Testers are chosen for a variety of reasons. In the past I have been invited and I saw no reason why other than I played on an older Mac.
But I haven’t done any other Betas since I didn’t want to spoil that sense of wonder as I started a new expansion since the second time around was like leveling an alt.
Randomly and in large numbers would be ideal… this cant be handled as a pr thing. Blizzard needs players to beta test 1-60 properly it cant be a hack drop like bfa.
The only transactional pool likely to increase odds of a Beta Invite, as per past precedent, would be BlizzCon. If you bought the stream, or managed to attend, that has often meant auto-invite to their next beta at some stage. Not always, but often enough.
This is why public betas are a very common practice, it is impractical to maintain and test across the hundreds/thousands of possible hardware configurations seen in the consumer market.
Yes, as it uses the retail client as a base, that shouldn’t need much testing. But as the world itself is very different from what’s in retail, including different game mechanics, there are going to be enough differences present that they’re going to want to at least run a brief beta to make sure an unexpected interaction between different (rare) hardware configurations doesn’t result in bugs that significantly impact gameplay.
I’m sure they have other metrics in play as well, like quest completion rates, what mobs are being killed and how often, what players are dying to, etc. (The player death statistic is known to have existed in Vanilla as Westfall is reported to have hosted some of the deadliest mobs in Vanilla WoW.)
Those metrics are useful even with player feedback because that provides them feedback in regards to quest tuning, mob difficulty, etc. Sometimes people just playing the game is feedback in and of itself, by tracking the interactions they have within the game, as an individual, or more likely as an (aggregated) group.
I would start with a closed beta and give access on by waves:
-First wave would be for people that can play it a lot and can give it a ton of exposition (streamers, youtubers, people from community sites like wowhead). Even some random active wow accounts to make the player base bigger
-On a second wave i would put smaller streamers, more random accounts (active and recently inactive ones)
-And from that on just random accounts.
I know this is only a question, but its this group of people who are effectively responsible for the decline and ruin of World of WarCraft as we know it now.
We want classic WoW because it has never been polluted by the ideas, concepts and design choices promoted by youtube or streaming.
I am against a beta because the only thing that will need fixing in Classic are bugs, not design choices.
If there are design choices made on blizzard’s end 14 years later, these should only be limited to the kinds of things that keep Classic true to its original era, not the sort of changes promoted by people who want “things” from outside of the original Classic era.
Bug’s will always slip into the game, this is why you the player need to report them as soon as you find them; also include a detail on how the bug was encountered and how to reproduce it if you can.
The players can beta test it live, Blizzard can get paid. Get that old time Vanilla feel back. Folks can create a whole new folklore of being their on day one when XXX happened “but they fixed it”.
Bring on the bugs, glitches, exploits, and lag fests.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizzard did a beta in the style of the Demo. Debuff for play time limiting. Open beta invites. (for subbed members - cause well ActiBliz)
The point I was making is no one should be able to re-design the game systems or alter them to meet the desires of the individual on a standardized basis.
Doing so changing the game; something we are against because we want Classic WoW, not some kind of hybrid joke.