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Changed line about WoW not having a stress test.
Open betas are often referred to as "stress tests," since the goal is not to test the game, but to test the game hosting software and hardware. The game client is usually about the size of a demo, but it can only be played online. Open betas are usually freely available to anyone who wants to download them. Beta keys may or may not be required, but if they are they're made very widely available, in numbers that scale up as the test continues.
Diablo II ran such a stress test for several weeks after the closed beta test, since they needed to see how the Battle.net servers would hold up with tens of thousands of simultaneous connections. There's no telling if Diablo III will run such a test. World of Warcraft did not, possibly because that game's server architecture only allows for had both a few thousand players per realm, stress test and Blizzard knew they'd be adding more realms as the game grew in popularityan open beta to test its servers. Diablo III's Battle.net set up is going to be similar to Diablo II's, with just a few realms worldwide, and millions of players on each. Blizzard may therefore feel it necessary to run such a stress test for D3, though they've said nothing about that publicly. They might also run an open beta because it's good publicity for their title.