Let's try to keep our discussion focused and on-topic, inasmuch as we can with a topic this broad, please. Focus on what parts of the BattleTech community you like and why, what to look out for, warning signs and dog whistles, things that can help other geeks feel welcome and above all safe.
It's easy -- and absolutely natural -- for a conversation to veer into real-life politics almost exclusively (since everything is political, but especially the personal), for topics to roam and wander a bit into recent history, social trends, etc. I get it. I absolutely get it. I, please understand, 100%, down to my marrow, get it.
But let's keep the rules in mind, MechWarriors. Stay on topic, focus on the hobby/community as much as possible, and refrain from insults that violate Rule 1, Rule 3, etc, etc, etc.
Keep it productive and community-oriented, and don't do anything that'll cause us mods to have to step in, okay?
It really does depend on the sub. I've found on Facebook and twitter it's non-existent. I've been doxxed on both by people angry that we made this sub a welcoming place and Facebook says the posts don't go against community standards.
Facebook has been a weird place since 2020, the algorithm got changed and a lot of posts seemed to just enter a void where no one saw them unless you were some sort of social media presence. I've gotten stuff from both side of the political spectrum personally and I have a tendency to ignore it all.Facebook has never been the place to get that kind of information in an accurate form.
I mean, that's a big task to take on so I can see why it failed. You may as well have tried to centralise all wargames with the variety of Osprey titles.
A lot of them are kind of flash in the pan things to be fair. Anything in the "blue book" like is a 50/50 chance of being an unedited, unplaytested mess, thrown together in MS Word with default table formats, or an instant classic that gets an expanded hardback 2nd edition. I've met very few people who really play any of them, rather than just buying them and talking about playing them.
Fair - of the ones I've picked up, I played two games of Pikeman's Lament, and trying to talk my wife into an Egypt vs Sea Peoples Lion Rampant 2 game resulted in me buying into WHFB again...which hasn't gone anywhere, even less than us picking up Battletech together hah
As someone who just got into this game barely a year ago I am happy to say that weird grogs and the fash-adjacent appear to be the exception among battletech players. Of course, I deleted my facebook account like ten years ago.
Nah. More on your grognards thing. The then mods stretched the definition of what no politics meant which angered the Reddit. It got so bad the this Reddit was locked down by the mods which prompted the original creator of the Reddit to come out of retirement to get it in order.
And yes, a replacement Reddit was made so 80% of the Reddit kinda followed some guy until it blew over.
You're misremembering. The prior head mod here specifically was locking/deleting posts featuring Pride-themed Mechs and the fan-made Pride anthology, claiming they violated the "no politics" rule while at the same time allowing people to post Mechs in WW2 German livery and such.
The alternate sub was created as a CGL-official BattleTech sub that followed CGL's inclusive "BattleTech is for everyone" policy (read: Pride-themed stuff is 100% okay, banning it is in fact a political statement against queer people). It existed briefly until the lead mod here was ousted by the original owner of the subreddit who came out of retirement to lock the server and clean house. The CGL-official subreddit was shut down because CGL doesn't want to run their own subreddit, and they pointed people back here, where there was a new mod team.
There is currently another BT sub where people who hate Pride stuff and generally who think CGL is a bad company that's silencing their legitimate political views about how LGBTQ+ people are sinners are going, but who cares.
And then I (1990s player) heard about all this happening elseweb, and when CGL were on the side of the Angels I thought "well I'll buy a box of 'mechs for old times sake and to show approval of their pro-LGBT+ stance", and then that one loance pack turned into a LOT of 'mechs... oops
Yep. I conducted a moderation log audit over a few days and spent a lot of that time unbanning people. Someone was banned for using a WWII allies camo that just happened to have pink in it, while allowing literal Waffen-SS painted Mechs, with decals from Bolt Action with swastikas etc.
Cause unfortunately that community also has a subsection of absolute fuckwads that the rest want nothing to do with. True tolerance is intolerance of intolerance in action there.
I remember this. Thank god the ship was finally righted.
