III 800 Mhz or AMD Athlon 800 Mhz minimum

RAM - 256 MB minimum

Available HDD Space - 2 GB minimum

Video – minimum of GeForce 2 Series cards (GeForce Ti and MX series cards accepted as well as ATI Radeon 9200, 9500, 9600, 9700 and 9800 series cards)

Audio - 16-bit Sound Card minimum

Internet Connection – Broadband (Cable modem, DSL, etc)

Keyboard and mouse

In addition to meeting these specs, potential testers will also need to be available during “to be determined” Closed Beta Testing play-session times and may have to meet additional criteria as determined by our Quality Assurance team.

Please make sure that the email address you provided us with when you registered on the Message Board is current – as that is the address your invite will be sent to. To change your email address, go into the “User CP” section of the board and hit the “Edit Profile” link at the top of the page.

We feel that basing our initial criteria for closed beta entry on forum registration is the fairest way to reward the loyal fans who have stuck with us through the entire development of City of Heroes. We thank you all for your support and patience! And for those of you who don’t get invited right away, don’t worry. We will be bringing you special updates and information about the testing that will keep you involved and informed until it’s your turn to play. Look for more information on that later.

Again, thank you all for your support, and let’s get testing…we look forward to your valuable feedback!