To have this on the record, we we are not looking at moderation history as a sole factor in determining whether someone is qualified to be considered for access to the test server. Other factors may include how active you are in-game, length of account ownership, whether you are active on the forums and in the community or not, etc.
The test server is not the staff team "choosing people they like and know". The only thing that we care about is who is going to do the best job as a tester.
For what it's worth, the people who we plan to be reaching out to are those who have consistently submitted quality feedback to the development team over the course of the past several years. Most of these people we have never even spoken to, this is because they've submitted their feedback through one-way no-response systems in-game and on the website blindly hoping that we'd look at it - and we actually do.
If someone is going to just be causing a headache for us on the test server, of course we're not going to give them an invitation to the test server. We have a game that needs to be tested so we can get the new content, bug fixes, etc put onto production.