I don’t understand this sort of treatment. If you don’t like the LGBQT+ stuff then just scroll past it. There is nothing forcing you to interact with it. Also banning it based on “politics” but allowing Nazi BS is about the weakest most obvious way of making a political statement that you’re a douchbag.
Wargame hobbies (nerd hobbies in general, but especially war/combat oriented ones) are a prime recruitment ground for fascists and other political extremists. Nerd hobbies are already full of people who have low self esteem, are lonely, and many who are angry and jaded with society. Fascists, tankies, racial supremacists, etc absolutely feed on this shit.
Be on the lookout for it, because you have to shut that shit down quickly, loudly, and publicly.
Agree wholeheartedly. Reminds me of the Michael B Tager story.
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you.
So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.”
and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And i was like, ohok and he continues. “you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.”
And i was like, “oh damn.”
and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.
I'm new to BT, but there's been a similar schism on the Warhammer side of things. They spawned a handful of grognard subs where they all complain about "Wokehammer" just because there are some female and dark skinned main characters these days. Which I find hilarious given the game started because a bunch of geeky British punks in the late 80's hated Thatcher's policies so much they made a whole scifi setting to lampoon it. The anti-establishment themes are baked into the source.
TBH I miss old hammer when the setting had the darkness balanced by humor and the lore wasn't structured around sucking the Space Marines' micropenises
I wasn't here for that, only returning to the game after a few years away and found this subreddit.
I used to be very active in the official forums and used to chafe at the 'no politics' rule there. At some point I came across an unofficial forum where many of the regulars were active in a more relaxed, unofficial, space. I didn't stay long as I quickly saw a post from someone I greatly respected and held in high regard express that while they loved their Uncle, their Uncle would forever be unwelcome in their home because he was gay and they didn't want their children exposed to sin.
As a man in his early twenties who just came to terms with being gay... I realized two things: I could never be open with them, and that the 'no politics' rule on the official forum was in place for a lot more than just fans of different countries getting heated over history. I could never see that person the same way again or the regulars on that forum who gave them a pass (or agreed with them). I never saw those people the same way again.
Thank you to everyone who subscribes to "Battletech is for everyone" and making this subreddit a safe, inclusive, space. That includes the mods, CGL reps and those that frequent this subreddit.
Thank you to everyone who subscribes to "Battletech is for everyone" and making this subreddit a safe, inclusive, space. That includes the mods, CGL reps and those that frequent this subreddit.
I'm a cishet, bearded, middle aged white man who would visually blend in with the most chuddy of WH40K fans, so my experience of such things is... limited... compared to yours and many others. I also grew up in a very "we're not [insert bigotry here] buuut" type household, so it wasn't until my teens that I really encountered people outside of that very, very restricted part of the spectrum.
I say this to establish my credentials to state confidently that life is so much better with everyone in it. Different perspectives, experiences, lifestyles, and the list goes on, all of it enriches a community. Encountering and conversing with and making friends with people who are different makes us as individuals better than we were before. We grow as people from the light of new experiences and shared wisdom.
I absolutely love that the BattleTech community and CGL works so hard to be inclusive for exactly this reason. If we weren't an actively welcoming community and didn't worry about making it a safe space, we would be diminished. It would hurt us so, so much more to lose our LGBTQIA+ members (indeed any group that brings diversity) than it did to lose our chuds.
And, just FYI, but there's actually like four BattleTech subs where people who hate Pride, etc, try to do that sort of thing. We've had splinter group after splinter group angrily stomp off, determined to be the new ones who make a BattleTech subReddit, but with hookers and blackjack instead of DEI hires and LGBTQ+ blue-hairs, or whatever. They come and go. Mostly go.
One of them wrote really terrible fanfic about the WoB deploying bioweapons that killed the entire Magistracy of Canopus because women running things at all ever is too woke.
I say wrote. He penned three sub-1000 word chapters and then gave up because it was boring and nobody cares.
