World of Warcraft Beta To Begin

MrWonton writes "The word is finally out from Blizzard: the World of Warcraft beta test sign-up begins 6:00 PM PST Wednesday, January 28th. No need to rush though, it'll be open through February 4th, and it's not on a first-come first-serve basis. Good luck!" Update: 01/27 16:34 GMT by S : To clarify, Blizzard say "you will be able to submit an application and receive equal consideration anytime during the signup period", but only selected individuals will get into this initial Beta.

Re:Open beta?

[metallicagoaltender]

Yes, that's basically the meaning of an open beta. In this case, "open beta" was just flat out the wrong term - there's an application and selection process, it has limited geographic scope (US, Canada, and Korea)...either the submitter didn't RTFA (ironic, eh?), or didn't realize they were misusing the term "open beta."

That aside, I'm curious to hear how the game plays once it's a bit more polished. I've never really gotten into MMORPGs because of the time issue, but WOW looks too good to not at least try for a month or two.

looking at the races...

[fireduck]

is the list of playable races [worldofwarcraft.com] complete? and if so, anyone know why Night Elves are included but the regular Elves (Blood Elves?) aren't. Also, why are Undead included with the Horde? I've kinda stopped playing WC3 so I'm a couple patches behind (including the bonus campaign), so I don't know if Blizzard has made recent adjustments to the official canon or not...

Re:Open beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

They will be having an "open open" beta sometime in the future, and they will be doing things MUCH differently than the two WC3 betas. Once the applicants have been chosen as soon as they feel the servers can handle more players they will then pick more to test. This sounds like they are going to have a pretty large number of people playing the beta (which is a good thing) if they can do this in rapid sucession without server trouble. So compaired to their previous betas, despite the large number of applications they'll receive, there will be a good chance most people will get in sooner or later. If not that's what the REAL open beta is for.

Re:How can one increase their ods?

[Vaevictis666]

I believe the criteria is the same as always.

As part of the application you fill out, you give them info on your PC - their goal for the Beta is to get testing on a wider variety of system, from their minimum requirements up to a brand-spankin-new maxed out system.

Along with that, they also ask stuff about gaming habits, etc.

Your best bet is to be truthful, and hope random selection goes in your favor - if you want to be risky, fill out info you may think is less likely to be commonly entered and see if you can get fewer people in your "bracket" of CPU power and playing habits. I'd go with option A though :P

Re:Open beta?

[jafuser]

They made roughly the same mistake in Star Wars Galaxies. They called it an "open beta" when they meant that they were dropping the NDA and that people would be "open" to talk about the game with non-beta people.

In the process, they got a lot of people's hopes up who thought they were going to just suddenly let everyone who could download the client in.

Re:Only for Canada, Korea, and the US...

[Rallion]

Actually, I think it was just to give them greater control. The biggest single reason was probably to eliminate the most blatant cheating, which it was quite successful at. Plus, it allowed them to delete characters of people using the cheats that do still work.

I hate the automated system checker

[Comen]

I just signed up for the beta, and I am going to tell you I really hate that active x system checker they are using, I guess just as much as making people send a windows system text file or whatever some do.
The reason is, I have a Pent4 2.4GHZ machine with 512ram and a geforce3 video card, I think the processor is fine and the RAM could definitly be 1gig but the video card especialy is outdated.
I have been waiting for DOOM3 or HL2 or soemthing to make really want to upgrade, I updated the rest of my system when I got on the SWG Beta, for a Pent3 600mghz machine.
If I got on this beta and it ran crapy I would probally just go out and buy more ram and new video card, that is what makes me go by new stuff is the games coming out, but they tend to look at the system then decide if you should be on the beta. I understand they want to make sure people dont wast spots etc... But I really tend to buy my hardware when I have to, and just planed to wait till a game came out I really needed to get new stuff for and would.
Maybe this wont effect them picking my for beta as much as I think, but I would think they would see the video card and think "this guy will just whine and complain and tell people the game runs bad with this video card" etc...