If this upcoming BWE doesn't have the ability to use modifiers, then that will be one of the biggest blunders I can imagine them making for the BWE and this player-driven marketing campaign. Not everyone who prepurchased is a die hard GW1 fan and used to not having the ability to keybind modifiers, and I would wager to say that at the very least 70% of the player base for the first BWE are people that use modifiers extensively. Something so small and important to how a game feels and its control to not be in the game this late in development is nothing short of a serious failure on Anet.
There is no counter point to this argument. "You only have 10 skills" or "There's not as many skills as other MMOs" are nowhere near sufficient arguments. The very least you can have in combat is 13 keybinds/skills in combat(Necro, Warrior, Thief). 10 buttons for skills and utilities, 1 for weapon swapping, 1 for profession-specific(DeathShroud, Burst, Steal) and 1 revive/finish move. Having F1-F4 as actual buttons for gameplay is woefully inefficient, especially in a highly mobile game such as GW2.
We've all heard ANet spout lines like "Play the game how you want to", but honestly leaving out modifiers will go directly against that statement. Not everyone in the BWE knows that ANet "plans" to implement the modifiers before launch and I know a few hardcore pvpers that will be IMMEDIATELY turned off by the absence of modifiers. Again, this wouldn't be an issue or feel like a futile cry of frustration at ANet if they would just have the damn forums up. The vast majority of people on these forums and other forums are wanting modifiers, and we don't even know if someone from ANet sees our complaints because they have yet to open their official forums so we'd all have the proper channels to address these issues.
They might have gotten some feedback from the CBT testers, but I think we can all agree that the majority of those players didn't know much about the game and in general these players were terrible to begin with. So the feedback ANet got from those CBT's will be skewed when actual good players get their hands on the game and bitch their heads off at such a simple quality of life feature being mysteriously missing from the game. Honestly ANet, it should be already in the game. The talk of trying to dethrone WoW when you haven't put in a feature found in pretty much every MMO that improves control and functionality for the player, is going to bite you in the ass. If you need help with the coding, call me and my friends and I will gladly put in the late hours to fix this issue.