Some quick answers (note, it has been a while since I have been on test so I may be out of date; others may correct me mercilessly):
- its been a while since I have been on test, but when I was, I just lived with the updates.
- Other than the release notes that say what has changed and give some focus to your play testing, part of the idea of test is to have players just play their game reporting things that they find that are broken. What we have seen is a reluctance to tell test server players too much about the details since they are more likely to find problems acting like normal players without internal knowledge of the mechanisms (there are SOE internal testers who start from that knowledge and test stuff before it gets to the test server). -- Also from time to time, there will be posted requests for specific testing focus (for load testing and to evaluate new mechanisms).
- In general, the test characters are separate. There is talk of a copy mechanism to allow you to copy (one-way) characters from a live server to test; however, even if that happens, they will become totally separate characters and the test characters will never (TM) be copied back to live.
- There seems to be a dislike of level buffs on test. The good news is that leveling is faster since there is (usually??) an XP bonus. There has been a bunch of talk about doing something to help with leveling due to the small test server population, but I am not sure where that came out.