The day has finally arrived. You can apply for the WoWS Alpha here.
Provided you have posted at least 150 posts on the forums.
That’s right folks, Wargaming is not interested in your previous experience with Alphas. They don’t care if you are willing to do testing for them. They are completely okay with having testers that will never once submit a bug report. The first and foremost criteria is that you have been active on a dead set of forums that, until today, had nothing to do but speculate over a game not yet released, and salivate over wikipedia articles. Or, you know, post off topic, as this very honest gentleman pointed out in what has become the official complaint thread:
The 150 post count can be seen as people who “care” about the game, but they probably have 150 posts in the my little pony section.
So where does that leave Wargaming? Well, it means people like Shwedor, who has been a very dedicated and useful Alpha tester for WoWp, who gives great feedback and is very active on the forums, is not going to be doing any testing. Meanwhile, people like Goldeneye54, who has received a ban in WoT for griefing and trolling after the first campaign, is clearly a great asset to the community and the testing process.
Should I also mention that to test the Alpha, you will need to be 3x more active in the forums than the developer selecting applications, and 10 times more active than the developer who posted in the unofficial complaint thread that getting to 150 posts was easy and for the community to suck it up?
Great job WG, we are off to a stellar start.
Harbinger Zero 
So I’ve gone from “don’t care much,” to “not with a ten-foot pole.”
I went from patiently waiting for the alpha to…”Where did I put that download link for Navy Field 2 again?”
ETA: Its also worth noting that the forums crashed this morning. Whether under the onslaught of laughter and fail or because somebody at WG woke up and hastily pulled the plug, I’m not sure which.
Wow. That’s almost unbelievable.
“This criterion is there to help us mitigate the risk of leaks by finding people who are really interested in this project and dedicated enough to spend time posting on these forums.”
I believe they’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater here. I’ve personally been waiting for this point and have never posted on the WoWS forums. And testing and looking for bugs in an ERP system is both a) My job, and b) highly relevant skills to what you’d want from alpha testers in a MMO. Fine, there’ll be no leaks, maybe that’s important – but now you’ll get a whole different crowd of testers.
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