PTR testing: good or bad?

A few days ago I came across a Ragnaros PTR testing video. It is below.

I`m not sure what to think of this. Until now, end bosses weren`t available for testing. Aside from some datamined abilities (which weren`t entirely accurate), it was all a mystery. In turn, the said bosses turned out to be pretty good fights (I`m mainly talking about Yogg-Saron and Lich King here). If I look at this video and study it carefully, I can already have a good opinion about what is going on.

Ragnaros was already a bit spoiled by the encounter journal. As opposed to data-mining, the information there is entirely accurate. I`m not sure what to think about this either, but overall I think that the encounter journal is a good addition, even in the case of guilds getting there first. The abilities seem a bit too detailed, but at least there is some clear information, so there won`t be cases of browsing logs for hours in order to determine how some obscure mechanic works.

Back on the PTR side, my personal opinion is to keep the encounter journal and remove the PTR testing. It`s starting to feel as if the progression race starts on PTR, and on live it turns into a execution race (or, a who-logs-in-faster race, even worse). Changes in this scenario occur when Blizz decides to ninja-add a few mechanics to certain bosses, which weren`t seen on the PTR beforehand. 

This whole discussion leads us to an obvious question:

Why is there a PTR in the first place? Bugs

As it`s name stands, the Public Test Realm is for testing. There will always be bugs around (it`s unavoidable), and quickly spotting and fixing them is very important. I guess we`ve all seen in one way or another how bugs can be devastating for progression. Aside from bugs, there are the exploits/"clever use of game mechanics" situations as well, which should be avoided as much as possible (although they are pretty damn fun!).

In order to prevent situations like the above, the PTR is an excellent tool. However, this is done at the expense of the players (especially top guilds). It`s not fun having to progress in some terrible conditions (server instability, lag, lack of addons), and the whole PTR raiding experience is pretty stressful.
Also, the most important question is: are the issues actually solved? 
There have been multiple cases in which issues have been reported on the PTR, and still not fixed/going buggy on live. Atramedes is probably the best example of this, as the fight was incredibly buggy and required about 3-4 complete overhauls. Some 10-man heroic tuning would also indicate the same, for example adds in Valiona heroic had the same HP in 10-man and 25-man, and spawned roughly at the same rate.This tier has probably been the champion when it comes to buggy content. Just Atramedes alone should win a medal, but there have been another weird situations. 
It seems that even with PTR/beta, bugs, cheeses and horrible tuning situations will still appear; in a way, making the whole PTR business nearly useless. I`d like to point out that I`m only talking about testing new raid content here; testing quests/new class mechanics and all that is a whole different story for which PTR is a good thing.

What about just inside testing?
 
I would believe that having an "in-house" raiding team dedicated to testing would be a far better idea, because most of the obvious bugs that are noticed by the community would still be noticed. I was reading the other day that, during the testing of a 25-man encounter, some adds would be invisible. I`m sure that any raid would be capable of noticing that. Of course, the stronger the team is, the better the feedback will be (regarding tuning), but Blizz seems to do a nice work on tuning most of the time, aside from obvious errors. In the Valiona example above (10H vs 25H) there is no need for testing to realise that something is wrong.
This approach would have quite a few advantages, namely:

• All content will be new, making the progression more enjoyable for everyone
• The server stability and lag issues would be non-existant (with proper arangements).
• The comunication between devs and testers would be significantly better, leading to more issues being resolved.

There would of course be a major disadvantage because there is only a small group of people testing the content; but how bad is this? Bugs and cheeses will slip through, regardless of how much testing is done. One also may argue that the skill of a testing team would be far lower than of top guilds (Blizz themselves even admitted that their QA team had issues with Yogg normal mode, when asked about Yogg-0). I have two arguments here. First is that you don`t need to be amazing at this game to discover bugs. For that, you need to be well documented about the encounter and the game in general, and to have patience. Second, if there`s a real need for a pro team testing content, recruit one! I`m sure there are people who would love to be payed for that.
I also mentioned communication above. Here`s how a PTR feedback thread would end up: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2098309903 . What do we learn from there? A lot of people were angry because the server went down often, and half the posters talk about trash. Some posters are arguing about the tuning of the abilities, which isn`t that important for PTR in my opinion. The abilities are there to work properly, not to deal precise damage. It is easier to hotfix some damage/healing adjustments rather than to fix a completely broken ability. As such, I`m not sure how much valuable feedback is in that thread. There are some good posts, which detail bugs, but they seem pretty easy to spot. I still believe that an in-house raiding team would spot them as well.




From a personal perspective, I only tried raiding on the PTR once, and that was to test patch 4.0 mechanics. We went into an ICC raid, which we found out it was resetted to a Saurfang-gate status. The lag was bad, addons were broken and the addition of the ability queue (which was horrible at that point) made us struggle on Lady Deathwhisper normal mode, despite being 11/12 heroic on live. I don`t want to think how actual progression would be in such conditions.
My (not so) small rant about the PTR should end here. I`m curious to read other people`s comments about this. Do you think that PTR testing is a good thing or a bad thing?