This isn't exactly a late post, I just wasn't planning on writing about it. :)

It's an issue that has already been talked about to death on many forums, and I prefer the kind of stuff that no one else is talking about. However, a lot of you have asked for my opinion on the matter so I'll oblige.

Basically, many WOW Annual Pass subscribers are upset to learn that they no longer have immediate access to the MoP Beta, and entry into the Beta is actually based on a previously unannounced Blizzard-internal surprise invitation ruleset.

Over the course of the test, we’ll be inviting Annual Pass holders, press, fansites, friends and family, and opt-in beta testers to participate.

In their official announcement, Blizzard makes note that "To find out more about getting into the beta test, including info on how we’re inviting Annual Pass holders, please read the Mists of Pandaria Beta Opt-in announcement and FAQ." Well, at least they created a FAQ on HOW they're inviting the Annual Pass members giving everyone an idea of when they'll be invited!

Unfortunately, here's all they wrote on the subject within the FAQ:

We’re inviting Annual Pass holders in waves over the course of the beta test, and will be ramping up the number of invites we send as quickly as possible. We’ll be inviting Annual Pass holders based on several factors, including how long your World of Warcraft account has been active and when you signed up for the Annual Pass.

The detailed information on "how we're inviting Annual Pass holders" was even worse than the official announcement, and it provides no clues as to what's going on.

This was a vast departure from that Blizzard customers were previously led to believe, but more on that later.

Hey, I Didn't Say That!

You might have noticed that I get misquoted a lot, or people just spread general misinformation about the blog. Anyone can be Daeity, it's just a virtual identity floating around the cloud.

Anyone can also make a post on "Forum X" saying "Daeity said Y" and then when "Y" didn't or doesn't happen, that's actually used as proof that Daeity was wrong. Sadly, unknowing (aka ignorant) users even continue to link to "Forum X" as irrefutable proof. :)

This just happened.. again.. on MMO-Champion. It's a really good read, I recommend you check it out from beginning to end especially the speculation on TOD's identity. And they say *I'M* paranoid. :)

Here's the original post that kicked off the funny feeding frenzy:

More than "90% people with Annual Pass" won't get beta till a month before release

I read this on Digital Castration.

How reliable is this guy?

This sucks if true

But here's what actually happened; it was just a comment made by an anonymous user.

Anonymous said...

On Mists of Pandaria beta and Annual Pass:

More than 90% of Annual Pass holders will not be receiving their invites until 3-4 weeks before the expansion is released.

And here was my response:

Daeity said...

@Anonymous

That's brutal. It was a major selling point of MoP. I guess from Blue's perspective; "hey, at least we're fulfilling our end of the contract. You get to play the beta." :)

Do you have a link for that?

The worst part is that no one from MMO-Champion needed to check the source. In fact, they DIDN'T EVEN ASK FOR THE SOURCE but instead asked for MY source.

Can you believe that?

Just read the first 3 pages alone. 3 posts demanded my source, 13 said I was lying but they refuse to check the blog (or have never read the blog), and 11 just refused to read the blog.

Even after they were told it never happened, and that everyone there was being trolled hard, it still continued. They're currently over 300 posts on the same subject. :)

Someone easily trolled them, and everything they're saying just makes the situation look even more foolish for them. The best responses are when they said that I never provided any sources. Oh my. And in a twisted way, this link will be used as "official proof" in the future that Daeity is wrong and never provides sources. :)

"Don't listen to Daeity. Remember that time he said that 90% of the users won't blah blah blah derpity derp. Here's the link. See, he's full of bullshit."

I've talked about this predictable MMO-Champion mentality before, and here it is again. It's very bad and just embarrassing.

If you're looking for something fun to do, here's something; out of the 300+ posts, see if you can count how many people actually asked for a direct link. Be careful though, some of them are misleading. For example, many users didn't ask for the OP's source, they just asked for MY source because they didn't believe ME. :)

If you want to have even more fun, keep posting stuff that "Daeity said", and just make up a bunch of stuff. Watch the feeding frenzy. Put me down for some ridiculous MoP Release Date (make it a Sunday), but make sure not to provide any links.

So, What I Do Really Have To Say?

From what I can tell, most of the written content about the WOW Annual Pass just guarantees "a spot in the beta test". But they've never said that WOW Annual Pass subscribers will get access as soon as it goes live.

Access to the Next WoW Expansion Beta Test – Get a guaranteed spot in the beta test for the next World of Warcraft expansion (at a time to be announced in the future).

