#roguetech

Part III of the "Derelict" Flashpoint in the RogueTche Mod for the Battletech Game got reworked. One of the 4 C Rider Battle Armor units in it now (as of HHR 1.1.16) is a C Rider Devistator.

This unit can not jump and can not melee but has enough firepower to flatten the Base.

This Mod for Battletech is really well done and I respect the hard work the people behind it have done, however due to personally receiving negativity from people this has left the team a little bitter. I think they should remove themselves as much as possible with the interaction of the community since it has left a very negative impact on them and instead put people who are more suited to the task of handling interaction with the community.

Now I agree having a single area to handle tech support and dealing with tickets for issue with the mod, but not everyone likes discord. Now it’s great that discord system help with assigning troubleshoot ticket to those who can help, but my two times trying to help by reporting an issue to the mod team had felt very hollow. I got a really cold shoulder reception. I felt very shrugged off at trying to help report a problem that I was better off just not reporting it at all.

After I got done reporting the issue all I really saw in the ticket chat area is, “I already fixed that.” Two people were in the chat server for the ticket and basically talking to each other about the issue. Afterward I was left alone, no, “This is how you can resolve or get around it”, “Thanks for letting us know and we appreciate you taking the time out to report it to us. Unfortunately until the next update is rolled out this will probably keep happening.”

Nothing that made me feel like the little bit of time I’ve taken out of my day to report an issue to them felt even slightly appreciated. They may work well as a team behind the mod, but I feel like their social skills could use a little work. At least try to give some advice to the poor person who is trying to help bring problem to your attention, because if you don’t I rather wait or figure it out myself.

I mainly have been doing the latter. Playing around with the files and trying to see what sticks and what doesn’t. I read, “We don’t have to have a support for our mod if we don’t want too.” Which again, your mod and you’re right. Yet, what the point of support if support lacks social interaction with those who are trying to help. So I think they need take a step back and really think, “Do we want to do support?” If you really hate it that much, maybe just let the community help and only moderate to make sure things don’t get heated or out of hand.

This isn’t meant to be negative or positive, but more constructive feedback in how I feel about the little interaction I had with the team in discord. I get it, people are horrible and can treat you bad, but if you treat everyone, good or bad negatively are your really so different? I get mad, I get upset, that just part of being human, but if you take all the negativity to the next person your talking too and they have a minor difference of opinion and you blow up on them, who is really the bad guy here.

Some people are great at social interactions and some are great at programming. Again, I think some of the team is better at the latter and may need to get some people to handle the former. If the people better with social interaction can’t solve the ticket themselves, they’ll consult the team member and act as an in-between of them and the community.

Battletech is where the majority of my free time has gone. I really like this game.

I’ve finally beaten the story around the 60 hour mark. Post-game you can roam around and continue to do the mercenary stuff but it’s not as interesting because by that point you’re already super strong and there’s nowhere to progress. The game also pigeonholes you into having to fight at the highest level because you can’t take easier missions to train new MechWarriors or use the fun, but impractical in the late game, light and medium mechs.

Enter the modding scene.

Battletech has a burgeoning modding community. The game is in Unity, which means it’s easier than it probably should be to decompile and start injecting code into it Minecraft style. There’s already some very extensive gameplay overhaul mods which make the game more complex, re-introduce mechanics from the tabletop, make it more difficult, and overall expand your tactical options.

RogueTech in particular has really caught my eye. While I do think it goes a little too far in terms of how fast and loose it plays with the canon and timeline, I absolutely love the mechanics and gameplay style that it introduces. Mobility is much greater emphasized, maintaining your mechs is significantly more expensive and actually a challenge, salvaging a mech requires you to put time and money into repairing and refitting it to the point where sometimes it’s cheaper to just scrap the mech entirely, pilots get panicked and might want to eject if they feel the situation is hopeless, and so on. The mod also starts you in an open world without the campaign and with a random selection of light and medium mechs, so you can get right to it.

RogueTech takes an already mechanically dense game and piles on even more. It takes some getting used to, because you have to play it dramatically different from the base game, but it makes it so much more rewarding and more in line with the expectations I had in the mercenary metagame. The mod takes advantage of all the mechanics built into the management sim part that don’t really come into play in the base game because it’s so forgiving. Between the base game and RogueTech, it’s really solidified a lot of the themes and player choices I’d want to build into my own games.