Bishop Steiner, on 09 January 2017 - 09:51 AM, said:
Just for consideration, since you brought up that nit-pick: Look up mentions of that book on their own bg.battletech forums. You'll find threads where people were arguing with the developers on the canonicity and compatibility concerns of the April Fools books with Battletech as a whole (some were demanding how to implement quad-mounts on a mech for crit saving purposes, for example). Those threads are also all locked, with the developers making it perfectly clear that those April Fools books are NOT to be considered canon and are just gag-books made for sheer amusement.
They long since passed the point of "might sharply drop" in canonicity. Several developers had made comments on those threads about lamenting the creation of the books and why they have done them so rarely . . . those exact arguments, stemming from people taking content in the books as some form of canon.
Metus regem, on 09 January 2017 - 10:41 AM, said:
Because PGI either lacks the ability to or the will to implement new equipment that is rather important to mechs post 3053... I'd love to have the IS knock offs of clan kit like UAC/2/10/20, LB/2/5/20, ERML, ERSL and SSRM/4/6... it would be a lot easier to balance isERML vs cERML than it is isMLas vs cERML... with out the need for quirks that more or less turn the isMLas into the isERML...
This was brought up to Russ again pretty recently (I believe it was something on twitter, but it may have been one of the Mech Con streamed Q&A questions right before the presentations). If I'm not mistaken, the word put out by Russ was that the reason they're not adding any more weapons/equipment to the game, right now, is they want the game to have balance in a more "satisfactory state" before they proceed with any other equipment.
Of course, that leaves things in a very precarious or dubious position for when anything could be added (admittedly a pretty good cop-out for an indefinite timeline). However, Russ admitted to recently hiring someone whose sole purpose is gameplay balance . . . so it might not be entirely out of reality to see more gear added to MWO in the not-too-distant future. I wouldn't get my hopes up, though.
Edited by Sereglach, 09 January 2017 - 11:26 AM.