And the thing is you can totally do crackpot politics in BattleTech and make it fun. I, for example, had a character I created who was a member of the Froness faction in the Magistracy (old money ghouls, basically) and thus a paleoconservative by their standards who thought that creating an education system was a mistake because educated peasants develop nasty things like opinions and then they start asking questions and demanding things and everything was better when the illiterate mud farmers were busy focusing on not starving, because everyone knew their place. She also didn't consider men to be fully human, and was vaguely homophobic because sure, women are better in bed and all, but to fully embrace lesbianism is to deny one's natural place as a leader of a household, and one must live one's matriarchal values by treating male family members extremely poorly.
And if she sounds terrible to you, don't worry, she got headshotted by a gauss rifle courtesy of Wolf Dragoons and turned into dog kibble when the gang decided to fight them for a lostech cache, so I've retired the character.
The problem is that they want to be serious about modern day politics in ways that aren't fun or satirical.
There's enough crackpot insane internal politics in BattleTech that we could just have fun with it. Matriarchy is a really wacky idea and it's fun for a larp but would be a nightmare in real life, and so creating wacky characters that want that nightmare is fun for me.
Unfortunately, puritanical political views tend to involve the creeping suspicion that someone, somewhere, is having a good time.
I for one don't care what your politics are so long as you're here for a good time and aren't going to be a dick to others.
If I remember correctly it was a bunch of dudes getting weirdly butthurt over posts of pride/trans flag mercenary painted mechs and trying to tie it all back to that wild Blaine Pardoe shit from a few years earlier; unless that was a different online forum community, fun times…
Pretty much. It was the "BattleTech is for everyone" notion that really sent them into a tizzy if I remember right. Basically a bunch of bigots trying to gatekeep the hobby.
Imagine having hands so soft and spines so weak you get triggered by the game with canonical catboys painting rainbows on their heavy metal death machines. Weak shit.
That and Blaine Lee Pardoe, 'historian' and author, announcing his angry departure from the stable of contractors, and starting his "omg I've been canceled" grievance tour.
I remember when one of locals had to be asked to leave an convention because he got so pissed off someone showed him this book cover, he started a borderline physical altercation with a trans person a third his age over whether or not it was considered “pornographic and obscene to display in public”
Central Florida baby, retirees and disaffected youth. Both love the beaches and hate eachother.
That cover was an April Fool's joke. Everybody loved it so they said fuck it and got a romance author to come in and make it a real thing. It's technically non canon but it's canon in my heart.
In the aftermath of the bloody, brutal campaign for Terra, Alaric Ward's Clan Wolf is victorious, but has paid a fearsome price. Their touman nearly crushed, the Clan must rebuild quickly, for there are more adversaries outside the Fortress Wall. Alaric, however, is resolute in his ability to not only restore the Wolves to their former glory, but to protect humankind's homeworld from all potential enemies.
However, there is much more that needs rebuilding—including the ravaged planet of Terra itself. And leading the charge is Dr. Darvendra Ellstone, head of one of the largest remaining non-government organizations tasked with helping save the exhausted, defeated populace and start restoring the planet's shattered cities…a monumental undertaking that pits her against the newly declared ruler of Terra, ilKhan Alaric Ward.
And when they finally meet, sparks do fly…but of a kind neither one expected. As the peacemaker and warrior work together, both try to deny the growing attraction between them. But when a new enemy arises, they must join forces to stop a deadly threat that endangers everything they've built together…including their clandestine love affair.
The Shirtless Alaric (TM) started as a shitpost meme image commissioned by Big Red-40 with donations from his channel members. Then it was shown to Michael Stackpole who did this initial first take on the story. Then CGL rolled with it and commissioned the full romance novel as their April Fools from another author Christina F. York.
Close, but not quite. The Pride '23 'zine (and the '24, and '25, and '26, and the other queer fan 'zines that have come along since, like Outreach and Pirate Point) was a fan production.
But a few CGL freelancers wrote for it and/or gave an opening statement, CGL signal boosted it like they signal boost any fan production that catches their eye, etc, etc.
So it led to a lot of wailing, tooth-gnashing, hair-pulling, and screaming about CGL "going woke" and "all BattleTech is queer now" and on and on and on.
Nah, there was an alternate that popped up when the mods locked this place down. It was retired when the old mods here were cleared out as there was no further need and no desire to further fragment the community.
