DiabloFans

Quote from BoyC

Quote from Scottehs

No need to announce beta loudly because most of the people won't be getting in it'll be a waste of time on Blizzards part.

1000 beta keys being sent out @ last years blizzcon which is 1000 loyal Blizzard followers, that's alot of testers already.

1000 testers is absolutely nothing if you're looking at an infrastructure that more than likely needs to be able to support at least 1-2 million customers. We can safely assume based on Blizzards track record that the game will hit 1 million copies sold - so even if only 10% of the people who own the game are online at any given time (a reasonable number based on mmo statistics) you end up with a constant minimum server load of a 100.000 people. So let's say betatesters are a more zealous bunch and 50% of them are online at any given time - those 1000 keys would come up to about .5% of the minimum expected server load. Even if as a stress test Blizzard wants to reach 10% of this minimum server load assumption they will need at least 20x as many players - and keep in mind that these numbers are very conservative - imo the beta won't be a small scale thing either.

Quote from KargosofUldum

Quote from Scottehs

Quote from Magistrate

Quote from Dauroth

Gamescom is in two weeks, I really hope they'll announce the Beta start date there!

I'm not going to say it's impossible, but I doubt it. They usually save major announcements for their own event (Blizzcon), for major interviews, or for their own news feed on their site/through Twitter/forums, which instantly is picked up by hundreds of fansites across the web.

It would certainly fit the time bill, though, I'll give you that.

The beta isn't a major thing.

Quite the opposite, it is a major thing. It's their chance to test out their hardware and software infrastructure to make sure when the game goes live that millions of players aren't going to be without a game. As for it being announced at Gamescom, it's certainly possible and fits into the Q3 time frame they established for the beta. For a major announcement like the release date I'd expect that to be at Blizzcon.

Quote from Magistrate

Quote from Dauroth

Gamescom is in two weeks, I really hope they'll announce the Beta start date there!

I'm not going to say it's impossible, but I doubt it. They usually save major announcements for their own event (Blizzcon), for major interviews, or for their own news feed on their site/through Twitter/forums, which instantly is picked up by hundreds of fansites across the web.

It would certainly fit the time bill, though, I'll give you that.