Building a live game with its players: how do you find long-term playtesters without treating them like free QA?

I’m the solo developer of Bitiverse, a persistent browser MMO that I’ve been building in public alongside a small group of actual players.

This has gradually become something different from ordinary playtesting. These aren’t people running through a temporary build and completing a feedback form. They have persistent characters, homes, guilds, businesses and relationships with other players. They progress normally while I watch where they struggle, listen to what they discuss and turn useful feedback into updates.

It has been enormously valuable. Players experience systems together in ways I never could alone. They discover confusing onboarding, broken progression, economic oddities and unexpectedly fun social behaviour. A throwaway joke about owning seventeen chairs resulted in players filling their houses with chairs. Feedback about having no direction led to new narrative onboarding. Requests for things to do together became house parties and playable table games.

The difficult part is finding more people willing to participate in that relationship.

A fifteen-minute first-impression test is useful, but an MMO also needs people who return, progress and eventually encounter its deeper systems. I want players who genuinely enjoy inhabiting the world, not unpaid workers being asked to hunt bugs. In return, they get unusually direct access to development and can see their experiences influence the game around them.

For anyone who has developed a live or community-driven game:

How did you find your earliest long-term players? What made them feel invested enough to return? And how do you listen closely without letting community feedback turn the game into design by committee?