I'll keep digging around, but if any of you know of older (October/November 2011) posts detailing the WOW Annual Pass / Beta Access portion that shows "as soon as it goes live", let me know.

Although it might never have been written by Blizzard, it was certainly said. By Mike Morhaime, CEO of Blizzard Entertainment when the WOW Annual Pass was first announced.



You can watch the exact statement above from his prepared speech (I've linked to the 6m36s mark):

"You will also get guaranteed access into the next World of Warcraft expansion beta when it goes live."

So here's how I see it;

• This was an official announcement from the head of Blizzard guaranteeing Beta Access for all WOW Annual Pass subscribers "when it goes live." Not "while it's live", or "during the beta".. but "guaranteed access.. when it goes live."

• Media news sites took this information, and it became a major selling point for World of Warcraft enthusiasts. Blizzard did not correct them or mention any fine print.

• When the written Annual Pass announcement was made, Blizzard provided no real details.. only that they would have guaranteed beta access. No mention that "terms are subject to change" or any kind of fine print to ensure that players weren't mislead by Mike's statement. This just left players with the Blizzcon 2011 announcement which contained the most details.

• The sudden back-peddle of the Blizzard's Promise™ was very disappointing as you've seen. If it was obvious from the start that Blizzard was going to invite players in waves and that only certain people would get in when it went live, you would not have seen the negative reaction that had just happened.

• Leaving everyone in the dark is not good business. It leads to frustration and wild speculation. You need to give customers specific information and stay true to your word.

• For several months, users were led to believe that they would have guaranteed access when it went live. Even though Blizzard claims to monitor all communications, forum comments, and fan feedback to improve the customer experience, they still didn't say anything to correct this gross misunderstanding. They have paid staff with the responsibilities to set user expectations, and they failed greatly in this specific situation.

What's left now are the "types of players" who are invited first, something I'll be very interested in seeing. Right now, initial invitations are to a very limited beta experience (the Pandaren 1-10 leveling zone) with the new content locked down.

According to Blizzard, they have a "secret internal formula" for invitations (which will drive hopeful Beta testers even more crazy) based on how long the WOW Account has been active, when you signed up for the Pass, if you're from the press or a fansite, a Friend or Family member, an opt-in beta tester, and other criteria.

Blizzard hasn't revealed which of these have more seniority over the Annual Pass members. If you're a WOW Annual Pass member, though, don't be surprised if (on average) the Press & Fansites get invited before you. I think the Annual Pass invites will probably be "sprinkled in" with the various other criteria that are higher on the totem (like Press/F&F).

* UPDATE:

Cool. Proof that even MMO-Champion impartial "Moderators" don't confirm anything, don't read, and their actions are personally motivated after all. It was purely a reaction to a name, even though it was completely fake. :)

Callei, Moderator

Closing. The person the OP refers to is not a credible source, ergo, closing to prevent spreading misinformation.

How many times has MMO-Champion kept threads open even though they knew for a fact it was from an actual noncredible source?

A wise moderator would have closed it with, "This thread has derailed."

The reader who posted the new PoE Beta Key wanted the puzzle to be a little more challenging. I didn't want to make it too lengthy or annoying though, so here you go:

__CW2 - W_M_C - HU_L_ - E6H__

To fill in the blanks, you need to answer the following riddles.

There are 2 letters per group, and nothing is jumbled up:

1st Group: You should already know this. All keys start out the same.
2nd Group: __ Red Ballons
3rd Group: Less __ More Pewpew
4th Group: The Deadmines instance is also referred to as __ because of it's boss.

Get your popcorn ready folks! I'm apparently so famous that a "daeitysucks.com" blog has just been created that's all about me. It's great to have some new and interesting content to write about. :)

It's called "Digital Frustration" (digitalfrustration.blogspot.com) and it's run by a previous Joystiq blogger I'll call the Bully BCC. I think he's employed by Joystiq or maybe a contract writer for them. And boy is he mad. Possibly in love with me. You can see his very angry Twitter account here. He's only sharing it with his WoW Guild members (for certain specific reasons which you'll understand later), but I wanted to share it with all of you too.

I had to do a Google search to find out who this person was. Apparently, I made an off-hand comment about him back in November of 2011. Yes, that far back. The one and only time I have ever mentioned his name and he's been obsessed (Twitter, comments, blogs, forum posts, etc.) with me ever since. He's also oddly obsessed with the letter Q, and he uses it in all of his character names and online aliases.

