Um, everybody I’ve ever known in beta knew that you posted beta feedback in the beta forum. I’ve done several betas with Blizzard. There is in-game bug reporting, and plenty of opportunities in the beta itself to give feedback, plus the forums.
Your ignorance of how this works doesn’t make it a conspiracy.
Sign up for beta. If you get a key, you can post on those forums as much as you like.
Oh my god this isn’t an example of gaslighting. Is 2020 the year of devaluing words?
AGAIN. WE ARE NOT talking about the WOW beta forums. We are talking about the secret invites that the top 1% of WOW players have had other the years on Blizzards secret forums that were just exposed today.
Sure, why not.
There is nothing at all new about that either.
They’ve been inviting high end raid guilds to test content for years. You can’t do that with pickup groups. I’m sure if you go back you’ll find references to such things in the past. I certainly read various public comments from such testers in the past and the problems they encountered.
This is a pretty normal software beta practice in my experience. I never worked in games, but most of the beta programs we ran fell along these general lines.
You select customers who are a) willing and b) capable of giving some important part of your system a solid workout. You often will include influencers hoping they talk you up.
You then share it more broadly with key accounts and try to strive for a wider diversity of customers to ensure you’re not missing something.
Then lastly is the beta/early access, before full release.
There are plenty of ways to run a beta program, but there isn’t anything unusual in my experience about what Blizzard is doing here.
Blizzard may well be listening too much to raiders, but they’ve been doing that for years and years and years.
The problem isn’t their fourth forum type existing. It’s how they treated them. Go read the tweets and come back to the conversation.
I’m more blue. I’m Blueberry Jelli.
So why did you waste your time being a beta tester for free, if you knew that your opinion really didn’t matter because you were never given a invite to their secret forum/Discord?
SimC exists though. People without beta can do some testing without beta access. The trick is to run experiments in a scientific way to pinpoint the real problems/solutions. Not many people do this correctly though. SimC is nice because analyses on talents, conduits, etc. are very controlled most of the time and aren’t tainted by someone messing up their rotation. Even if I had beta, I’d still resort to simc to fully understand how these systems work.
Honestly, I argue the fire mage beta feedback (supported with simc) that I’ve provided surpasses most of the fire mage feedback in the beta forums. So if you beta testers want to claim that your feedback is more important: do a better job please 
Also, through some bug that occurred this week, I can post in those forums if I so choose to, but I won’t out of respect because your feedback is “better” than mine apparently.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that because somebody’s vote counts more, yours counts for zero.
Articulate, well-thought out feedback intended to improve the product is invaluable to a developer.
But, let’s be honest, most beta testers just want to shout about how Blizzard should invest more in their own favorite thing. Wading through all that to get to useful feedback is grueling. Of course they’re going to seek ways to get higher quality feedback.
Well if true, they didn’t listen to that quality feedback either and treated them as still beneath Blizz.
Right, if your opinion mattered as a beta tester, they would of given you a invite to their secret feedback forums and Discord. Don’t flatter yourself.
You need to sharpen your claws, dear. My feedback can’t be better than yours because I haven’t given Blizzard any. And, on class balancing, I don’t think they listen much to other people because that’s a numbers game, and they have all the numbers in-house to decide what to do.
I am unexcited about this expansion because I am not a raider anymore, and the whole expansion feels like Blizzard trying to make raiding great again.
The only thing this expansion is likely to offer me is the story, so why spoil it by playing it through on beta?
I miss Ystheins.
There are beta forums. Seems private/exclusive enough. I’m convinced MVPs have had access to a CM/GM/Dev forum.
I troll a lot. I admit. It’s always been obvious they read maybe 1% of these forums and probably only by the MVPs sending it up the chain of command.
Pretty sure they do as well as the Discord.
I am about 99% sure I have seen a green mention the Discord.
No they don’t. I got reported and had to wait 3 days for someone to actually read it and reverse the suspension. What I said was flagged but the context in which I said it was not against the TOS. They never read it until I specifically asked them to.
Yes they would have. They would have continued to write their essays and paragraphs over and over like they do now. How many people start out their rants with"i know blizz doesnt care or isnt listening to us but" and then post a 2000 word essay on every thought theyve had since the 6th grade. People think THEIR opinion matters even when it doesnt and never did. They will continue to post even now knowing noones listening.
I laugh because it is true.
Exactly, that’s the exact premise of Blizzard being exposed about their secret forums/Discord. People opinions on these official forums never did. +1.