this was also the time you only fought 14 provincies and won the tournament, and the time you did it all manually to reach that 14.
So more like 10-20x as time consuming
You can't compare it with today.
When it started the starting levels were too high. a lot got modified.
You also needed 400.000 points for 10 chests.
The points were different and each of the 25 players needed to complete between 10 and 11 provincies 6 rounds, but when you consider that to win a tournament you only needed 14 provinces you can imagine how difficult that was to reach. only some eastern block server(s) (i thought 2) managed to achieve that feat.
I no longer know how the enemy power was decided, but I think it was a lot harder than today, considering we did it all manually and never even considered tot do it on autocombat.
As for
@Enevhar Aldarion question, I no longer know that, and am to lazy look around all the announcements and update logs from around that time.