Can somebody repost all the Q&A stuff over to this site here? I didn't know that a new Q&A had been posted at WOTC.

The whole business with Soresu right now, plus the recent errors on the various cards and stuff have really started to irk me as well.

I mean, there's a 100 players who would gladly sign an NDA, AND stick to it, if we got a chance to help proof-read some cards. They could produce sets 100% error free if they had people who actually PLAYED THE GAME proof reading for stupid errors like these.

as a first time reader of this thread excuse my ignorance, but reading this looks like SWM does not have playtesters. IS this true? Is no one playtesting this game before the mini's come out?

There are playtesters, we just don't feel they're doing the best they can. Too many "sloppy" mistakes have happened in the last couple of sets that a regular group of players could have spotted on first use...

And I would glad sign an NDA form to playtest...as long as we're able to talk to others who also signed the NDA form

Playtesting is not the problem. Rob has explained this at length before. Here's how the design process works.

Rob makes up the stats without a cost. Instead, he assigns a "power level" for the set. Then he and Mons Johnson, one of the guys who helped develop Magic into the game it is today not to mention the company, playtest what Rob came up with. They tweak the stats here and there and then Rob hands everything off to Mons to assign costs. When Mons is done, he sends it back to Rob for review. Rob recommends whatever adjustments he feels are necessary (have you noticed the most important flaw in this approach yet? More on that in a minute...) and then sends it back to Mons

At the same time Mons is doing up the stat card costing, the editor, Jennifer (can't recall her last name) is busy typing up the insert/rulebook glossary. This is a very rushed product and has always been. At this point it's more just a copy/paste update job than actually writing anything. There is absolutely next to no proofreading or review of the material to make sure it matches with the stat card definitions correctly. Then she sends it off to the printers.

About the time she is sending it off, Mons is emailing her the stat card info with the costs he decided on. Using a master template, she designs all the cards - another responsibility that has devolved into a copy/paste job leading to glaring errors like Kyp having a Commander Effect or Master Kota having two sets of Special Abilities, or Barriss Offee not having Synergy with any existing fig (we'll probably never know for sure if her +4 Defense was a Freudian slip or not).

So what happens is the stat cards' text don't match the glossary/insert text because they are not checked against each other. Jennifer would probably tell you she doesn't have time to do that, but that is no excuse. Speaking as someone who works in the media field, you MAKE the time to make sure stuff is correct. Hell the solution is so simple. When Rob and Mons make a change on the stat card definition of an ability, WRITE IT DOWN and send it to Jennifer so she knows to change it before sending the rulebook/insert off to be printed.

Earlier I asked if anyone noticed the glaring flaw in the design process regarding playtesting? I did, almost right away. They are testing pieces without cost, which means they are not testing REAL squads. They are testing power levels. This means they are missing tons of stuff. It makes me wonder if they even thought about board-wide swap before Mons slapped that 8 pt. cost on Mas Amedda.