It's a question I ask myself from time to time. I'm sure there are others that feel the same way, but how new is new content? We've seen Ulduar and The Argent Tournament all over MMO-Champion and the PTR for the past few months, anything from the loot that drops to videos/strategies of the boss fights, and I can't help but wonder how much more of a challenge things would be without the PTR. In a good way I mean.


I know that the PTRs are there for a reason, to test the content before it comes out to fix any bugs and make sure it's ready, but personally I think it'd feel much more epic seeing all this for the first time when it's actually released. Having to figure out the strategies yourself instead of just heading over to the forums and reading up how to do the fight right away. Now of course anyone could simply ignore all the information that goes up about the PTRs, but that would put them at a disadvantage when it comes to clearing content the fastest, world firsts, etc. Well if the information wasn't released to anyone wouldn't they be at a disadvantage anyway? No. Everyone would be on the same leveling, figuring out the fights for the first time when they're first released. Seeing the new armor/weapon models when they actually drop for you.

Now of course if Blizzard ever did this they would have to find some other way to test the content before it's released. They had the PTRs up for a month or two and still had a few bugs when the patch went live, so there's some issues that would be needed to overcome.

It would also mean that we wouldn't be seeing 14 boss raid instances cleared in less than 24 hours. Even if it only took a day longer, this is months of content that's being absolutely blown through. Yes, yes I know there's still 1 more boss in Ulduar.

This has it's ups and downs, and I'm sure plenty of people are happy with being able to hop in there and follow what's been written down on paper, but I think it'd put a better feel and more of a challenge into raiding.

~Aenorn