Gasboy, on 03 August 2014 - 11:22 AM, said:
Those who hold the rights to publish Battletech material are entitled to use the name Rifleman. I believe PGI could as well. The problem lays in how different the in game Rifleman is from the Macross destroid. Even the slightest similarity could cause a lawsuit. It comes down to how willing PGI are to fight it. As long as they keep backing down, HG will continue to suppress the unseen/reseen mechs.
That said, still waiting for a Marauder.
Also...
[Picture of a Dragon]
Dat nose...
Yes whoever owns the rights gets to use it but the problem is that HG has either a person (most likely) or a program designed to look for keywords on any new content. So the names Rifleman and Battletech coming up in one of their searches would throw up red flags and they would then prepare a lawsuit. The reason why companies back down is because of the costs of having to pay a lawyer or group of them hourly to fight it out in court which can easily cost $100,000+ and also the bad press. Hasbro backed down rather than fight it out over their Starscream, which they could have easily won, because they figured that a payout would be cheaper than a drawn out court case when they factored in the bad press, court costs, risk of loss, etc. PGI just does not have the resources to risk this.
Also the reason why that I believe that HG looks more at keywords than images is that the Jagermech looks very close to the Rifleman but they have yet to have any complaint thrown at them.
Oh and P.S. Nice Dragon.
wanderer, on 03 August 2014 - 11:36 AM, said:
Reactive and reflective armor are, in and of themselves, specific armor types in Battletech. A module would be kinda silly as a result. Reflective shows up in 3058, reactive 3063 (and has the nasty drawback of occasionally self-destructing the entire armor section when damaged).
Really, a lot of tech complaints are simply a matter of being in an early point of the timeline- and heck, we're missing considerable chunks of tech as it is. I'd rather see them add what's currently historically available but not in the Mechlab and actually get the Mechlab able to match TT-construction ability (currently, it's flaws preclude putting in the Urbanmech from kludging engine installation, anything that spilt-locations an AC/20 mount like the King Crab, or uses an Arrow IV launcher) before skipping ahead further and ending up with even more messes.
Granted they are a little off in the timeline but given the current issues with balance and that they are not adverse to fudging some details (ECM) that it is a possibility. The reason for making the armor a module is that they would be addons to modify the properties of armor. This would fit perfectly with their module system and give us more options to balance things against the meta. Use in tournaments would be: you know that the other team uses ballistics or missiles heavily then you could have your team slap on the counter armor module and you would have an advantage. But the other team could predict this and change their play-style and then turn their disadvantage into their advantage. It makes things more interesting without being OP like ECM.
Also the reason that we do not have the King Crab or the Urbanmech is PGI's lack of foresight. They could easily have added these options into the mech lab when they were designing it but it never occurred to them to consider that we would want those mechs. The King Crab is the easiest for them to add since they can fudge the build a bit and just remove the lower arm actuators and fit a regular AC20 in. It would be no worse than a Dire Wolf or AC40 Jager.