On a more serious note (and I hope this hasn't been asked before - there are almost 5000 posts in this thread), how do you pick playtesters? Do you ever seek out new ones? I'd imagine you'd want people of different levels of experience / skill.
IRL, I play with anyone who shows up to play, except when the table is full of regulars, in which case I play with them.
A few times I have specifically recruited playtesters from the online Dominion communities.
- Initially - before the game was published - I playtested with people I knew from online Magic communities, and they stuck around for a while.
- I invited LastFootnote based on his endless posting and collection of Donald X. games, when I needed to playtest Prince.
- For Adventures I first invited people who I knew had a physical copy from one thread here, and had done well in a tournament from another thread here, which I think included Adam and jsh357.
- Then we were also able to do testing online with isotropic, so I could invite good players who didn't necessarily have a physical copy, which included Mic and Stef. Mic has actually done testing irl for other games now.
- A few years later I needed more, and invited Ben and Steveie King.
- Recently I invited Ingix and markus in a rules capacity, due to the errata. Ingix is more vocal and made it into the credits for Menagerie, but neither of them playtested it (except now, for the online version).
I don't let people invite themselves; I let that happen a couple times in the past and wasn't happy with how it went. And way back when there were people I didn't invite at all, and most of those did not really contribute.
Even if everyone is an expert, they will end up playing with non-experts; that will be covered. My biggest concern is having people actually play games and tell me how they went; some people are not chatty and well I want words. And some don't end up actually playing much.
It may be that someday I will be looking online for more external playtesters. I'm hanging out in these communities and I'll have some idea who I might want.