Expectations have kind of been built up that "Build ABC will contain X, Y, and Z", especially if it's been in development for a while. I felt kind of compelled to complete the login system, data validation, and other things that were expected for build 17 before making an actual release, but in the meantime, several people were stuck playing without native resolution support or with "swapbuffers failed" messages spamming the screen because of crappy drivers. I really should have released new builds as soon as these issues/features were added, though releases are a pain in the butt and generally take an entire weekend -- sometimes longer -- to put together.
So... build 17 might be what you got, and build 18 the fixes for known issues with that. It might not even be a "public" release until build 19 or 20. Possibly even higher.
I think for now I'll fix a couple of the small issues pointed out in build 17 and have that be the build 17 "final", then try using libCURL to see if it fixes the login connection issues for build 18.
Thoughts?