Just a quick question, really. When I try to log into the beta forums, it says "Sorry, permission denied." I'm just curious because I didn't do anything to get myself banned from the beta and am hoping that the beta forums are just closed for now.

Thanks!

As the beta event is now over, it can be presumed that the forums are closed now, yes.

I cannot understand why they would shut down the beta forums of all things. Maybe enlist some of the good testers as moderators to help the devs keep it clean. Just my two cents.

/close

Logically they would take them down to process all of the feedback from the last test.

One could easily get that from a "dedicated" thread. I have beta tested other games and usually there was a bug report section just for that. I don't recall the forums ever being taken down after a test.

Anyway, this is the first that I have heard of something like this.

It was certainly done during the GW2 beta. It makes sense. If you don't shut the forums down, the flow of comments never, ever stops. At a certain point people aren't reacting to their experiences, and are just reacting to each other. This often turns unpleasant, and at that point the information provided is useless.

Generally beta feedback is specific technical issues, specific bugs, and overall impressions. The latter is honestly easier to process by way of a survey with quantitative data that can be processed and anolyzed, not by long, written opinion pieces. Sampling some of those is useful, but the greater the distance between the event and the feedback, the less useful it is. Customer feedback is a well known and well-researched field, as are data metrics; based on decades of studies, this really is the logical thing to do.