The public events were pretty seamless and awesome to fight in. Since the selection of participants for the Alpha was so small, I only had about two other people help me whenever one popped up. ;) As for multiplayer, it's a lot of fun. Your ship in the menu actually flies to the battleground which is awesome and can even go into FTL if on a different planet. For example, my ship was floating around Earth while I was searching for players in matchmaking. When I got paired up, our multiplayer map was going to be on the Moon. My ship then flew off into FTL space that took us to the Moon. It's bad ass!