Same story here, my friend got an invite. Never seen him play XIV. Said he tried it out a few hours. So it seems SE really wants new players to test out the game. It does matter to me if i get an invite or not, because i really want to give that feedback so the ARR launch goes as smooth as possible in compared to my friend who doesn't have that much time for alpha. But these are things SE cannot predict and I can understand them in this decision.