pbiggz, on 19 March 2016 - 12:33 PM, said:
Its a clan mech, piloted by clanners. Some of those clanners aligned with the inner sphere, but clanners they were, and your critical thinking skills are shaky at best, you've made this clear to everyone.
CW will always be Clan vs IS, so the clan tech, whether piloted by clanners who fought with the sphere or against them, will only be available to clanners in MWO.
Phase 3 is all CW will ever be. This you can neither deny nor debate, though im sure you'll try when you start talking about how "i make all your points" even when I contradicted every one of them, but again, critical thinking skills. You have none.
Ahem... so since you're actually using a degree of logic, I'm happy to engage.
First, we don't know that phase 3 is all CW will ever be. In fact, to say that is silly, as PGIs current plan is to support the game for another 5+ years. None of the whales that support this game will continue to play and pay if the game stays as it is. Simple fact. If the game stays in the same state for even another 2 years, it will die.
Moreover, our available mech selections in the current timeline are running thin. There are probably about a dozen mechs on the IS and Clan tech lines in the current timeline that players can reasonably agree on being in the game, and only about 50% of those are popular enough to sell well. Reasonably, PGI has about 2 years left of solid mech releases that will work in the current state of the game - using existing tech and working within existing faction lines. PGI has to sell mechs to make money to feed the game - so it's fast coming to a point where PGI will have no choice but to deal with the tech and faction changes in a post 3059 galaxy if they hope to continue their mech revenue stream. This isn't speculation... it's a certainty. There literally are not enough "easy" mechs to continue selling.
The MkII hightlights the problem with going outside the current timeline. It doesn't fit neatly into the game. We can say right now that MWO divides mechs by tech type, but that's not really true in the purest sense. It just so happens that in the early Clan Invasion, faction availability for tech was very neat. Clans were new, so only Clans had clan tech. Clans actually had IS tech too, but for MWO we don't let them use it, because IS mechs and tech originated in IS factions, so that goes into their toybox. Faction availability is still the factor upon which the lines are determined, not tech base... just as it is in the tabletop game.
And this works for MWO as long as we stay on THIS side of 3058. Lines are neat. But starting in 3058, they're not anymore. Factions realign in such a way that factions with native clan tech join the Inner Sphere and start fighting against the Clans. MWO draws as clear a line as the tabletop does about whose side which factions are on in the Clan/IS war. If you're on one side of the line, you're IS. If you're on the other side, you're Clan. As of 3059, Nova Cat and Wolf moved across the line and are now IS.
This is where the problems for MWO start. Lore dictates which factions can use which mechs, and every mech released so far has been done in accordance with lore. Lore dictates that mechs like the Nova Cat, Arctic Wolf, Mad Cat MkII, etc, get released to factions aligned with the Inner Sphere. But so far, in MWO, there are no mechs on either side that use tech from the other. But there's never been a case yet where a mech using one kind of tech was native to factions on the other side. But look at the game. There is literally nothing in MWO that prevents mechs with clan tech from being added to the Inner Sphere roster, is there?
MWOs build systems support proper build formats regardless of tech type, right? Battlemechs, omnis... clan, IS. And faction alignment for a mech is not something determined by some sweeping code that causes the game to examine all factors and make a determination. It's determined by a few letters in a pure-text document somewhere in game files. PGI could assign the MKII to the IS in the game right now, and it would function perfectly within the game system. Even in CW. The game doesn't care what tech each mech is using, only what faction it is assigned to - Clan or Inner Sphere.
So it really is up to how PGI wants to deal with the lore.
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