Now I can't help but think of the subReddit as a IIC model. Replacing what was, and better in every way. Longer reach (literally). Less heat (stricter rules against flaming). More damage (higher activity rate, user count, post count).
We're a lean, mean, subRedditing machine, after a couple years of very pointed, very consistent, moderation (that hasn't always left everyone happy, but has given the community room to grow in a safer direction than it was before, and with more people feeling welcome and included).
lol, Reddit finally suggested the Chud sub to me yesterday after ages. Didn’t even remember it existed! One “show fewer posts like this” later and I can get back to forgetting it exists.
A friend of mine roped me into Facebook back in 2009, and I found it neat to be able to talk to all of my friends, and even found a guy who I was friends with when I was 6. I tried to convince my boomer mother that it'd be a great way to connect with her family back in California, but she didn't want to sign over all her information to a website that was giving her scam vibes.
At the time, I laughed at how closed-minded she was. Now I'm pretty sure she's the smartest person in my entire family. She called that shot like Markiplier did with Honey.
People hate CGL to such a massive degree, it's baffling. I've been playing Battletech for forty fucking years; in that interim period, some of my long time friends now identify as being queer of some sort. People who don't like that? Literally fuck off forever.
CGL has done some... interesting things to keep Shadowrun going over the last two decades, including mistreatment of freelancers, I can understand criticism of that. But when it comes to BattleTech they've seemed rather solid. I'm not a fan of the new lore, but they've done a really good job of keeping the overall game and IP alive and thriving.
People are still so bitter over their Kickstarter: I did it, wasn't a great deal, but I've been dissatisfied with every kickstarter I've done, I don't blame CGL.
I'm just happy the new source books have illustrations and nice color miniature pictures. I love that format.
I will say that there are Still people who haven't received their Mercenary KS products. Despite paying for everything, all the taxes, all the shipping, all the second round of shipping etc.
CGL in general is pretty decent at managing Battletech. But kinda sucks at managing everything else around it if you're not in the US or middle of Europe. Especially DownUnder, CGL keeps just not shipping to the local distributor here. So I saw one round of new stock on shelves, before I got my KS delivered, and then nothing.
Harebrained Schemes ruined every other kickstarter for me. They just set an impossible standard in both the response level and their fulfillment of it.
I've had a few Kickstarter pledges that I couldn't be happier with, most recently Lorescape (which only arrived at the end of July because being in Australia makes everything shipping wise harder for some reason).
The other standout is the MannKitchen Pepper Cannon. If you cook and like pepper, then you need to get one even at MSRP. It's fucking brilliant.
Part of the problem with the Kickstarter is that the problem is on Quartermaster Logistics, not CGL, but people are taking up their greivances with CGL. The one criticism I will give CGL over the KS, and its one they themselves have admitted, is that the sheer number of SKUs they offered, and the many, MANY configurations made picking/packing an absolute nightmare.
Now Shadowrun...hooooo boy, that's a whole other story. For as much as I've liked their handling of Battletech, I have almost nothing positive to say about their handling of Shadowrun.
"Mistreatment of Freelancers" in this case means that one of the higher ups at CGL stole company money and after the rest of the leadership held a prayer meeting to forgive the criminal, the only other result was that Freelancers didn't get paid for the work they did.
That's a dick move no matter which way you look at it and I'm them doing a halfway decent work otherwise does not make up for that.
There are legitimate grievances lots of folks have. CGL's had more than its fair share of problems in the past, whether that be with the timely paying of freelancers, keeping up with shipping and delivery schedules, you name it. We live in interesting times (that have certainly ramped up in recent years) and the gaming industry has always had some issues with professionalism, the treatment of contracted employees, and tempering expectations.
There absolutely are plenty of fair complaints that can be leveled at CGL, believe me. I've been a more active member of various CGL communities, from both sides of the NDA, than most people, and I've been involved in them for a very long time and from multiple different angles (including right now).
But the signal to noise ratio has always, always, been absolutely bonkers, even more than lots of other online communities. There have always been small but incredibly vocal groups of bad actors, for a host of reasons, that blow all sorts of things out of proportion, that make things up whole cloth, or that focus negativity beams on CGL for bizarre, often bigoted, reasons (I remember plenty of complaints about Shadowrun back in the day that focused on insulting Mormons and their magical underpants so heavily that entire rabid screeds then fell by the wayside, their snark and bile just made everything else people said ignorable).
