My understanding of how founders mechs work, is they use the same pilot tree, so the trees will likely be merged.
Secondly, my understanding is they had a great idea for a competition.
It went really well but PGI outright said "man guys, this took a LOT of time and effort on our part to compile results. This is cool, but it's not worth developer time."
So I suspect after they did all this, some guy said "hey, you know what might make this kind of thing worth our time in the future . . . ". So probably not an evil conspiracy.
Even if it was, so what? Would I have voted differently? Sure.
Am I hurt by it? No.
Back on the main point:
Would I buy it for MC for 5% exp boost when I prefer the 1C variant which can run similar weapons? Of course not.
Would I pay 2,000 MC for even a 1C variant with 5% more exp? No.
But will other people? I don't know.
If 2 of them sell, obviously, the rewards aren't worth it.
If 500 of them sell, PGI made a good money making decision.
Given how the coding works, I bet it took one guy very l ittle time to create Champion mechs (by create I mean add in code that says "if you play this mech, you get 5% more exp!", not the whole competition thing).
If they don't sell at all, they've delayed a feature I want by 1/2 a day at most, for nothing.
It won't hurt my game play at all. I can just not buy it.
IF they sell 10,000 of them, it won't hurt me at all, because I can buy an identical mech with C-Bills and just play 5% more games on mine.
But it will help me, because that's potentially $100,000 - the cost of a new chassis!
So why the *anger*?
It will be desirable, or it won't.
If it's not desirable, they'll increase the bonus or they will not introduce any more champion mechs.
Either way, it hurts no one.
And yeah, actually, when I started, I bought mechs with MC.
Why? Because I was willing to pay $30 bucks to support the game, And that got me 5 mechbays and 2 mechs.
So the day after I Finished my 25 games I had 3 different mechs I could play.
In contrast, I could have spent that money on one hero mech and nothing else.
IT could also depend on price point.
IF champion mechs are 1250 or lower, that's $8 to save myself 60 games.
That's 10 hours of my life.
Yeah, sometimes 10 hours of my life is worth $8.
(Why? Because maybe I have 10,000 exp on the trial mech and just want to play a dragon!)
In fact, here's a novel idea.
You said it is dumb to buy c-bill mechs with MC.
Let's say your right.
Let's say a mech costs 5 million cbills (2000 MC).
No one would pay MC if they're smart (according to you).
But let's say for 2000 MC I get the same mech AND a 5% exp bonus.
Now suddenly, it is looking a lot more tempting because the eXP bonus is a free perq for spending MC. In other words, suddenly there's at least a small reason to buy these variants with MC.
Best of all, it's not pay to win at all! Not even *potentially* P2W like hero mechs could be if they accidentally introduced one that was the best in chassis. The more money PGI makes on things like that, the better this game will be for all of us.
I'm just saying, why the hostility, man? Take a chill pill and relax!
Edited by DanNashe, 15 April 2013 - 07:04 PM.