The Joystiq Connection

You see, a lot of this drama came out of Joystiq it appears. BBCC is a professional victim and frequent troll on forums like 4chan and reddit. He's also very good friends with Michael Sacco and they have shared comments about this blog many times in the past. Remember him? I'm surprised he hasn't been terminated for stealing content, toxic chauvinism, or his deplorable antics. He's just like The Bully BCC.

Much of his jealous streak was made quite evident around the time of the Joystiq layoff rumor which I had used to discover major layoffs happening within Blizzard (everyone forgot that it was eventually confirmed and that mass layoffs really did occur.) This particularly made Sacco quite cross.

And, to top things off, the first thing he addresses "coincidentally" in his new blog are in regards to really old Sacco-specific blog posts. He calls them "a series of conspiracy theories." Sacco, by the way, is the person who claimed that "Blizzard's internal security has never been compromised" and that authenticators cannot be bypassed among many others. A real turd.

The Delicious Irony

Remember, this is a guy who tried to create some major hoax in the past but he was quickly caught lying to everyone and was ridiculed for it. He trolls people, lies, works from the shadows, and has been manipulating his guild through Twitter to harass this blog and myself.

The absolute best part of all of this is the posting in which he was first mentioned here; it was entitled "I Smell Fraud." :)

In this post, a reader commented that [BBCC] tweeted that in my post I claimed that "Blizzard steals credit card info from wine enthusiasts to artificially inflate subscriber numbers..."

Obvious lies. In reality, I wrote "They all probably use the same wine (or related) online ordering site, and their credit card numbers have been compromised."

So, he was lying to his Twitter followers, working them up into a frenzy, and it definitely wasn't his first time. After reading his other posts, I responded with:

I've never heard of this guy before. Based on his most recent posts though, it appears that he just attacks everyone. I detect a lot of anger, jealousy and judgment.. so he probably just hates everyone.

I've been called worse things by better people. :)

Apparently, my discernment of his anger and jealousy towards me were spot on as made even more evident over the past few days.

He's spent months and months monitoring and reading the blog. He claims to hate the blog, but loves to read it and even steal content from it.

So, we've got a known fraud who commits fraud for attention, commits more fraud for more attention, gets mad because he's caught being a fraud, obsesses over it for 6 months, then decides to commit more fraud trying to expose something he thinks is fraud so that he can fraudulently get more attention.

Love Is Blind

The problem with being a celebrity stalker is that these obsessions can seriously affect sound judgement. Apparently I'm a "celebrity". And this sad individual fits all of the psychological criteria of being a classic celebrity stalker.

1. [BBCC] has been obsessed with me for at least 6 months. 6 months! And that's 6 months of planning of who knows what. Holding a grudge over petty matters for over half a year is very concerning.

2. He uses the word "conspiracy theory" a lot, and if you go over his scribbles he writes about his own paranoid feelings and claims a real actual conspiracy taking place that involves many people.

3. The blog was obsesively written like a manifesto and it's a hilarious read which is why I'm publicly sharing it.

4. He tweaked a lot of comments, reinterpreted things to fit his narrative, and has even fabricated a lot of posts and information desperately trying to give himself some legitimacy.

5. There are several fatal flaws in his theories. Some are because his timelines are completely mixed up and he couldn't keep track of the blog posts. This is either accidental, or more likely intentional, due to the other overwhelming evidence of what he's trying to do. For example, he "forgot" that I was already communicating with TOD during the first week of August and he forgot that I update posts with * UPDATE. One in particular that was crucial and damning to his theory was noted to have been updated "3 weeks" later, which destroys most of his claims.

6. The other problem is his lack of knowledge. He's not familiar with imgur and reddit, he doesn't know that editing features weren't added until SEVERAL MONTHS later which I had to find out myself, and he doesn't know that editing is time restricted and that everything is Google cached (which is something I use all of the time to find resume changes and be certain that nothing was tampered with).

Intentionally misleading, twisting the timeline, and desperately attempting to bend facts to his own personal narrative? I mean, what's more to say? It's foolish buffoonery and clearly a biased attack without any supporting evidence or even an investigation.

Whatever I've done or continue to do, he'll always be very upset with me. It's the nature of these kinds of stalkers. Celebrity stalkers are also erotomanics, and it won't matter if I deny feelings for [BBCC], since he'll still see my denying of his love as a sign of affirmation. Every gesture I make, like this blog post, is just another sign of affirmation to him.

Why Is He Doing This?

My guess is plain old envy and he's bitter about something specific. You see, about 3 days before Blizzcon he posted a hoax "Pandaren Brewmaster" screenshot. He obviously spent A LOT of time working on it.. probably for months only for it to be flushed down the toilet when it was outed as an obvious hoax very quickly (since he used stolen copyright material.)

During this same time, I also posted Daeity's image 3 days before Blizzcon and it quickly stole his thunder. Rather than blaming himself for trying to deceive everyone, he's looking for someone else to blame because he didn't get his wanted attention like a petty child. He's been obsessed ever since I starved him of attention.

Internet Pranks Don't Work

Frankly, internet pranks/believable hoaxes just don't work. I can't think of any successful internet prank and no one ever does them because they just never work or they involve too many people. There are just too many variables and things that can go wrong, making them impossible. This is something that he experienced first hand, but he didn't learn anything from it.

He's spent MONTHS investigating and researching the Blizzcon posts and he still couldn't find out how it was possible. His best guess involves a significant number of coincidences happening, a group of people assisting me (this is called a "conspiracy" by the way), using internet magic, somehow silencing people who could easily expose me, and doing activities that would have taken years of preparation and precognition, as well as some crazy multipronged internet attack. His explanation gets really complicated and elaborate (which should tell you something right away.)

And even though he spent months working on it, he still couldn't reproduce it. Although he claims it's easy to do, he actually said that the reason he couldn't reproduce it is because, "I had less motivation to work longer on it." Come on, really? Did you see the sheer amount of work he put into the blog and all of the research he did into this huge project?

"Yeah, I uh.. spent 6 months researching something, but the one critical piece of my theory I just threw together and I uh.. didn't spend any time on it at all."

Unfortunately, much of his theories are predicated on the "fact" that I'm superhuman. Although I'm flattered, this is not a good basis for a theory. This entire blog, and my firm beliefs, are actually based on the complete opposite; people make mistakes. That's how I have discovered so much information online from different employees.

This is simply an example of occam's razor. Things are way more simple than he's making things out to be.

So, what's next?

Next up for Digital Frustration, he'll be refuting my blog post about the major layoffs that have, and were to, happen within Blizzard and he'll prove irrefutably that the 600-person mass layoff never happened.

He'll also call my "In-Game Ads Planned For Titan" post into question, because there's no way I could have ever posted that 2 months before Gamespot, Neogaf, IGN, and his favorite Joystiq among many others. Oh, and those unreleased games and official pitch documents from Swingin' Ape Studios.. yeah, those were all fabricated apparently. Everything on the blog is all conspiracy theory.

Sure, he's lying to his "followers", but this will be good for both of us. His followers will increase and drive traffic to his blogs, and I'll have something fun to write about to stave off boredom and entertain you. It's mutually beneficial after all.

With the Mists of Pandaria beta supposed to be announced very soon, I figured it's about time to start speculating on the Release Date.

As far as I could tell, the last time I talked about this, I put MoP down for Q4 (October/November time frame) until more information was made available.

Even though there are supposed to be 3 games released this year, things are looking down for HOTS anytime soon. I'm still hopeful for a surprise Christmas release though.

Now, according to Boubouille, Blizzard will be sending out the Beta Invites either today or tomorrow, and the F&F specific Beta will not be happening this time.

The information that I'd really like to know (to determine a release date), is the length of the beta. This will be determined by the amount of content. So, will the Mists of Pandaria beta be just like past betas (approximately 5 months long), or are they going to shorten the beta this time around?

The WOW beta was 7 months long, TBC 4 months, WOTLK 5 months, and CATA 5 months.

Assuming that this is going to be a "normal" beta, the release date should be some Tuesday in July or August. However, they've skipped the F&F Beta test this time and they might shorten the beta to get it out even sooner.

So, say that I have a specific date already in mind.. but I didn't want Blizzard to see it. What's the best way to "lock it up" until a specific day so that critics could not possibly deny it's authenticity? I've been trying to think about it, but unfortunately, critics will just claim that it was "hacked in" or something (they'll have an excuse for everything.) Anyone aware of a website where you can post a message that "unlocks" at a certain time?

* Oh, by the way, I have another Path of Exile key to give away. I'll create a new post at approx. 1:00PM PST today and put it up. First person to register it, gets it.