Between that and the layer(s) of insulation that exist between any given social media site and meaningful CGL leadership? The complaints that actually reach CGL's ears are always a crap shoot. Sometimes a message gets so garbled by the time it's reached Loren or Randal that there's no relation to the initial complaint. Sometimes a one in a million complaint gets through and a molehill turns into a mountain overnight, for no good reason.
CGL complaints here from me are their awful inability to actually stock their product and their inability to communicate updates and changes. Actual game stewardship is fantastic and encouraging an inclusive community is fantastic, good on them for that.
Also, isn't catalyst pulling the IP back together after years of scattered bullshit licensing? I'm even hopeful we can get some Lego sets because they're actually cleaning up the legal side of the game.
No, it's essentially split into 3 places. Topps owned the rights to tabletop, lore books etc. Microsoft owns the digital games rights and Tornante (Eisner company) owns the film rights.
Lego doesn't like War Games and War machines, which is why you don't see tanks and military planes. An Sr-71 Blackbird was voted for one of the lego sets to be made, but not actually made. Though Star Wars gets a pass. Maybe one of the other building block companies might be interested in the IP if Topps or whomever owns that product allows it.
Yeah, i mean they basically spent like a decade forced to tip toe around Wizkids/clickytech, right? Like how long have they had to be in the driver seat really?
I kind of understand some of Kickerstarter people but I would say they botch kickerstarters but not the game itself.
The Kickstarters also got screwed by COVID happening and then the utter insanity that is the tariff war. Yes, there are management issues on CGL's end, but there are also distribution problems, Quartermaster Logistics problems, etc. International shipping logistics are insane.
Also, a lot of people who didn't get their backer rewards literally just didn't pay shipping on time after being told for months that they were going to get bumped to a later wave if they didn't pay.
Err, no. One or two of the original bods went to HBS, but HBS has since then been bought, gutted, released, and is now doing their own thing again in a different direction.
But it's very much not staffed by a ton of original FASA folks, or anything. It was mostly just Jordan.
I mean it's not like FASA didn't mismanage the franchise into the ground.
I know it's considered part of the charm, but the fact that the quality control ranged from horrendous to nonexistent on the old material really did FASA no favors.
I concur with other commenters, your mistake was using Facebook, ignore those Grognards and embrace the greatness of the Ilclan, I mean Blake, I mean House Kurita, I mean...
Average citizen of the Free Worlds League: there are two people in this world I can't stand! People who are intolerant of other cultures, and House Marik.
In my case, for the Battletech International Trade & Sell facebook group, which has no equal for seeking out Lostech. Those guys trade practically anything you could want from the franchise and they banish the awful eBay scalpers and their hallucinatory pricing back to Mordor where they belong. If it weren’t for that group, I’d have deleted my account years ago.
Stick around long enough and you’ll eventually discover the ways that the culture war trolls are also an unfortunate smokescreen for questionable line development decisions and an “aww shucks” mom-and-pop approach to what these days is once more feeling like a major tabletop franchise. I love the fact that Battletech is for everyone and the day it isn’t is the day I stop playing it. That said, CGL routinely frustrates me and other ordinary, not-troll players, and I’m sure that contributes to the signal-to-noise ratio, too. They’re slowly making improvements, but it’s difficult to keep a fan base happy that are now middle aged working professionals (who have a much better sense of what competency looks like in, say, web development, copy editing, logistics, marketing, etc.) rather than 12-14 year old kids. When you’re 12, you read a rulebook and think “oh there’s not a functional index to this rulebook? No problem! I’ll just re-read it obsessively until I think I’ve committed the entire thing to memory!” When you’re 40, it’s like “who designed this?” Or “It’s going to be how long until we get the Clan Battle Star?” Or “LAMs yet? It’s 2026.” That sort of thing.
