and my reasons to say this are:
- power creep
- running costs
- patches
- trial mechs
power creep - is the whole base on which BT is built on, you have the IS, then you have the Clans with their better tech
until the balance of new mechs and existing mechs is settled, owning a mech is just begging to be sold at a later date
limited number of mech bays is not helping either
running costs - maintaining a mech costs C-Bills, repairing it, rearming it (even if many suggest using the 75% free rearm, ending up in battle short of ammo is no fun moment)
owning a mech you'd want to upgrade it, structure, maybe DHS, why not, a XL engine ... those cost C-Bills, a lot of them
you will end up with a build that costs more to maintain than you can make in a match, and that will get you back to running trial mechs just to support your build
patches - every patch brings some nerfs and/or some buffs that may or may not affect your owned mech(s)
my case: I owned a Catapult A1, I built it with 6 streaks and it was quite good at support role and light hunter, then the patch came, made LRMs godlike
for me to keep up I switched to LRMs+Artemis, then the hotfix came .. I switched back to streaks to find out they had more spread and miss the target in large numbers (and this wasn't mentioned in the patch notes)
in the end .. I sold it
trial mechs - you want your daily MechWarrior fix? stick to playing trials
you do not have to maintain them, they do not eat ammo and there is no downside getting destroyed in the match - no repair bill
you earn money with them and when you feel comfortable the power creep and the patches won't affect your desired build, go ahead and buy your mech(s)
got bored playing same mech, well you have 4 of them and each patch there is a mech rotation
learn their characteristics, by the time you will own your own mech you'd mastered their handling and you'll know their weakness
Edited by zmeul, 10 November 2012 - 04:07 PM.