This is a petition to get some real paint options for the founder and hero mechs. Understand that the Founder Mechs are special models, so it is unlikely we will ever get the full range of camo spec for them. It's unreasonable to expect to PGI to rework every new skin, like Urban Block and Dazzle, to fit a different set of models. This is just about getting the three basic colour choices - primary, secondary, and tertiary - for the special skin that comes with hero and founder mechs.
Points to consider on this subject:
- As Albert Tottleman so correctly points out later in this thread, the introduction of ECM has expanded this petition from the realm of pure cosmetics, and into areas of raw functionality. With large sensor blind brawls occurring on a constant basis, sharing your unit colour, or even having a uniquely painted mech your pick-up team mates can recognize easily, now has a significant effect on game play and survivability.
- The original founder's paint scheme has already been changed. Piranha altered the white trim on these mechs and made it brown instead. Founders have to pay real money to get the stripe back to white.
- It's just four mechs. We're not asking for the sun and the stars here. Also, no one is saying it needs to be done in the next 72 hours. If they just updated one founder mech a month, we'd have all four done by April.
- Founders make up a sizable portion of PGI's best customers. These are people who shelled out $30-120 to kickstart a game that was years from being truly finished, and helped make everything about MWO possible in the first place. Their founder mechs shouldn't be completely excluded from shiny new toys like being able to change their colour schemes. The same is mostly true of people who shell out $15-25 (and who knows how much in the future) for hero variants. Again, not asking to change the Yen's stripes, just asking for the option of recolouring them. All of that aside, encouraging your best customers to continue shopping is just common sense.
- The person who wrote the Nov. 30th Weekly Review talked about painting their Ilya Muromets black and white, and how cool it looked. This means some of what we're asking for is already in place, we just aren't allowed to use it.
- The worst that could happen is that PGI would make some more money. There's really no downside to making this minor change to the game, and it would make a lot of people happy, all of whom have already helped the support the game's production. Some portion of the development team is already devoted to these aesthetic designs, so it's not like the net-code optimization is going to be put on hold to deal with this issue.
Lastly, I will make a plea to all who respond here, whether they agree or disagree with me, the petition, or their fellow responders... PLEASE BE COOL. There's no need for either side to get insulting or mean-spirited. Let's pretend we're all tabletop gamers, capable of sitting across the hex map from each other and having a civilized discussion.
Edited by Thirdrail, 08 December 2012 - 03:26 PM.