To be fair to them, though, ACES seems to have been a big turning point. Lynnvander Studios did a fantastic job with Scouring Sands and I feel like it has nudged CGL to up their game. I finally got to check out the Core Box pack-in rulebook and the Draconis Reach book last weekend and the layout was night-and-day better. I haven’t seen the Core Rules book yet but if it’s the same leap forward in quality, that will be a huge win for Battletech.
I’ve watched a couple people go over the new core book, and if nothing else it seems to have a more rational layout and CGL finally found out about spellcheck.
Even just the pack-in book for the Core Box was really great looking compared to the older ones. No more tan/sepia (horrible optical contrast) colored pages, better fonts and negative space on the pages, actual flowcharts for table situations and how to handle them (the Alpha Strike book needs this sort of thing badly). The art was fantastic and there were even cool little in-sets of equipment art like in the old 2nd Edition era pack-in rulebooks. I was very impressed with that part of the box in particular.
Well I'm not going to pretend CGL is some saint, no company is. But it's problems that constructive criticism should highlight, not the "this company must die because (Insert Nonsense Here)!!!" In my short time here, I gathered CGL has been a much better steward for Battletech than WizKids was, and that's part of its steady resurgence.
Gaming and nerd culture kind of sucks though just with the reactionaries though. I've been a lifelong Star Wars fan, longtime Star Trek and Halo fan as well, I know the fandumb menace can always be sooo much worse. 90% of it boils down to "you're in your 30's-40's and raging that your favorite franchise no longer feels like it did to you when you were 12, but never realized you'll never feel like you did at 12 ever again because you're in your 30's-40's now" problem.
These guys all hangout in private discords and talk about how they can drum up community drama to make CGL look bad. Their stated goal is to get people to stop playing Battletech soncgl will lose the license and that someone else will get it and make it "not woke" or whatever that means.
They'd rather it die again than share it with someone who is different from themselves.
I am always sort of alarmed at the idea that the game/hobby/fiction/etc you like is somehow diminished by its current representation rather than the pure expression of joy it had been because of corporate interests.
The corporate interests are not new. They may be worse or better but cmon now. You can hate GW/Wizards of the Coast/CGL all you like but does this actually reduce your enjoyment of rolling dice and consulting a chart? It gives waaaay too much agency to what is effectively an IP landlord.
I don’t get it. I’m new here and it’s amazing that a tabletop system is so long living.
I’m from Warhammer 40K and it’s lifeloss with new editions. The game was on peak (not perfect) in the 3rd. Now we are in the 11th and no. It’s not getting better since 2000.
I like the simple rules here at Battletech. They are f**king 40 years old and the game is still on fire.
The hate against Catalyst is unbelievable. They are working on a game that would have been dead. I have seen so much game systems dying in the last 26 years and THIS HERE is 40 years old 💪🏻
Yeah, there is a subset of Battletech players who can't seem to enjoy their game if people different from themselves also enjoy the game. The "Battletech is for everyone" and general acceptance of all people by CGL and the larger Battletech community was just too much for them.
Those same dolts also don't realize that many of the old guard FASA are still involved with / support Catalyst.
As someone who has been playing BT on and off (tabletop or digital) since the mid 80s, I can say that CGL has been a boon for the game (as has Piranha and HBS), and the diversity in people that I encounter at BT events is great to see.
I do remember the outrage about the Clans at the time :) But, yes, I could only imagine the outrage if there was a broader platform (rather than a handful of BBS chat rooms).
EDIT : and thank you for all the work you (and the other mods) do here!!
There is one major problem I dislike about Catalyst.
They refuse to throw out the old rules and finally rebalance Autocannons, even though we have a working example of how to do that in Battletech the video game.
THAT would at least be something worth complaining about (upset the balancing of fancy new Autocannons rounds like caseless ammunition, AP rounds and having to be careful it doesn't upset the balance between snub PPC, plasma rifles and etcetcetc )
All these fucking No lesbians/gays/transexuals in Battletech is fucking boring. Back in fucking 1988, they were fucking mermaids and having orgies with GOATS involved. Half cyborg Mechwarriors, more machine than man as a horror of being burnt alive in cockpits. And you think having a sex change breaks the lore? Even better when it's Clanners, given how Maeve wolf is a sex swapped Jamie Wolf clone..... The scientist caste will do ANYTHING.
