As you can tell by the other update posts, the UI is getting completed and is part of the update that we need in place before we can move to beta. The other piece is the engine update and that is still taking some time. I'm not liking the results I am getting and even though they are close, I'm going to have to redo how I am doing some of the simulation. The way it is now is difficult to tweak to change results the way I'd like to see it, and since it's the part of the game that produces the results of each play, it's probably the most important part of the update, so I don't want to short change it.
I am human (contrary to the conspiracy theorists out there) and I am taking a week off in a couple weeks to spend the holidays with my family, but after the holidays, the focus will be on getting beta up and running. Next week will mostly be making those changes to the engine I just mentioned as well as completing the UI pages. The weeks during the holidays I will spend with any remaining tweaks to these engine changes as well as trying to get in fatigue, injuries, and penalties and those things - some of which I am okay with not getting in until beta. There will also be at least a few days in trying to get the beta environment set up just on the technical side, as we don't currently have a process in place to set up beta on the live site.
So optimistically, I'm looking to get beta out the first part of January. I'm still working on the details of any limitations for users in signing up or grabbing teams, but as soon as we have a hard date and a fixed plan of how to sign up, I will post those details. In the meantime, I'll keep the UI screenshots coming as they are ready.