Beta Fail

Last night I received two unusual emails from Bioware. The first one informed me, now that I had tried the SWTOR first hand in beta, that I should go ahead and pre-order the game. The second one asked me to participate in a survey about my beta experience.

Since I have already pre-ordered and had not received a beta invite, I was curious. I quickly dug through my spam folder, looking for a lost beta invite. Alas, I found nothing. My next reaction was “IT’s A TRAP!”

I hop over to the SWTOR boards and see a 15 page thread where people are asking about these emails. I make a post to add my name to the list of confused people with their hopes raised and then the entire SWTOR website goes down. It seems so many people were confused by theses emails, the SWTOR website couldn’t handle it. I check back a little while later, and the thread has expanded to over 40 pages.

Alas, this morning I see a post from a member of the community team:

Earlier today, two e-mails were sent to members of the Star Wars: The Old Republic community. These e-mails were sent to a larger group than intended, and have caused some confusion in the community. We can confirm that these e-mails were from EA and BioWare and apologize for any confusion they have caused. Please note that receiving these e-mails does not affect your chances to be invited to test the game. Thank you all for your understanding!

Sadly, still no beta invite for me. Which is a mixed blessing. Part of me doesn’t want to spoil the game before it’s launched. It’s nice to have all of the content new when you start, instead of replaying it. It would also be a several dozen gigabyte download that would just need to be redownloaded when the launch version is ready.

However, it is beta and getting to see what the game is actually like would be cool. It might also help me decide between playing a Smuggler and Jedi Knight with my first character. These are important decisions that require the utmost careful study. Or can be made on a whim at the last second.