Have you seen the playtest rules? Auto-cannons are getting some love, at least UACs and RACs are, and those don't do the special ammo thing so it is balanced separately. I guess maybe they aren't playtest anymore but no idea when we can all get our hands on that new book.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. There's one specific page that does nothing but spitefully dunk on CGL.
I saw he made a post about the humble bundle, and I'm like "Oh good, finally something positive from him." Nope, he was showing everyone how to cut CGL out of the deal. Which, sure. Gives more money to charity, and is something humble explicitly allows you to do, but it's still meanspirited.
I think these sorts of posts are very self-flattering. Facebook definitely has its ugly communities, but it also has many healthy BT-focused pages. Reddit, too, has communities that can be welcoming and others that are explicitly reactionary, both in design and political senses. Both sites have a multitude of communities we can only ever see a sliver of, and casting one as one or the other just isn't going to ever be as true as us Redditors would like it to be.
So there's some extremely fair criticisms that people can have for CGL. If I were an outsider looking in (and I arguably am anyway), I'd probably think CGL is problematic. And right now, I'm a little irked that price per model is teetering towards Games Workshop territory while not being anywhere close to their manufacturing standard.
That said, 25 years ago I would occasionally see a couple expensive IWM models at stores, and they were functionally unobtainable to me anyway because of how expensive they were. CGL took this thing I love and made it massively available through plastic models, and broadly appealing with developments like Alpha Strike, and I'll always be grateful to them for that.
I really want a retro Atlas, the Lil Footballer one. The OG design, no, the one from before that one. The ORIGINAL original. Squat, broad, and looks like he's gonna power walk through a steel wall.
Grognonsense, if you will. I mean, me personally, I don't care much for everything post-jihad era, but that doesn't give me the right nor inclination to be a toxic asshole about it. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool, and you should eat them.
The only Facebook moderation of note for BattleTech fans is that of the official BattleTech (and Catalyst Game Labs) accounts.
But all the other BattleTech groups I'm aware of -- and I'm aware of more of them than most -- are either the right-leaning flavor of neutrality and apolotical, or are overtly right-leaning and vocally anti-CGL because the company's gone woke, or are somewhere on the spectrum between those two (one popular novels-oriented group, for instance, claims towards neutrality, but up to and including their moderators you'll notice certain trends like non-BT Blaine Lee Pardoe novels being posted all the time and glowingly praised, and 'woke' BattleTech novels by certain writers being universally panned, coincidentally).
And, please understand, when I say overtly right-wing, I mean very, very, worst far-right stretches of it. Not polite discussions about political differences and the prioritization of our tax dollars, but rather I mean helmed by guys who drop hard-r's on their personal Twitter feeds and in the private Discords they coordinate from, folks who criticize MAGA for not being xenophobic enough, folks who laugh about crusader and Nazi iconography being photoshopped onto BattleTech artwork, etc, etc. Very right-wing guys.
Facebook is basically the worst place to be a BattleTech fan this side of Twitter.
And it's what this Reddit used to be, several years ago, and still on occasion we've run into people for whom it still has that very same reputation (folks unaware of certain upheavals along the way, and now concerted efforts of years of very strict moderation pruning the community and letting it grow back healthier to the best of our ability).
I always wonder how these guys felt about the best mechwarrior in the galaxy being a woman (Natasha Kerensky), the second best being Asian (Kai Allard-Liao), and the most honorable samurai in all of the Draconis Combine being black (Minobu Tetsuhara)
All of that was in the Fasa era, so what exactly is Catalyst doing that is "woke" in comparison to what Fasa did?
Further, the guy they all seem to have a hard-on for, Blaine Lee Pardoe, wrote quite a bit under Catalyst. I don't think Catalyst can be blamed for his appallingly bad writing. They can and should be blamed for publishing it, though.
I’m generally pro catalyst and I support the game fairly extensively, but I’ll play devils advocate here and say that it’s good to have some cynicism.
I mean the meme here is definitely how ridiculous some people get, but it’s important that this sub doesn’t become an echo chamber for the company.
