Friends and Family Alpha

I recently moved a bit further away from Anaheim. I could still get there in probably an hour and a half without traffic, but traffic is they key here in Southern California. So, for last weekend, I hung out with my best friend, Elinor, at his brother's house. Thursday night, after we got in from waiting in line to pick up our tickets for BlizzCon, we jumped on his brother's computers to play around in the beta a bit.

Elinor launched the first WoW icon he saw, and the "typical" EULA or whatever popped up. (He hadn't patched the beta for a bit, so this wasn't surprising, and we had him do it for our arrival. Out of the 7 Wow players in the house that night, 5 of us have beta keys.) But then the title of the EULA caught my eye: "Friends and Family". WHAT??!!?? You were in Alpha? Elinor's brother wasn't in the room, so I didn't fly off the handle or anything. But I asked Elinor if he knew that. Nope. And I certainly didn't know.

When he did come in and I asked him. It was kind of a casual, oh yeah... we were in alpha. He eventually explained who he knew and how they knew him, etc. But yeah... kind of a shocker. Was he ever going to tell us? I warned him that he was going in my blog. So, yes... some people in Alpha do actually abide by the non-disclosure agreement. And I now understand why his wife (also in Alpha) was so upset when I got BlizzCon tickets and she didn't. (By the way, she had pushed to get us in Alpha too, but it obviously never happened.)