On the off chance that Mongooser still slinks back to read this thread even though he has said he plans to post no more .....
I am a professional writer. I base this claim on having recieved royalty checks for stories in an anothology that was not published by me, and because I have published and sold at profit game books for the pen and paper crowd through my own company. And even been asked to sign some of them. In the spirit of total truthdom - I do not make enough from writing to live off of - but I'm still working on that - and my spelling is often horrible. (That's what editors are for
)
Somewhere deep in this list of pages you commented that you were not aware you could imply a tone in a written message of text. Please believe me sir, you certainly can. And often inadvertantly. My surmation is that you hoped to impart your original comments with a tone of authority and draw measured responses on the upper level strategy of crafting a free to play game. You saw your results, a pile of hate mail for the "professional". Not really sure I agree with the haters, but I understand where they were coming from and do not dismiss them as "kiddies" even if there was childish behavior.
You had some valid concerns, a few of which I even share. Many specific points have been covered, so I will only touch upon the concept of "end game". There are many storied events in BTech lore that can be used as mile-stones to a longer narraitive with the Clan invasion being the most obvious one,. So I guess it will be more a matter of players living out scenarios that start and end. Like Star Wars and Star Trek, there is no final end to the story. So there cannot be a destroy the One Ring type moment for BTech MWO players.
Having run a MW4 league I can imagine many things the devs could do to implement team play and build small communities that interact with each other. So I have hope that they will manage to pull something together as they are collecting the paychecks to make this all work and not me.
I do wish that the devs would seriously lay out their community warfare plans. I know they don't plan to have that stuff active until maybe December, but it would go a long way towards quelling my nervousness about the viability of the merc unit I am helping run to know what their plans are so we can do whatever we can do to prepare and work on building our own small community around some type of theme or purpose.
Other than that, all I have to add is that old school B Tech fans are very possessive about what they see as "their" game. And any tone of egoism or elitism is often cruelly crushed. Sure, I bet many units internally think they are the best players and know how the game should best be created - but they keep that talk in their own unit forums and don't run around here shouting "We dominated League XYZ back in the day so our opinion is obviously the best". It's just not the way we middle aged kiddes operate around these parts.