FUCK THE OPT-INS

One thing that's been a real treat for the past few months is having the chance to participate in the Wrath of the Lich King Friends & Family Alpha and Closed Beta tests. While it does ruin the surprise of buying the expansion at release and seeing everything in its shiny finished state, I enjoy the opportunity to actively be a part of making the game better, even if it's something as simple as suggesting a flight path change so that the ride from Point A to B does not take less time than the wyvern trip.

I got my invite back in early Alpha, so it's been almost 3 months since I got started. I got to experience things in their very earliest state, such as Death Knights having spell graphics stolen from other classes and abilities that were broken, unimplemented, or bug-ridden. The best bug that comes to mind was having your summoned ghoul die or reach the end of its duration. The thing would collapse to the ground, and somehow manage to aggro EVERY HOSTILE CREATURE IN VISUAL RANGE. Yakkity Sax has never been more appropriate.

The cool part about the Alpha was the small community. As the name might lead you to believe, the populace consisted of, quite literally, the close friends and family of Blizzard employees. Consequently, the quality of feedback was high, the bitching was low, and constructive thread after constructive thread was made on the forums. OH THOSE HALCYON DAYS.

Now that the Beta's in full swing, in addition to more F&F invites from Blizzard employees, we've added people who got keys from the World Wide Invitational and those who were on the Opt-In list (ie: Blizzard randomly selects you, yay!).

It is, by and large, this illustrious latter group that bears mentioning. See, they're random people. They basically entered a drawing for a beta key and won, so really it's like the Internet versions of the Publisher's Clearing House.

Of course, not every new beta invite is bad - several of my guildies got in too, and for the most part they're not completely worthless (:V). The one direct consequence of this thinning of the player pool, however, is a marked drop in quality on the beta forums. Observe the following recent threads:

Blizzard should remove the need to farm money completely from the game!

Ret paladins are bugged FIX THIS NOW PLZ (spoiler: this is like thread #50 addressing this)

I am bored with this expansion btw I won't propose to my girlfriend til it goes Gold

My 50s reagent is TOO EXPENSIVE

and my favorite...

BAWWWWWWWWWWW MY DOWNRANKING

If you read all of that last one, I will be impressed.

Things are still moving along at a stately pace in ye olde beta, and good changes are happening (except for warriors thus far HO HO), but meantime having to wade through an ankle deep layer of shit coating the General forum is pretty fail.