But raiding is what players do at top level. The rewards you get from raiding are epic gear, access to epic content, and the big-time "bigger than 5-man" participation. The game becomes a gear-game at top level. The reason you don't see AA points is because that gives top-level players an arguably unfair advantage when the level-cap is increased.* I think the only time we're going to see AA points implemented is when Blizzard doesn't have any more expansion content to release. And that's not going to be anytime soon.

* This has a precedent in Blizzard's policy of not giving top-level players the 1.5 levels of rested XP when the level cap is increased.

Someone on MMO-Champion got this e mail, looks legit to me.

I saw that, but the language used in it seems a little bit clunkier than I would have expected. And it's much shorter than the equivalent email from the TBC beta.

Blizzard has actually said that barber shop costs will scale with level. Just pointing that out, will take a look if I find the original message.
And it was more on the lines "We don't know yet" so ... Nothing concludes.

I find weird that blizzard would send the login and pass of an account in an email about beta invitation. They usually don't send passes, unless you specifically use the password retrieval feature, and then they changed it to a random pass and send you that iirc.

That aside, I couldn't be happier if they started beta tomorrow.

If I'm reading it correctly, they didn't send the name and pass, they sent an ID code to put in alongside them to confirm Beta registration.

Does anyone remember if you had to use your password to register for the BC beta? I remember I had to put in my user name and the beta key I got e mailed into a Blizzard site but I can't remember if I had to use my password also. Since that e mail the guy got asks for a password to be used for the login also.

Yeah ok my bad, english skills failure, misread it. Well if you read stuff on dk.info, they wiped the alpha forums, so yeah they're definitely getting ready for a beta very very soon, question remaining is, will they be able to setup servers tomorrow for the weekend, or will they just wait until next maintenance/week when they have more time, since I doubt they'll spend the weekend monitoring if their beta build works fine.

I really hope that at least if they're going to leave in the pet feeding they either fix it so you can feed your pets in combat, or they make it so that pet happiness can't decrease when you enter combat. They actually had a blue post months ago in the hunter forum saying they were looking at allowing feeding pets in combat then they never commented further on it. Nothing more annoying than having to remember to overstuff your pet or risk him demanding a snack 5 seconds after you pull a boss.

That was not written by someone with a college education. Sweet Jesus, the unnecessary, commas, are everywhere, why would they type, like this?

A quote from one of those screenshots has me intrigued:

Is this new information? Does this mean when you're level 80 and tame a low level creature, will it suddently become lvl 75?

Given it's WoW Europe, my money would be on a non-native English speaker writing it since comma usage tends to be an area that trips up people. Assuming it's a legit email anyway, as the consensus seems to be.

That's how I interpreted it as well.

Also regarding pets, Neth on the WoW boards mentioned months ago that pet feeding in combat was being considered. I wouldn't be surprised if this goes through for WotLK.

Which consensus would that be? There is nothing in the email that indicates to me that it's legit, and I haven't heard of any others recieving the same email.

The consensus being a lack of people screaming from the rooftops that it is obviously fake/a scam in some way.

Considering the issues that always crop up with a launch like this, wouldn't they want to start it at the beginning of the work week rather than a Friday though? The e-mails might go out, but I pity the Bliz IT guys if they have to spend their weekend fixing crashes and login server failures.

According to wotlkwiki, the Beta downloader should be available any moment now.

http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/9094/15728146lv1.jpg

Blarg, didn't see the post above mine.

Yeah the client is up.

Guess alpha is over, (woot?) I'm actually very surprised at the amount of information leaked about certain spell mechanics (nearly none), never saw any leaked testing on any of the 51 pointers as far as I remember. Strange. I wonder if they were actually usable?

Rockin'. Let the datamining commence.

That said, I'm pleased that the beta is starting already. Isn't this earlier than TBC's beta started in the year? It sucks that the TBC content cycle is done, but it looks like they're really focused on getting WotLK out the door by the holidays this time.

Oops. Delete.

Maybe this is old news, but I hadn't heard it. In the official beta FAQ, it says there is no NDA covering the beta, so all info is now fair game. Honestly that just seems like a smart move, it was obviously going to come out either way (see: alpha). Might as well save some money on paying the legal department to chase people down.

https://beta.worldofwarcraft.com/expansion/faq.html

Edit: Gonna quote it since the site is rapidly slowing to a crawl: