Originally Posted by
Blizzard (
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
We will soon begin public testing of patch 5.0.1 of World of Warcraft, a patch that will precede the Mists of Pandaria release, and includes many features and functions that are new to the game.
We encourage all players who wish to test patch 5.0.1 with us to take careful note of the following:
- It will not be possible to access the 5.0.1 PTR realms with a game account that accesses the Mists of Pandaria Beta.
- If a game account has been flagged with a Mists of Pandaria Beta license, it can only be used to enter Beta realms.
- This limitation is on each World of Warcraft license, and is not Battle.net account-based.
- While testing 5.0.1, players will not be able to access zones or content that is a part of the Mists of Pandaria expansion.
Thank you for your continued support of our testing and tuning process. We look forward to seeing you in-game.
This is good news. Unless you subbed up for the 12 month trial and got your guaranteed beta invite and does make me wonder how many of us who want to test the PTR have 2nd accounts to enable this. Hopefully enough s the PTR isn't too under subscribed that it last for more than the typical will last for 4-6 weeks.
This means that we can guess potential dates for the Pandacraft pre-patch of August 14/21/28 and using the usual 2 weeks between the pre-patch and expansion launch means we will all be "rolling" on our Pandas on Aug 28/Sept 4/Sept 11.
However, with Guild Wars 2 out on August 28th I don't think Blizzard will be cruel enough to go on that date and I'm not sure they will be prepared to launch on Sept 11 either because of the place that date has in the hearts of America. So my money is on September 4th, although that will upset me greatly as I doubt I will be able to get the time off work because I am on Olympic cover until September 9th So I'm actually hoping for Sept 18th or later.
About the Author
By day I'm an IT Server analyst for a major telecoms compnay in the UK and I've been playing World of Warcraft since November 2005 when a pair of colleagues bullied me into playing! I have evolved into a raider (summer 2006), an auction house wheeler dealer (2007), a guild officer (2007), an altoholic (2008), a raid leader (2008), a Warcraft blogger (2010) and a PVPer (2012)
My main has, and always will be Evlyxx, a priest and I love to heal. I started as Holy in vanilla, dabbled with the shadow side during the middle part of Burning Crusade, before returning to Holy but I have been mostly Discipline since mid-Wrath.
The "account" thing may not mean what it seems to mean. I have basically three accounts on my one battle.net account. One for PTR, one for Beta and my live account. PTR is WOW1, Beta is WOW2 and live is normal. It would strike me as being extremely stupid if Blizz were to suddenly decide to lockout all the Beta testers from the PTR though it may be they have realised that 99% of the Beta testers were mongs and that's why they've gone down this route. Beta still feels pretty unpolished and there are still bugs in quests in early areas so I am quite surprised that PTR is already going live. I'm pretty far behind on testing now though I have dipped my toe in once or twice to check it out and know there are still some pretty basic quest bugs hanging around. It may be they're going to fix these on PTR and are waiting on that and not developing on beta realms anymore, I dunno.
ReplyDeleteSeems I was only a week out! September 25 it is /huigs Blizz!
ReplyDelete