Speaking from personal preference, I much prefer to play with new tech, but when clantech was introduced, I wasn't even old enough to go to kindergarten yet. Calling it "New" is pretty laughable to me. Newtech is TSEMPs and CEWS, not Streak SRMs.
For me, between the time I started playing until Total Warfare was released and I found experienced people to play with, the Succession Wars introductory tech (Then Called "Level 1") was a nostalgic thing to play with every now and again... It made a great setting for the RPG... but there were a few major snags.
The first was that unless you were one of the oldbeards who were playing it in their teens because they wanted to play something based on the Robotech cartoon, getting your hands on the unseen minis was a very expensive endeavour. Especially with so many sellers putting up "US shipping only" or somehow jacking up the shipping rates ten-fold just to go over the border, it meant that you could only viably buy the considerably less aesthetically pleasing and usually less effective in-house designs. This also meant that the game felt like there were "holes" in it, since the unseen were the very first 'mechs in the Battletech game and everything else was built around them, removing them meant that there were gaps in roles that could be filled. Sure, you COULD proxy with the Project Phoenix mechs - but they looked nothing like the 3025'ers aesthetically, and stuck out like a sore thumb as a result. For all the gripes about 3025 mechs being boxy, on close examination they're covered in tiny armor plates, ports, vents, and other fine details. The Project Phoenix mechs AKA the reseen were far less detailed, covered in broad, flat surfaces.
The other issue with the old-tech is that it got stale very quickly. Playing with new guys? Probably need to use Level 1. Playing with old guys? They want to use Level 1. It seemed finding someone who kept up to date and knew their stuff was an uphill battle. Finding matches with guys who liked that tech level was a treat, and allowed me to use my main army with all my mechs like the Owens, Strider, Ninja-To, and Shugenja, using C3 Networks and MRMs, Streaks and Pulse lasers... But then being forced to dumb back down to introbox tech to teach more guys from scratch in the next match. When you're wanting to try out your 'mechs but get forced to shelve them because the other players either havent RTFMd or haven't been arsed to RTFM in 20 years, you get irritable.
The final thing I had with 3025 could be good or bad depending on how you look at it. I know that it was a period of salvage, where a 'mech might have been made in one faction, blown up, cobbled back together by the other side, blown up on another world, and cobbled back together by yet another faction. This was part and parcel of the feel of the setting. However, I could also use the lego blocks analogy: 3025 is like getting one of those megablocks sets...
...yes, you get all the blocks that you need to build things. You get the 2X4s, the 1X4s, the 2X2s, the 2X1s... all the foundations you need... but everything that you make draws from the exact same box of bricks. All the factions feel "Samey". Mention this, and I'll probably get a "Nuh-uh, the Zeus feels Steiner, and the Jenner feels Kurita", but the armor on that Jenner is the same kind as the armor on that Zeus, and the Zeus' medium lasers are effectively the same as the ones on that Jenner. Likewise with the heat sinks... Save for a few suggestions that get broken all the time like "The DC likes PPCs", (which interestingly enough of all the 'mechs they were producing up to 3025, only the Panther carried it) there isn't any real differentiation between each faction during that time period, especially if half of your army is running Warhammers and Marauders like everyone seemed to do.
Fast forward to the 3060s, and now we're starting to finally see differentiation. House Liao got their TSM operations going, the FWL is putting Ultra AC10s and Light Gauss Rifles on everything, Steiner got their new Light Engine and Heavy Gauss Rifles that make them spend more time on their backsides than they already did... The Dracs had C3 Networks on almost everything, and Swords on everything else, and the Davions were fitting everything with copious amounts of Autocannons and Targeting computers. This could be likened to getting the good lego kits, with the Space Police or Medieval Knight Castle set or Ice Planet...
...Every faction now had a flavor to it and played significantly differently from others. Sure, you might not be able to find a lot of creative ways to use that orange plastic chainsaw, but it complemented all those drab 2X4 yellow blocks to make a pretty cool base...
I can definitely see where the animosity stemmed based on the horror stories of older players. Fasa dropped the bomb on the whole community with bigger, better mechs and equipment in a time period where people only knew about balancing matches by tonnage. Fasa offered no suggestions on how to balance matches, save for suggesting that lorewise the clans used the least they possibly could in order to win matches, but do you think that the munchkins would ever use any sort of self-limiting when it came to matches? You'd have better luck hoping for that in the Mechwarrior Online community. You'd see people saying "I have a Dire Wolf - you have a 3025 Atlas. They are both 100 tons so this is a fair fight". Had FASA introduced a working, convenient point-balancing system at the same time, we'd likely have not had to deal with as much spite regarding the clan/sphere split. This would have continued on to the Fedcom Civil War, maybe beyond... but we've had Combat Value, Battle Value, and BV2 for more than 20 years now. Matches can be played with relative balance. Not perfect - perfect requires balancing done by supercomputer and adjusting for maps - defeating the point of a Pen and Paper game... but the nominal "balance" benefits given by 3025 gameplay doesn't really help the fact that the only thing differentiating the different factions is flavor text, not mechanics.
Edited by ice trey, 16 June 2017 - 11:05 PM.