To Beta or not to Beta...

We're now about five months into 2014. When Warlords was first announced, there was some wild speculation that the Invitational Beta might come out as soon as January. Clearly it hasn't, but at this point, it's actually starting to be worryingly slow.

I do have some sympathy for Blizzard on this account. Betas were originally purely about testing things. They'd let the public take a look at a half-built, broken version of the game, and use the vast volume of testers all looking into different nooks and crannies to find problems with a sort of massive parallelism.

The problem, though, I think, is that Betas have become something more of a marketing tool. This was certainly the case for Mists of Pandaria, where guaranteed access to the Beta was given as a reward for signing on for the annual pass. Rather than being about testing, the Beta became something of a preview. It's a little like those short clips of movies they're showing nowadays in addition to trailers (which I actually hate, because scenes are not meant to exist in a vacuum,) whetting your appetite with a taste of what's to come.

Indeed, I think this is part of the reason so much emphasis has been put on the idea of this test being an Alpha, rather than a Beta. I think that Blizzard fears that if they call it a Beta, people will expect to be able to participate, when in fact, the Mists Beta - fun as it was to try out the Monk in its primordial stages (I might do a Memory Lane post about that some time) - was pretty overloaded.

One of the reasons they say the Invitational Beta has been delayed is that they want to rework some of the quest-flow, presumably to help integrate Garrisons more thoroughly, as they've said that they want Fort *Your Name Here* to be a major part of the leveling process.

So there's a tension for me here, which is that on one hand, I really want to get my hands on the new ability-pruned builds of the classes, not to mention check out what my characters are going to look like with the new models. But I also recognize that it's best for them if they limit who gets in. Let's be honest here, this blog's only gotten one comment ever (and it was someone complaining about my uncomfortableness with haste for Paladin Tanks. You win, angry commenter!) so I'm not exactly a "prominent" WoW blogger that Blizzard would want to get testing for marketing purposes. Much as I enjoyed Icatia, my female human Monk who Monked around back when Tiger Palm did extra damage to targets above 50% health, I also think the most important thing for Blizzard to do with Warlords is get it built, get it tested, iron out the kinks ASAP, and release hopefully before Siege of Orgrimmar has been out for a full year (though honestly, I expect that 5.4 will wind up being the longest-running patch in WoW history, and that Warlords will come out some time in the Fall.)

With a game as complex as WoW, I don't think you can get away without Beta testing at all, but I suspect that this time around, the Beta is going to be a more limited thing, getting a decent number of players in there to make sure that by chance, most of the bugs will be stumbled into.

For now, I'm going to enjoy watching the data-mining, just as I did for every expansion since Wrath. Blizzard, make my male human Paladin pretty and send me to Draenor as soon as you can!

(To Beta or not to Beta, that is the question,
Whether 'tis nobler in the test to suffer
the bugs and crashes of outraged players
or to nerf Arms against a sea of QQers
and by making Colossus Smash less effective against players, satisfy them?)

(Ok, I'm done.)