04-19-2006, 08:36 AM
There was an interesting theory on how Blizzard intially tests and tunes raid content in the aforementioned EJ Thread:
This would explain much, what we're seeing today. The original version of C'thun was buffed by an arbitrary amount to make him a challenge to the top guilds.
Remember that during the test server period for AQ, guilds only just came up to the Twin Emps and during those testing many tweeks have been made to these encounters and these were also the encounters that worked more or less fine upon release. C'thun, Ouro and Viscidous never got the chance to receive Test Server attention and were thus only arbitrary balanced. It is up to the top guilds to finalize the balance on the live servers.
This also explains while the 20 man raid instances ZG and AQ20 had seen a relatively smooth release. They were meant not to be too difficult, and so there was no need to arbitrary buff them, to provide a challenge to the top tier gaming crowd.
Ghostz Wrote:Contrary to popular belief, they did have an internal testing team for BWL, and those people killed every boss save Nefarian (who was bugged on release of BWL, something about never going into phase 2). They were all given full tier2 gear for testing purposes to my knowledge. My guess is that those testers found the bosses somewhat challenging even after being given a detailed strat and good gear, so Blizzard left it at that. Their team though probably had nowhere near the experience (I know one of the testers had very little MC gear at the time he did BWL testing) or teamwork that guilds that have been raiding together for years have, and we saw Fury blow through it all in one day. Tigole was put under the gun and probably just made drastic changes to make these fights harder than they should have been just to prevent other guilds from blowing through it as well, then worked it down from there.
If AQ40 was tested using the same process, I'm assuming their testers actually did kill C'Thun and Ouro in their old forums, but then Tigole and Co turned them up that extra notch to account for the skill/coordination of long running end-game raiding guilds prior to live release.
This would explain much, what we're seeing today. The original version of C'thun was buffed by an arbitrary amount to make him a challenge to the top guilds.
Remember that during the test server period for AQ, guilds only just came up to the Twin Emps and during those testing many tweeks have been made to these encounters and these were also the encounters that worked more or less fine upon release. C'thun, Ouro and Viscidous never got the chance to receive Test Server attention and were thus only arbitrary balanced. It is up to the top guilds to finalize the balance on the live servers.
This also explains while the 20 man raid instances ZG and AQ20 had seen a relatively smooth release. They were meant not to be too difficult, and so there was no need to arbitrary buff them, to provide a challenge to the top tier gaming crowd.