Alexander, forgive me if I can't do those nifty quote things that you and others do...I'll have to take the time to learn to do so at some point. You asked:
"When did TSD said that the AOE expert testers "caused" the TC bug?"
TSD stated:
"AoK was tested by AoE experts. AoK had the Teuton TC."
Those two sentences, especially isolated as they were, take the form of the sentence pair, "Bob hit me in the eye. I got a black eye." Now, if you were a lawyer named, say, Clinton, you might argue that no cause and effect is implied in this sentence pair, but most native speakers of English realize that there is cause and effect implied.
TSD also said:
"I think having blind faith in a group of 200 testers to not produce a repeat of the Teuton TC..."
I hope you see that this is a less ambiguous statement of cause and effect than my first example.
In response to your statements:
"Apparently, only some of those AOE testers saw this problem, while the majority of them failed to see it! If you have only a hundred of testers or less, and only some of these testers think there is an imbalance, how can ES take the word of just a few guys over the majority (eventhough they were right)? If 90% of them saw the Teuton TC and told ES about it, do you really think ES would disregard their opinions? I think not."
I'm not following your reasoning here. So if ES won't pay attention to the 10% of the expert testers who say there might be a balance problem, then some 9,000 of the 10,000 randomly selected testers would all have to assert there is a problem before ES would take note?
To ShadowDawn: Your memories of your LAN games brought back my own fond memories of starting out in AOE. A friend and I got into the multiplayer scene, and we became quite proficient at walling in and booming. This was in response to getting killed pretty quick when we first started, and, naturally, this strategy got a lot of our teammates killed as it was much easier for our foes to focus their attention on them rather than brave the walled and towered Hell that our towns were. Of course, in due time our allies would quit under the ferocious pressure of double- and triple-teams, but not before hurling epithets our way for not helping out. We would lose most of these games, but I suppose we were rewarded by staying alive much longer than we otherwise would at that stage of our development. My friend and I still crack up when we remember how defense-oriented we were during our early AOE days.
Shadow, I do agree with you that 10,000 additional testers would help to balance a game, but I stand by my belief that there won't be enough time for the new testers to contribute much. One poster stated that this belief is based on something we don't yet know, namely, the release date of AOM. This is a good point, but we have heard that AOM, once apparently slated for a late September release, has been scheduled to be released as early as the second week in October. Needless to say, this date might not be accurate, and it is certainly not carved in stone. However, in ES's history, there has not been a case in which they have repeatedly moved back the date of a release (*cough* Blizzard *cough*), and I have no reason to believe it will be moved back a substantial amount of time beyond the second week of October.
And, finally, to lummir, who started this thread, and all the other posters: Thanks...it has been an entertaining thread, even though it has meandered onto topics only slightly related to lummir's original title.