You have to respect the transparency of this game.

However you feel about the game, this dev team has put forward the most transparent pre-release (pre-alpha) environment I have ever seen in a game.

Just about every MMO dev team I've experienced had some kind of NDA they make you click through -> from multi-million dollar (supposed) triple-A game companies, to solo indy devs and everything in between.  (One cowardly game company I shall not name made you send them a drivers license or passport to get on their test server - shameful).

And then you have the LiF team:  "Fuck the NDA, post whatever you want, say whatever you want."  These guys have balls of steel.  I have never seen a dev team have so much confidence, even in pre-alpha state.  I've always asked myself about other companies - "Why did they make me sign an NDA?  What are they hiding?".  There is nothing being hidden here, despite a lot of bugs and core issues (to be expected in pre-alpha anyway).

The other piece of transparency I was impressed with is openly known player count:  When you log in the game you see exactly the total number of players logged into the global channel.  So many MMO's give bullshit numbers about how many people are playing their game, but never any concrete numbers of "X people are online right now".  There were over 90 players in the last pre-alpha session...  a number I think is encouraging for such an early stage of an indy project.  

I know you can name plenty of exceptions (X company didn't have an NDA, or X company shows you everyone logged in).  I'm not saying its never been done before.  But I am saying its the direction companies should be going in, and its a direction I respect.