I'll try to answer some of the points raised. This is a one-off post that will hopefully give a little more insight into why and how things are done in the 40k team, which will hopefully show that the guys don't sit around for a month and then frantically start on a new release.
Firstly, the 30 day minimum wait period is self-imposed, but with good reason - GW have never approved of any of the files we create (nor any other set of files for GW games), and over the years the decision was made to delay release to reduce the risk of legal action (and as far as I'm aware was the result of attempted action by GW many years ago, but that was before I was involved in the AB40k team), as that would provide GW with an "exclusive" period during which the stats for units could mostly only be obtained from the codex itself. GW have made it clear over the years that they are not happy about the 40k files, or any others, and there are public posts in the Lone Wolf forums about their own troubled history with GW. I can't discuss any possible contact we have had with the GW legal team, however the suggestion that we could simply ignore any C&D letter is a dangerous one - nobody should ever ignore a legal document. dbgoldberg23, are you an IP lawyer? If so then you should know better than to make sweeping statements without having been involved in an IP case specific to GW; if not then you should not be making suggestions about what to do with legal requests to anyone. I'm not a lawyer, IP or otherwise, so I'm not going to pretend to know what is and isn't applicable in UK law (and that only covers part of the problem - GW and myself might be based in the UK, but that's not to say that anything else is or isn't, and a public forum is not the place to discuss any of this anyway), and I'd never suggest to anyone what is and isn't applicable even based on my own previous experiences with copyright and IP issues (my employment means that I do have to get involved in copyright and IP issues from time to time in a company that is involved in the distribution chain of printed material, so it's somewhat relevant to the matter).
As to the Tau files and testing (and this applies to other codexes too), they have been worked on pretty much from day one of the codex release, and each time bugs are fixed they have to be retested to see if those changes affect units that were fine before. Also fixes to other races may impact too due to global rulesets and definitions, so it's a lengthy iterative process. While the test team try to cover every combination of option in every unit it's not possible to track down all errors, and often bugs that were missed in early testing raise their head later and cause problems which require changes from the core up. So far the Tau files have gone through around 6 days of initial coding, followed by 12 major and minor revisions, alongside fixes to other races and continued work on IA and Apocalypse. Given that the maintainers are all volunteers and have a life outside of working on these files, and some of those major revisions have taken days to work on, I don't think there has been more than a couple of days in the past month where something hasn't changed. Another round of testing was completed only yesterday and 6 minor issues appear to be outstanding.
As to the 40k updates being "quicker" due to the lack of rules text, that's simply not true - lines of text take almost no time to type in, the bulk of the time is spent cross-linking units and options and coding rulesets to make sure that validation works according to the unit entries. It's also not helping that the page numbers in the printed codex and the iPad version don't match up, which means it takes longer to figure out page references for the rules.
I realise that this post doesn't contain too many details, and it may well raise more questions that we simply cannot answer at this time, but hopefully you can understand that the process of creating and testing the files is a long process and is not taken lightly. I'm fortunate in that I get the easy part of the "job" - all I have to do is keep this website up and running
The more observant of you will have noticed that there was an outage of around 12 hours earlier in the week, that was in part my fault for using a default configuration on some security software running on the server, and in part the fault of large number of automated attacks on various services apparently originating from China - the config has been updated to prevent the same thing happening again, and the Chinese didn't get in so any potential disaster was averted successfully. Nothing to see, move along in an orderly fashion, everything is tickety-boo, stiff upper lip and all that.
Posted: Thu May 09, 2013 7:42 pm