02-15-2016, 01:41 AM
(02-15-2016, 01:35 AM)Surge Wrote: So I've found out that in addition to MegaMek, which is the digital, java-based translation of the Battletech tabletop game more or less in it's entirety, there is MekWars, a strategic add-on to MegaMek that allows players to coordinate their MegaMek games as part of a persistent strategic war for the Inner Sphere, buying mechs, tanks, aircraft, and pilots from their faction's industry and managing their inventory of hardware. Now this is a stellar idea, MegaMek is a good idea by itself but it's kind of...well, barebones, but MekWars addresses that by not only adding unit persistence and context to battles but also providing a vessel to organize matches. There's just one problem, as of right now only two MekWars servers are running, MegaMekNET and MekWars Dominion, the former of which is a 3025 campaign, which means vastly restricted tech and equipment, and the latter is a 2765 campaign, which means less restrictive techs and more factions, but still a relatively small amount of battletech's staggering list of mechs and vehicles. To add onto this issue I've been attempting to use MekWars Dominion because fuck the 2nd Succession War, and quite simply nobody uses it, I think they've got 50 registered users total and the number of people online at any given moment seems to peak at 5, which kind of defeats the point of having the entire Inner Sphere and most of the Periphery to fight over, and rather cripples my ability to explore the system in depth. I would also like to point out that the whole system is very unintuitive and requires a dedicated user to decipher, which is no doubt partly responsible for the lack of players.
That's kind of sad actually. but then again. Almost all of the battletech tabletop games are done in very personally set-up games. And always have been, with not much wide range appeal. So it's actually understandable that such would happen even without the glaring issues throughout it. Though mostly it's just been that most people don't even know about the tabletop at all as it hasn't really been given much facetime.