First, I want to make sure everyone who is reading this understands and is clear that there is no official closed beta announcements to date. This is simply information shared to fans. If you receive any emails luring you to provide info or with links—do not even click the links. There have been and will be more scam emails. Your first place to check out if a Beta announcement has been made is the official World of Warcraft website and the fansites. That said continue reading below:
A Wrath of the Lich King Closed Beta topic thread hit the official forums when a fan asked how it would work. Nethaera – the WoW Community Manager – responded the following today:
Ok so we all know or have an idea that people that went to blizzcon get beta keys when closed beta starts out, but i have a question about the other people that will get closed beta invites, will there be some that were in the first wow beta, or the people from the TBC beta (that i was in); or is it going to be a random pick of people – kinda like what happened in The Burning Crusade (TBC) beta? Because before TBC beta there where comps to get beta keys + extra stuff which were fun btw (by the way).
Nethaera: We generally pull from many places so that we have a good variety of people in the beta. Some of it is random and some are winners from contests, or specific groups that we want to pull from. We don’t have a specific schedule for you on who we will pull in or when to share with you, but we’ll do what we can to keep people as informed as possible.
Out of curiosity, is there a minimum level of experience/total time played that we would need to be considered for the beta? I’ve only been playing for about two months, and am wondering about my chances of getting into the beta.
Nethaera: There is no minimum level of experience needed since we look at a broad spectrum of testers. We want people of all experience levels to be able to share their experiences with us so that we know where we might need to work on something more. We don’t necessarily want to make one aspect too hard or too easy on either end of things.
Neth, will there be some sort of application process to at least show interest in beta testing? If its completely random, what happens if you pick someone who isn’t even interested? 
Nethaera: Undetermined on the first question and it will most likely be the same as with any beta someone gets and isn’t interested in, they just won’t play it. We watch our numbers, we see if we have the beta testers we need, and if we need more, we get more people in.
It’s all dependent on what the development team feel they want to have tested and where the focus is. We could have specific things we want players to test, or we could just want to load things up and stress it.
I just thought I’d update this thread with a little extra information to let people know that there will be a sign up process when it comes time for the beta as well.
Please note that that time is not now. Please be aware that there are some scams currently running that are asking people to sign up for Wrath of the Lich King beta. We will let everyone know when it is time to sign up
