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<blockquote data-quote="JohnSnow" data-source="post: 3952707" data-attributes="member: 32164">And how many of you were working on those 6 monsters? Just you? And I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you had other things to do as well.WotC has something like 10 employees dedicated to Design and Development alone. They also have people dedicated to editing, artwork, approvals, and legal checks. In-house playtesting could probably involve 15 groups without player overlap. Factor in all their home games, and the fact that many of them play in multiple games and you probably have upwards of 100 4e playtest games running inside WotC alone.In addition, unlike 3e, they've also put all the monsters and their stats into a database so that rechecking and balancing doesn't involve 60 different math computations every single time.From what we've been told, a significant part of what they worked on during their &quot;downtime&quot; on 3e products was getting the support systems up to snuff. I know that most companies don't use excel spreadsheets to produce all their monster statistics - in fact, WotC didn't even used to. However, from what we've been told, WotC does do that now.I did some free editing for the guys at Green Ronin between the initial .pdf release and the final .pdf (and print!) release of True Sorcery. Rob appreciated it - a LOT. Most game companies just don't have the kind of staff Wizards does, and trying to extrapolate based on experience with them is probably misleading.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="JohnSnow, post: 3952707, member: 32164"] And how many of you were working on those 6 monsters? Just you? And I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you had other things to do as well. WotC has something like 10 employees dedicated to Design and Development alone. They also have people dedicated to editing, artwork, approvals, and legal checks. In-house playtesting could probably involve 15 groups without player overlap. Factor in all their home games, and the fact that many of them play in multiple games and you probably have upwards of 100 4e playtest games running inside WotC alone. In addition, unlike 3e, they've also put all the monsters and their stats into a database so that rechecking and balancing doesn't involve 60 different math computations [i]every single time.[/i] From what we've been told, a significant part of what they worked on during their "downtime" on 3e products was getting the support systems up to snuff. I know that most companies don't use excel spreadsheets to produce all their monster statistics - in fact, WotC didn't even used to. However, from what we've been told, WotC does do that now. I did some free editing for the guys at Green Ronin between the initial .pdf release and the final .pdf (and print!) release of [i]True Sorcery[/i]. Rob appreciated it - a LOT. Most game companies just don't have the kind of staff Wizards does, and trying to extrapolate based on experience with them is probably misleading. [/QUOTE]

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