http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...p=1#post553129

They are actually trying really hard to get it right the first its up in live and telling us about it, it can't get better then that. Can it?

Really awesome that they are trying hard to get it right before it goes out the door and gets a lot harder (politically) to fix.

Yeah I appreciate their efforts. Certainly looks like this will be the greatest patch ever.

As you probably already know, it's pretty much impossible to participate in the "beta testing" of Naxxramas here in Europe. So I want to ask you who actually get to raid the place, what's it like? Was it terribly bugged in the beginning? are there alot of bugs now? Was it very well made in the beginning and now its just minor bug fixes coming up? What's it like compared to AQ, or BWL at release for that matter?

Even before 1.11 hit the ptrs my personal impression was that this time they will really try to prove that they can get a bug free instance out right away. Just want to see if I was right.

From my limited time in the zone, it seems decently polished already. The encounters range from "Thats a pretty cool trick" to "How the hell is a raid group going to do this without 100% perfect execution?" The feel is smaller than AQ but a little more spacious than bwl.

It really isn't difficult to get an instance that's by and large bug free. All they have to do is be willing to let it sit on the test realm, until it's really done. Not kinda, sorta done. Or we think our test monkey's fixed these 30 major bugs. They have hundreds of free QA people in there every nite, all they have to do is give them time to work. So far this test server, in terms of GM response time, and bug fixes, etc, seems to be far and away the best so far. Hopefully they'll let it continue.

Does this mean they fixed the Shades/Necro Knights? One can only hope...

unfortunately, that's not really realistic from a business perspective. if they kept the zone on the PTRs long enough for people to test every iteration of every encounter, anticipation for the patch would dip significantly. how cool would the naxx release be if every top guild had already killed kel'thuzad by the time it went live? you can only let so much of the information out there for so long before the new content becomes old and tired before it's even off test...

There's definitely something to be said for not putting dungeons on test. Sure BWL was buggy as hell when it was first released, but it was almost more exciting in terms of progression because people didn't know anything but the names of the bosses. It was new, untouched content. I remember back in the EQ days, when new dungeons were released, nothing had been datamined or exploit-killed before the first guilds got in there, and it was a discovery experience, you didn't know what was around that corner, in some cases, you didn't even know what the last boss would be.

The loot was a surprise when it dropped, instead of getting all of the ooh-ing and ahh-ing done before you even set foot in the instance, making it somewhat anticlimactic when that amazing sword drops, because you already know its stats and what it looks like. If only blizzard could test their content without relying heavily on public test realms, they could probably get a lot more mileage out of their dungeons. Some steps towards preventing data-mining would help too. I'm really looking forward to the expansion, because (hopefully) those dungeons *will* be fresh and exciting, although I don't doubt that illidan's loot table will be common knowledge before he's even killed.

Avellyr, without gtting sidetracked into an EQ bashing session - every single raid encounter from PoP onwards was havily tested by the current end game guilds. Admittedly, that meant nothing in some cases (hello Plane of Time! :)), but Sony needed external testers just as much. They were simply a lot more strict with their NDA's and ublic testing - which cost them, I believe, in the long run, as I think putting in the extra leg work on NAxxramus will earn Blizzard a lot of good will eventually.

I don't expect for a moment that encounters like Sapphiron and Kel are going to be tested on the PTR, so there will still be plenty of surprise.

The real problem is the datamining and the death-touc hacks, but that's not a design decision, and may be almost a hopeless battle when you have the game data out there in so many different countries and such.

I really don't see the reason why they need to even incorporate the loot tables into the PTR to be honest. They gave us the stats of the T3 gear and I think people will be able to make their own assumptions as to the quality of the loot that will drop in the instance. The one thing I really liked about BWL was no one really had any idea as to the loot that dropped until people actually got to that boss and beat it on the live servers.

Seeing a Herald of Woe for the first time on Nightmare's Asylum's frontpage was a lot more exciting than just seeing every single peice of loot spelled out for me the day the PTW went up and was datamined.

Maybe them having almost like when game companies release a demo of a not completed game, have the first bosses of a couple wings and the prior pulls set up, possibly leave out a 20% enrage that may happen when things go live to spice it up a bit come time for it to go live.

But yeah its a minor thing, the amount of content in the patch is amazing and I can look past it since this instance is just one small part of all the content we will be getting this patch.

