Getting Pandafobia?

How to get the best out of the warcraft-beta

The next wave of 250.000 invites for the Mists of Pandaria beta have been send out yesterday evening, leading to the Pandaren starting zone being overcrowded with fresh panda monks. The majority of players will drop out after a few days to return to the live servers, but if you don´t have the patience to wait for that, there are some ways to explore around while avoiding being trampled by a stampede of panda´s.

 

Steer clear of the Wandering Isle

Because everybody wants to see the new Panda starting zone, the smart choice is to make a level 1 char from any other race. Granted, you don´t get to see the Wandering Isle just yet, but most of the races allow the monk class which is completely new, and you have the zone more or less to yourself. Added to that, you will have access to a racial mount at level 20, as of yet not available for panda´s.

If you are prepared to face the crowds and insist on seeing the Wandering Isle RIGHT NOW, give up on questing. You have to go through the first 4 quests to get out of the starting zone (turn on “friendly NPC nameplates” in the interface menu, for easier clicking of the questgivers), but after that you can more or less run around freely on most parts of the island, take a look at the scenery and cuddle some angry rabbits. The questline of the starting area is completely linear and phased in some parts, but there is still enough to see and do to get a feel for the atmosphere.

Steer clear of level 85 quests

The level 85+ areas are less crowded, but quests have more bugs and waiting times of over an hour just to kill a certain mob are no exception. Satisfy yourself with just exploring, or level up first through older content and instances so you can skip ahead to a higher level zone. Blizzard promised to make the questing less linear in the high level areas, so in theory there should be quests available for you when you skipped the first bit, but I haven´t tried this myself yet so I´m not sure if this has been implemented yet.  

Be aware that premade characters are not available for the test realms at this moment. You can copy an existing “live” character to a beta server through your blizzard.net account page, but  especially on European realms this process can take up to three days.

Beta is not a demo

People expecting a full working glitch-free game will be deeply disappointed. The beta-test is not there for your amusement, it is exactly what de word implies: a *test* of a work in progress. So be prepared to encounter many bugs, half-finished area´s or story lines, missing objects, changes and lots and lots of rolling restarts. It is possible to get completely stuck and the only remedy is to start over again with a fresh toon. The good thing about that is the majority of the invitees will get fed up quite quickly and go back to the live servers. Usually only a small percentage will remain and dutifully report bugs and give feedback about all aspects of the game. There is no reward for that, no rare mount or extra privileges. On the contrary: you will eventually lose your characters, but you may revel in the awareness that you contribute a tiny little bit to a better game. 

"Pandaria Beta is not a joke" by Wowcrendor