I hardly ever see anybody online anymore. Has this game died?

Meh, I can't play it anyway. The server is too far away and my internet connection is as good as it's going to get.

No, the game is not dead. There are players on often, and we're still developing.

Pretty much this. There isn't any rush to complete development. And when you consider the possibilities of platforms like Steam and possible ports to mobile devices for when development is (somewhat?) finished, that's where I think a decent player base is to be gained IMHO.

My testing has stalled for two reasons:
1. I've not been specifically told exactly what I'm testing. I don't really want to level up to lvl 40 and then find out that quest triggered at level 5 and that I could have reported a bug 35 levels ago. If given clear guidelines of intended behaviour and what I should do I don't mind following along
2. Whenever I go from main to dev or dev to main client ends up taking a few minutes loading different server settings

OK, I generally understand that idea is I go around dev and scream when I see something wrong.

Well what I was saying that could be a problem is that when I try to go to dev it loads content and then times out. I then try again and it continues loading content and eventually I can login ok. When I return to main it takes a while to load too.

As far as setskill at least for me it doesn't work as it's a SA/MM/GM command so at least in it's current form testing requires a lot of grinding. If it's unavoidable I can do it but if it's a situation where one person can test it in 2min and another person can do it in 3 hours then it's not exactly an economical usage of time as grinding agaisnt same mob for a few hours shouldn't really uncover anything after first few kills. If on the other hand you're given a list of all the quests and asked to make sure they work ok with the intended reqs and you work through them it could take the same time but be a lot more useful. Hope that makes sense. I guess idea to have someone get to 110 in all skills on dev naturally is probably prefered method for devs but time needed is huge (500 hours+ using limited dungeons in suboptimal testing way) and I can imagine howl of despair when they get a RoA looted that they can never use

Can I request that when you're actually testing, you're not in MW mode though? we miss a lot of things that way

True. But I think if you do /wizpass to toggle it off you become like a normal player but still with access to the fancy commands (wizpass is what lets you see/walk through walls, etc).

/stealth may also be useful. This make you invisble to mob's aggression so you can, for example, kill the target without worrying about those pesky minions.