Generally I support public betas as a good marketing move, besides obvious testing purposes. Just like a free trial, a beta which invites a large number of people can produce a lot of positive hype, provided the game is any good. Having said that, I think that the Burning Crusade beta is a flaming disaster for World of Warcraft. A mix of bad timing of the beta and bad end-game design of the original game is driving more people away than it attracts.
The bad timing is due to the delay of the expansion release to January. Inviting a large number of people to an unfinished beta three months before release is not a good idea, especially without an NDA.
The bad end-game design of the original World of Warcraft has always been with us. At level 60 the normal flow of the game stops, and is replaced by a variety of alternative activities, like grinding faction, PvP, or raiding, all of which have a much lower reward to effort ratio than leveling up and questing. You can still improve your character, but it will cost you a lot of time, and in the case of raiding a huge organizational effort. Now that is not unusual for an end-game, most MMORPG work this way. But all the information coming out of the beta makes is blindingly obvious that the huge effort we put into the level 60 activities will be wasted shortly after the expansion comes out. By end of February most people will have fully replaced all their shiny epics with Burning Crusade green and blue gear. They will also have replaced all their PvP reward gear, their PvP rank will have gone up in smoke, and their PvP factions won't be used for anything any more. Other factions they might have grinded will have become pretty much obsolete.
With the motivation from the rewards falling away, many people start asking themselves why they are doing this end-game. If you raid or PvP or grind because it is fun, everything is fine. If you don't really like it, and just do it because of the rewards or because there isn't anything else to do, the knowledge of the Burning Crusade beta is a big drain on motivation.
Especially raid guilds have always been an uneasy alliance between people who actually like getting wiped repeatedly for 6 hours in a big group of 40 people, and others who are just there for the epics, or because they couldn't find anything better to do. Hands up everybody who is in a raid guild and who noticed a declining participation in raids over the last couple of weeks. My guild has some people openly refusing to go raiding any more, citing the Burning Crusade as a reason. Others don't give a reason, but simply don't show up for raids. Even the people who enjoy raiding, which includes me to a certain extent, are getting frustrated with signing up for BWL raids that never start due to lack of participation, or Molten Core raids which go a lot less smoothly than before, due to many experienced raiders missing. Whether you raid for loot or for fun, at some point you have seen enough of Molten Core.
Curiously while lots of people have been invited to the beta, and more invitations are being sent out all the time, the beta servers are pretty empty. In the beta of a new game you can create a character and learn a lot about how the game works. Although you know that your beta character will be deleted, at least you feel you gained a lot of useful knowledge for the release version. You can also experiment with different character classes and see which one you would like to take for the real game. Playing a copy of your original level 60 character in the Burning Crusade beta is a lot less attractive. You already know how to play him. You gain some knowledge of new zones, quests, and dungeons, and you can experiment with the new talents. But that isn't really enough to keep you busy for 3 months. And the release of the Burning Crusade expansion will then feel like a big roll-back, where your same character gets thrown back to 60 and will have to do everything again. After first proposing ready-made level 60 characters, Blizzard changed their mind and only allowed copies of existing characters in the beta. Thus you can't for example try a level 60 character of a class you didn't play yet.
Lots of people visited the beta as tourists, had a look around, explored a couple of quests and the new instances, and then stopped. Especially the big increase in xp requirements for leveling discouraged a lot of people from playing the beta to 70. Even if you get there, it will be difficult to find enough people to explore the level 70 raid content. So the beta had the curious effect of making people want to play neither the expansion beta, nor the pre-expansion real game. Most of them will be back for the Burning Crusade release, but right now the beta is rather causing a low point in World of Warcraft, and not the hoped-for hype.
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