People have criticisms about stuff like the BSA rules or the nature of lance pack releases, and I think it sometimes gets downvoted to hell unreasonably.
There is a BT for conservatives Facebook group that is 95% whining about woke, the gays, fake thing that didn't happen and every now and then a post about Battletech. They even scraped MUL (which caused it to go down) and then stole Jeff's Battletech tools because they stripped his name out of it and renamed it freedom unit list.
Yes, but because they vibe coded it they couldn't figure out how to make it a functional website so instead you have to download it from someone's Google docs and run .bat files to get it to work.
Its fun. It has big robots. It seems they have new novels too! It will always feels different that stuff you had in your best years but it is pretty neat now to be honest. Really need di find the time for one or two If the new books
It isn't just on Facebook. Reddit thinks I like Battletech so maybe I'll be interested in "normal" Battletech. YouTube thinks I like Battletech so maybe I'll like Mage Leader. The algorithm sometimes hits (still glad it brought me to things like WolfNet and Wargamer Stories), but it lacks the ability to understand certain nuances.
I mainly use Facebook to stay in touch with family, friends, and local community. Not that I actually see much of that. Most of my news feed on Facebook and Google news now is either US/UK politics (when I don't live in either country), celebrities I don't know or don't care about, military stuff (I'm guessing because I play wargames, the AI/algorithm thinks I want current military news) and adverts for crowdfunded products (usually electrical devices I don't need) that are pretending to be unbiased articles, but are basically shilling.
I occasionally get reasonable posts from a Facebook group called "Everything BattleTech" - especially photos of nicely painted mechs. Most of my other gaming news seems to be clickbaity D&D influencers/news-sites speculating about the doom of the hobby. I do still get some superhero "news," yet it's often clickbait with a title suggesting it's about the MCU, but it's actually speculation about some comic I don't read.
Facebook went crap a few years ago, tbh, around the same time Amazon started suggesting more and more ridiculous products to me (hey you play games and buy groceries, so how about a new hammer drill?), and Google gboard started getting ridiculous with predictive slide typing (it now thinks common forenames from the other side of the planet are more likely to be typed than common everyday English words here) - 3 years ago it worked so much better than now.
I blame AI for all of it. The pre-AI algorithms knew my tastes much better than the AIs we have now. I expect because the AI programming is tainted by either business reasons or the CEO's personal agenda.
As long as outrage influencers have a platform to spew their faked nonsense, there will always be easily manipulated rubes willing to follow along without putting any logical thought into things.
I see this on YouTube aswell. It's a solid 50/50 split on old heads hating the new core rules, and others being super excited for it.
God it must be rough hating the world.
I'm new to the game (as in waiting for my first mechs to ship to me), and have had the exact same experience on Facebook during and post-GenCon announcements, like witnessing a wave of reverse-enthusiasm.
Never mind the fact that Battletech has been more successful under CGL than it ever before including the height of the FASA era, and FASA ran it into the ground by the late 90s/early 2000s trying to recapture the high from the early Clan Invasion era while throwing every idea at the wall to see what sticks.
Running it for longer does not necessarily mean running it better. I'm not saying either is above criticism, far from it, BattleTech has been a bit of a dumpster fire more often than not, but it is not that cut and dry.
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u/RussellZee [Mountain Wolf BattleMechs CEO] Aug 14 '26
Let's try to keep our discussion focused and on-topic, inasmuch as we can with a topic this broad, please. Focus on what parts of the BattleTech community you like and why, what to look out for, warning signs and dog whistles, things that can help other geeks feel welcome and above all safe.
It's easy -- and absolutely natural -- for a conversation to veer into real-life politics almost exclusively (since everything is political, but especially the personal), for topics to roam and wander a bit into recent history, social trends, etc. I get it. I absolutely get it. I, please understand, 100%, down to my marrow, get it.
But let's keep the rules in mind, MechWarriors. Stay on topic, focus on the hobby/community as much as possible, and refrain from insults that violate Rule 1, Rule 3, etc, etc, etc.
Keep it productive and community-oriented, and don't do anything that'll cause us mods to have to step in, okay?