Steven did an impromptu Q&A in discord about the upcoming alpha!! Someone kindly recorded it and posted it on youtube. It sounds pretty awesome. There will be a guild mode queuing where you can queue for some events with up to 19 friends! An interesting thing they noted about guilds is that the current cap is 300, and that is obtained by “leveling the guild and selecting the path of size rather than guild skills.” They go into that a little bit more in questions.
He says that the servers will start by being up for a couple of hours, then progress to days, then to weeks. This progression will be based on performance of the servers. The first week it will run a couple of hours a day during the day Wed-Sat. Then barring problems the next week it will be a couple of hours during the day from Wed-Sun. Then they will move to up all day, and finally they will progress into being up all the time.
They are aiming to begin the third week of September, and thus far they are ahead of schedule.
Watch the full Q&A here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqWsNeemuQI&feature=youtu.be