I do not think it was intended as a joke and I truly believe they are taking this very seriously. You sound as if you’re a paying customer and have grounds for your irritation which of course you absolutely do NOT!!
You really need to calm down and be grateful that there are people willing to put forth their “valuable” time to write all the dam code in the first place. I think they are entirely justified in asking all of us to please help test but maybe it is people like you that drive them to use “covert” methods of get all the hounds to show up for a stress test. Or maybe it was just as they stated and ran into load issues. Either way I am sure they could use more constructive comments here instead of sounding like a bunch of children not getting their way.
Hell I showed up but did not bother with Jedi. Went forth with testing through 2 crafting trees. It is all good fun.