I dunno, I guess I miss the old "lostech" allure of the 3025 days. It was cool when we were playing CBT using that technology base.

I mean, most mechs were not brand new and our players inherited their 200year old something family heirloom Jagermech. hehe, that was cool and it still is. MW then was like a steampunk game since the technology was kinda misunderstood and had a mystical aura around them.

Old MW books had Comstar adepts conducting incantations before activating and HPG. Stuff was like centuries old, cool!

:) Heck, we actually played that you gad to have the correct (and painted) mini, and if you lost the Mech, you lost the miniature... Kept the "feel" of the rare, high value Mech never EVER being thrown away lightly, especially to us poor College Student types :) It was amusing, and got you in the right frame of mind for a VERY cautious game... Eventually the group moved on and the remaining folks threw in with other locals playing "correctly"...

So, charge isn't a viable tactic against this unit? Capture? Flamers? How about the ever popular artillery?

High defense against ranged, just means you go for other ways to damage it.

I don't mind change when it is productive and stays in the "reality" of the fictional world in which belongs. Look at LoTR, the movies. They didn't stay word for word, scene for scene with the books. They took some creative liberties to make the movie flow better. It was making a movie out of a book, had to be done. Heck, most movies that are adaptions of books are like that. However, what they didn't do, was have the Riders of Rohann assault the gates of Mordor riding M1 Abrams, reasoning that that would draw more fans to the movie. But then again, Frodo did go "INVISIBLE" several times, so the movies just sucked.

Loved the paintball technology comment earlier, that had me rolling.

I'm close to selling off all my MWDA stuff in the Trade Forum at the moment, so I will pry not be continuing in this thread much more (hold the cheers xyberbratt, hehe, I will still be around for another week or so). I have thoroughly enjoyed the chat though. Heck, I may be peeking into this site (it is on my favorite places and I have made a few friends who I communicate with through here), just to see how everything is turning out. I may eventually get back into MW if it looks like things are going a way I think I will enjoy again.

P.S: I was kidding about LoTRs sucking because Frodo turned invisible. LoL.

Don't mind the raptor...

Hate the invisible look. Period.

Not just a CBT continuity thing either. I've always hated clear figures.

Disapointment sums up my reaction.

About continuity and canon...
Continuity and canon is 95% what is released and 5% what the fan-base collectively considers to be canon. Look at Star Trek, there have been a number of things in episodes, movies, and the books that were in complete contradiction with other episodes/movies/books (Star Trek V comes to mind...)

When something crops up which blatantly contradicts preestablished continuity or ignores a core concept of the genre (read "no invisible mechs"), the fan-base gets really hacked off (hence this thread) and after the dust settles, most of the fans choose to ignore the offensive material.

The problem with this Raptor sculpt, however, is that it cannot be ignored. With the novel "Far Country" I can put my fingers in my ears and sing the Star Spangled Banner is someone starts talking about it. But I am going to go to a tournament and someone is going to plop the Raptor onto the table.

There it is - an invisible mech - on the table. I can't pretend it doesn't exist or that it never happened, and clearly it's not just a "novelty item" if it is tournament legal.

So, that is half the reason I am so angry. We have a tournament legal figure which, IMO, flies in the face of the spirit of Battletech. If they had released it as a non-tournament-legal novelty fig to use in friendly pickup games, I wouldn't have created this thread.

The other half of why I'm so piss3d off is what I stated earlier - the attitude in which WK and Kevin have done this. I'm completely flabbergasted that Kevin had the audacity to come on here an post something to the effect of: "I know this is a huge slap in the face of continuity and I know it will pi5s a lot of you off but I'm going to do it anyway because I like Mechassault 2."

I completely understand the business decisions behind it. (Gotta get the drooling x-box playing frat boys to buy a couple of boosters of AoD...) I even understand that the increased sales might help the game in the future; but at what cost? Like I said before, there are just some things you don't do; some places you don't go when you are at the helm of a Science Fiction franchise with a huge number of veteran dedicated fans.

WK has gone to one of those places and Kevin, by his own admission, does not care.

So again...I just want you to remember this. Remember that Kevin and WK has given all you CBT'ers and dedicated fans the finger in exchange for some short term AoD revenue from the x-box playing frat boys.

Oh, I'm sure the Raven promotion will be a "smashing success."

Hey, maybe 'all you CBT'ers and dedicated fans' weren't getting the business in? The concept that WizKids might have more of a clue about their financial position than you do never seems to have crossed your mind. It's all 'they're messing with our canon' and 'they don't LUV us anymore!'.