Really? Without the datamining Nerubian Slavemaker would've dropped at 3.0 speed and taken 3 months to get corrected. Of course some items will still go live in screwed up states despite the being seen early and having people bitch about them.

The Nerubian Slavemaker wasn't datamined. A GM was running around with it on the PTR and everyone saw him and said "WTF" and linked it all over the place. That's why it was scoped.

But eh, the Slavemaker wouldn't even have been seen for months anyway.

On the one hand I appreciate the testing and of course I'm always interested to see the loot; on the other, it'd be nice to kill a boss and have no damn clue what it's going to drop until it does. I guess Ouro first week of 1.11 will offer a bit of that.

Uh.. if you try to link an item not seen by the server since it came up you get disconnected. So the only way new items are seen on test is by player action (killing bosses and they drop) or GM action. So all datamining is the result of someone at blizzard running around with it.

If I have to choose between "Oh hey that's a new drop.. and it's a total piece of shit too" or "All of this was datamined on test, but the stupid crap got fixed" I'm always taking the latter.

I'd actually prefer to "test" it some on live with my own actual char, then not reaching it on a buggy PTR with some silly premade. And for guilds who do try to be early/first on kills (yes we are such monkeys) and might also have people who dont like spoilers of even the most minor variety, thats an annoying balance to manage. Not to mention the difference between the PTR's, but I guess there has been enough whining over that. The loot thing (datamining) annoys me too, but the loot is by far secondary in an instance anyway to the actual experience itself. And I think it'd be greater if you were among the firts non-hired QA people who go there. And not having seen all the loot, all the mobs and heard of people who cleared the whole wing before you set foot init. So yeah, if I'm gonna test it anyway, I'd rather do it on live. (Assuming QA dep. was able to find the most glaring bugs, which bwl showed they wernt, but they hired a lot of people after that)

C'Thun wouldn't have been bad if it had been fixed in days rather than months. I mean, the problem wasn't that it was broken, the problem was that it was broken for a few months during which guilds were wiping to it over and over. It's not that they didn't have the data on exactly what was wrong with the fight. It's that they didn't do anything with that data. Anyway, I'd rather not dwell on that, but even if Naxxramas has some bugs/bad tuning on release it won't be bad as long as they don't take months to fix it.

Well, for C'Thun you can't really say the problem was that the encounter was super buggy due to lack of testing upon release. The encounter worked (mostly), it was just way out of tune.

The problem was they took a month longer to fix it than they should have, basically, not that no one tested the encounter on test.

I think PTR is an extremely valuable tool, though. It does suck though that the final bosses were killed (even though it was with exploiting/hacks) on the Korean PTR.

It sure was a hell of a lot more fun then sitting in bwl reading about US guilds wiping on C'thun on PTR for 2 months stratight. As others said, the problem here wasnt the lack of tune and bugs, it was the time it took to fix it, it would actually have been worse if we'd have had to wait that long on PTR instead of Live. (also, I'd be pretty annoyed if everything in AQ was killed on PTR before I could step into it).

The problem for us Eu testers is the way the test realms are set up for us. Mainly that we cannot transfer our own characters onto the test realms. I know a lot of guilds on EU-Zenedar, and all the 'big' ones have tried to get as many people onto the PvP test realm as possible. As they know each other from the same server they can work together, many having done strat and the like over a year ago together. the first thing they did was walk straight into Ahn'qiraj (one day resets afaik still in play at this point) before trying Naxxramas seriously. The American/Pacific guilds could just transfer over and try Nax as it would be for them.

That and a lot of people, at least on the PvP test realm, are actually just playing with items they will never have in Alterac Valley. That is what pisses me off, that a slot for a dungeon tester is being used by some half-educated turnip who just spams lol when he mortal strikes with Ashkandi having dismounted in full Wrath from a Swift Razzashi Raptor...

C'thun was pretty cool. Even wiping on the early version was neat.

I like to pretend the weeks of wiping meaninglessly didn't really happen. I wish the devs would have just owned up and said "stop fucking around, it's broken" rather than lying to us. But that is more about slow response time and poor dev relationships than actual testing problems...

People on the US PvE realm have the same problem. Well, they can transfer their characters, but good luck using them with the 6k person queue, although I suppose it may have gone down by now since I haven't been checking.

Sure but patches occur much more frequently on test realm. Because it's test they're free to admit their mistakes and push new builds all the time, this doesn't happen on live. We suffer for weeks or month for the one uber patch to fix it all.