Originally Posted by
The Last DJ
I was in the Cata beta, and the Wrath beta as well. They were night and day compared to one another. It seemed like the Wrath beta was much more slow to invite masses of players, instead sampling from a smaller group who were there to actually play test, and not treat it like a free preview. The blues were helpful and the players constructive, and the DK forums were simply awash with input, most of which was responded to in some way or tested out. (Believe it or not, my husband was one of the Unholy DKs who started suggesting that Unholy, as a master of ghouls, get a permanent ghoul for themselves.) Me, I spent half my time in the DK forums (where I laugh about just how broken beta Blood DKs were - you think their self-healing now was absurd? Unlimited number of bloodworms spawning on AUTO ATTACKS mwahahaha) and staring glumly at the shaman forums, where all the enhancement players were wringing their hair and screaming about how DKs were going to be benching enh shamans everywhere.
No matter what the goddamn expansion, the sky is always falling for shamans. Christ.
Anyway. The Wrath beta was fun, and enjoyable, and minus that little Ret with the GOD SWITCH flipped on snafu, an overall success. Then came Cata. Suddenly their subs had ballooned to 12 million, Wrath was a rousing success ... aaaaaaaaand it all went straight to their heads. The Cata beta was shit. Utter shit. They started mass-inviting before things were even ready for a beta release, and most of these people weren't interested in submitting bugs or offering critique. They were there to get a free preview. The blues, especially Ghostcrawler, were very condescending and smug in a very "my shit don't stink a'cause I got 12 million subscribers whaaaaaaaat?" fashion. If suggestions weren't worded with 95% ass-kissing and hand-holding, GC or another blue would flop out the big blue Blizzard e-peen and start threatening to revoke the poster's beta status for "trolling" and "being unhelpful". What happened when Cata was released? Subs took a nosedive. Not surprising, given that they didn't listen to any of the suggestions - and how could they, when they started inviting hundreds of players hand over fist when the game was a week out of beta from the alpha. Half of the posts on the forums were complaints about bugs - not bug reports, actual complaints, and the other half were WHAT SHOULD THE WORGEN DANCE BE?
Given that they're handing out MoP keys to everyone with one of those goddamn obnoxious Tyrael's Chargers, I suspect the MoP beta will be no different, unless they sorely learned their lesson about being arrogant pillocks when it comes to the testing phase of their game.