Of the two successful venues I'm aware of, in the Twin Cities area (Unicorn and Village), there are maybe a third of the players who even have a clue what happened in CBT (I don't play at Outpost, so that could be another one). The majority of the players at these two successful (8 to 10 players and up) are kids who don't know and don't really care that House Liao and House Davion had this TSM fight thing going on. The other venues did have more CBTers and now they're dying because they didn't get the young kids in.

This is apocryphal data, to be sure, but it plays out very well across all the places I know of. If this is any sort of trend, yes, WizKids has to get away from pandering to CBTers and get some new kids in.

But here is my question---

why play this game at all?

There are other clix games, with simpler rules and far mor recognizable characters (e.g. heroclix). Young kids can easily understand and appreciate playing superheroes.

There are other miniatures games, some with far easier customization (warhammer 40K) and some with easily recognizable storylines (anyone wanna kill some stormtroopers?).

No, there are two things that draws people to this game.

1) Gaint robots are freakin' cool. The sculpts are cool. As such, this scuplt may bring some new blood in.

2) The community who plays the game is supportive and welcoming.

Neither of these has to do with cannon or not. And only one is influenced by this latest plastic scuplt.

I agree, no one who was at the helm of a vetern science fiction franchise would ever to anything that the veteran dedicated fans would have problems with.

Look at George Lucas. He kept his fans happy with the prequels-

Victory Class Star Destroyers
Z-95 headhunters
Boba Fett's life story

And in his remakes, he kept true to the original storyline
(Han shot first!)

Because he knew that if he did these things badly, it would cause sales to plummet, and no one would go and see the movies.

Are you really that gullible? Don' you get it?

The Raptor is not intended to bring new people into the game, it is a gimmick to generate revenue in the short term from a fringe market that typically would not consider dropping $10 on a booster of Mechwarrior. That is all it is.

And if you really think that CBT'ers don't make money for WK then you need to put down the crack pipe. CBT'ers are why this game exists at all, they are the one's who typically buy this game by the case instead of the booster. They are the ones that fronted their own money just to keep Battletech going when FASA went down the tubes thanks to junk lawsuits from an unscrupulous toy company, and they are often the ones who dedicate their time as envoys and get new people into the game.

So if WK should be catering to anyone, it should be the veteran Battletech players. They are the ones that have proved time and again their willingness to put large amounts of time and money towards keeping this franchise alive and thriving.

Mark my words, if you alienate the CBT'ers, this game will die.

That sounds famillar?

Kind of like what was said about the banning chat and how well FP sales are.

Glad you remembered that Kai. Nothing like throwing their own words back at them and seeing them stutter! Keep it up.

What is this even referring to? Do you mean "Raptor promotion?" Inside joke? Perhaps no one is responding because we don't know what this is...?

Expect to be facing off against fluffy_bunny in the next few months at a tournament?

Remember to field your inviso-raven, and bring along a copy of 'Far Country'. Set it up in plain site. Keep talking about 'how good it is', and 'how it's much better than any other Battletech novel'. You'll either throw him off enough to win, or get him disqualified after he leaps across the table and kills you! (ok, you'd be kinda disqualified too at that point, haven't completely worked out this system yet)

In general I don't like 'clear variants' because they're usually a cheap (no paint costs!) way for toy companies to bilk gullable collectors. This piece at least has a little bit of a paint job, though you can't tell much from it in the photo. As long as this doesn't become a regular thing, a one-shot doesn't bother me too much.

Please. Harmony Gold was not in the process of suing FASA when FASA went down. FASA went down because they weren't making enough money. FASA closed up shop before they ran out of money to do so gracefully, a fate that has befallen other gaming companies. They paid their bills, sold their IP and paid the freelancers. It was a classy move and I have no problems with it at all.

The envoys, here, in my life, getting people into the game aren't CBTers. Sorry, hate to burst your bubble, but it just ain't so. The hardcore CBTers are out (with one exception I can think of off hand). The places that had the largest 'hard core' players are dead. D-E-D dead. Not playing, not supporting, gone. The stores in the area are getting hurt because the people hard core enough to buy cases are also hard core enough to skip the venues and buy them from internet retailers. While that might help WizKids, it doesn't help the venue and lo, no place to play. The kids who buy boosters often do make more money for the venue than the CBTers.

If you want to be real honest about it, I am one of the reasons people are still in MW around here. I've been handing out free pieces like Santa, making tremendously lop-sided trades and setting up different scenarios at one venue. I also did it with the permission of the venues, because I didn't want to take booster sales away, because I know it's not just who buys the cases, but where and how.

Mark my words, if only CBTers are in this game, this game will die.