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Message: <blockquote data-quote="3catcircus" data-source="post: 1891553" data-attributes="member: 16077">While some great books have come out - I wouldn't say it has been 95% great, 5% garbage - more like 50/50.  As far as talent coming into the industry - for independents this is true.  WOTC, on the other hand, seems to have managed to lose all of their talent and rely on freelancers.  I'm not saying freelancers aren't good writers - it is just that they may have multiple commitments at the same time.  You don't get the focused effort of a salaried employee, nor do you get the slavish devotion of someone creating or editing something as a labor of love rather than a way to pay the bills.  Actually - it does.  One measure of an industry is, obviously, performance.  If the majority of companies fold after a few years, with unsold product mouldering in warehouses, it makes it that much tougher for others who want to get into the industry.  Sure - this isn't medicine or lawyering, but if someone wanted to try and get into the game industry and make a living at it, based upon the current performance of the various game companies, they'd be crazy to try.True, but those of us who *do* have 20 years' worth of books are *that* much more likely to *not* buy a product when we can convert what we already have.  Especially when I see some of the products being offered that are of such poor quality that I think - "I could've done a way better job than that."True - but *as* a DM, I *still* have to spend the time comparing every version of them to determine which one I want to allow.  A better example of this would be the example of the spell "Nybor's Stern Reproof," which appears no less than 3 times - first in Magic of Faerun, then in Unapproachable East, and finally, in Player's Guide to Faerun.  I find it offensive that the text of this in Unapproachable East was nothing more than (paraphrasing) "Identical to what is in MoF, except for..."  They were so lazy that they couldn't take the time to reprint the spell in full?!?!This is the crux of the matter.  I continually get the sense that WOTC doesn't give a damn about product quality.  So long as people continue to buy their products, they'll have no reason to improve.  It isn't just in the creative end of the product, but in the editing and quality control.My point is this - there have been cases of WOTC publishing stuff in 3.5 products that involved simply re-publishing - i.e. it didn't update a piece of crunch from 3.0 - yet they didn't bother to do the research of their own products to realize that what they were putting in a 3.5 product was a "Rev -" from the 3.0 book - not even the "Rev A" from a web enhancement or from an official errata.  There have been (as evidenced by several reviews posted on ENWorld) WOTC products where some of the information in stat blocks were off by +1 or -1.  If it were a single entry, or if a stat block entry was way off (e.g. a skill should have been +5 and it was +15) then I would simply ignore it.  But the fact that there were *so many* entries that were off by only +1 or -1 leads me to the only logical conclusion that whoever is responsible for creating stat blocks and whoever is responsible for checking stat blocks isn't doing their job.  While this is a *minor* thing - it is an indicator of a company who doesn't care about their product quality.  What next - a product where they forget a whole chapter?</blockquote>

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