Do we expect mod authors to get beta keys again?
 

In the WotLK beta, I seem to recall that WoWI addon authors could get keys so they could update addons. Do we anticipate that happening again? I'd love to be able to play Cat without feeling guilty about not having updated my addons when it comes out...

I just have to say.....

As a User, I can say no one should ever make you think you must sacrifice your time and or enjoyment of the game just so that they can have xxx precious addon ready for them to utilize the moment Cataclysm comes out.

Good things come to those who wait. I for one will be happy to play the game without addons until Author/s have time/energy/ambition/whatever to update their respective addons when the next big expansion comes out if they choose to.

/end rant

Seebs, given that we've been able to arrange it with them for every other expansion, I am reasonably sure that we'll be able to again this year, but until they actually say "yes" or "no", I can't make any promises. You know I'm trying to make sure we get them again though. :)

Awesome, thanks!

Last time, I managed to end up getting my key exactly during the last window during which a key could be gotten, but by the time I got it, I could no longer copy characters, because the test realms were down. Wanna be a little more careful this time. :)

This is great news! Thanks!

Active account required for beta?

yes. they will copy accounts to the test database at the beginning of the beta and any account that is inactive at this date won't be able to log in during this phase of the beta ;)

at least that was the case with previous betas.

I'm wondering if it might be different this time. The SC2 beta is just another license in your Battle.net account, and the latest PTR seems to have added a separate WoW license (for me at least).

It's possible that a Battle.net profile is all you need, but they may check for a valid WoW license before allowing it to "work."

Sorry, I'm just terrible curious...

Blizzard plans to hand out beta keys to guilds and korean players. Are there any news on the addon author giveaway?

SC2 is a separate game. The wow beta account is tightly bound to your wow account. (e.g. for chartransfers). If your wow account is not active you won't be able to get into the cata beta ;)

@Caiginn: when there are any news about it, you will read it on the front page.

Yepper.

I would say that the most important (or necessary, if you want to go that far) use for addons are for raiding, and people will have to get through 5 levels before doing that on Cata release.

So if it follows the usual expansion trend, it'll be less than 2 days. I'd say about the 30-hour mark.

/Emporor Palpatine voice on

I have taught you well, my young apprentice...

Well, most of us are pretty attentive to the mods and the people that use them and we just want to stop having to worry about it and just 'play' so we'd probably do it the day things go live and depending on the problems, it can eat up a LOT of time. I recall spending over a week just tracking down one bug (turns out to be in blizzard's code, too) during the LK beta.

If I did manage to 'put off' doing it the day of, it'd prolly be a few weeks before I got back around do it so, yeah, letting us fix them in beta is a huge, huge thing for the majority of the fanbase.

I've played w/o my mods before to do isolation testing...how anyone plays wit the default UI is beyond me.

I think Blizzard will probably wait until they've enabled third party addons before sending out invites to addon authors. Right now, we're limited to using clunky macros to do what little UI modding we can.

I hope you can get a key from the random selection if your account is not active. My subscription ends in a few days and I don't like to pay 13 Euros just to get a chance for a random key from Blizzard. It's boring and no raids are possible on my realm anymore until Cataclysm ships because most players stopped playing. -.-

You MUST have an active account to get into the BETA.

The person who decided this is just... stupid. My account was active 99.9% of the time in the last 5 years. It should be no problem to see this is an "active" account if I don't renew my subscription for 2-4 weeks. :rolleyes:

The same login server is used for Beta and Live, iirc.

How would they know you would come back if assigned a beta key? Their logic is sound.