6 months? that's pretty fast. So how long does it take any of you to draw up a load of concepts of full sets of armour on hume male and female, galka, mithra, taru, then even the hume males have to have a larger set. Then after you are done drawing these concepts and colouring them (presuming you dont have a manager to tell you it's not good enough and you need to start again or change things), you have to draw each of these races/gender drawings from multiple angles in order for the artist (3d modeller) to model it from, which for me takes time, as I'm an Artist and Animator. For the quality of the armor sets in SE, I think it would take me maybe up to a week to model or more, then you have to put it into sculpting (Mudbox, Zbrush) and sculpt in the tiny details, in SE's case this is most of the detail. This makes the normal map. For me the sculpting process can take longer than modelling, however, you have to UVmap it before sculpting on it, which takes longer than the model it's self for me, hate UVmapping. Try doing that for all the races and genders, then all sculptin for all the races/genders. For me alone, up the sculpting process could take me a very long time. After sculpting, you create the normals, which is a simple click of a button, then, and this is the fun part; you have to skin and rig it (maybe not rig it, depending on how their system works) that for me takes a little time, but there are ways to get round doing it over and over for each race/gender from scratch if you have the right tools, but even then it requires tweaking.

All of this for one piece of armour could take me 6 months to do, maybe more. But then what about the details? You have to organise everything (notice things in-game have colour varieties? what, you think that just happens on it's own?) they need to separate each part for their own qualities. Belt buckles, shoulder armour, different pieces of cloth, everything! Now this is probably all done during the modelling process, but that would also mean it would take longer.

The factors, you need to get all the work approved as you go by your lead artist, you need to make sure you test it in-game to make sure there are no glitches or bugs with the armour. The armour stats and level are already worked out, otherwise you wouldn't be making them. The programmer needs to be in on this too, you see, their are physics, and other properties that need to be implimented.

For myself, a designer and a dev, then a bug tester, this process on such a grand scale, for all races/genders, for all varieties of the same armour to be even possible, then finally approved by the producers or whoever is in charge, if there were no major or minor glitches or bugs found that would make me have to redo it all, this can take me and my team of four up to 6 months, but if there are bugs (and there will be) it can take longer. Even then I can openly admit that I am nowhere near as talented as the people at SE and my work would not be of the same quality that they put out.

So STFU complaining that a small team within the studio would take so long for so much work to be done, when they have hundreds of people in that studio that can work at the same time to create a lot of content within that 6 months. Seriously, even I can openly say, I don't know how they work, and it's probably a different process to the one I explained, but still, if you aren't even in the industry you have nothing to argue about, you have no idea.