Like, a genuine question for Blizzard:
Is there a reason you guys don’t do forum key giveaways? Not everyone has interest in going to places like Twitch. Yet, you aren’t giving any chance for people to be rewarded for using the site you actually run?
I’m in beta, so it doesn’t concern me, and I don’t care if I don’t get into a beta, as although I love sending in feedback, there’s others who tend to give the same feedback I do. But I know a lot of people are sad when they don’t get in.
As an example, why are you not giving keys to active forum posters to host forum giveaways for? There’s been a few great people like Grimoire who have hosted mount giveaways:
So forum giveaways do work, and doing them this way can encourage people to share positive things like their best memory of wow, the thing they’re looking forward to most in dragonflight, etc. And as an added bonus, it would help stifle the complaints about having to go off-site to get a chance at winning.
Yes, they would be prone to the same type of favoritism, but there’s also a lot of people who genuinely just assign everyone a number and use a random number generator, as a way for things to be fair. (Before anyone comments on me winning a mount from Grimoire, that was before I was on the CC, so it definitely wasn’t favoritism, I didn’t know them before it.)
It might be too late into Dragonflight beta to do something like this, but something to keep in mind for the next beta?
By the time Blizzard starts key giveaways like this, Beta is “finalized” - any major changes are done. They are fine tuning, stress testing servers, etc. which isn’t really testing by this point. Blizzard literally told us right around when they started giveaways that all major changes are done on classes and now they’re sticking to minor adjustments and tuning.
Yes, you’re still testing, but the giveaways happen at a time where stress tests are the more important part, and seeing how quests work with a lot of people doing them - which is still testing, but it, for all intents and purpose, does in fact act like pre-release, just with no progress saved to live.
Like when we were in alpha, I saw maybe two people out in the world my entire time on alpha. (Not counting the dungeons I queued into, but dungeons had 4+ hour queue times cause finding 5 people was that hard lol) That’s not a way to test things like “Can this quest mob supply support a retail live player amount” - that’s when things like key giveaways come in handy.