Production, and Speed of Content Release

"quick question on the matter, the cause of lack of weapon balance, new mods and stuff lies where exactly?I Is it lack of game design time?
Is it lack of possible 3d asset production possibilities?
Is it lack developers time, not being able to actually code that all in?"

The above is an example of many comments and questions we've gotten relating to the expedience of content releases. We hope to provide a more complete picture to our eager fans for why such content is not released as quickly as we might hope sometimes. With that, I'll hand the conch shell to Nathan:

"It's all three, and depends on which weapon classes and what needs to be done we're talking about.
Basic balancing is continuous. The first rule of balancing club is, you do a set of limited changes, you deploy, you evaluate the result, repeat. Iteration. It just takes time. Nothing is blocking changing the stats etc. on our currently deployed weapons.

Creating new items that don't have a visible component. Usually the same as above. It's considered part of general balancing, but also requires translation, icons and so on. Usually pretty simple as we can re-use base icons.

Creating new items that have a new visible component, 3D model, VFX, animation. Takes ages. It's a serial process that requires a lot of different people.

Creating new effects that don't exist. Like an entirely new ability, requires programming time, VFX time, balancing, etc. but after it's created, it's often "easy" to re-use or adapt to another similar function.

Note, that when a game developer says "easy" it means measured in weeks instead of months. That's how slow game development is. And imagine, today with tools like Unity and Unreal Engine 4, integrations and improvements to content creation tools (Maya etc.), it's orders of magnitude faster than 10 years ago."