Thinking Outside of the Tesseract

Playing Mechwarrior Online , I’m reminded of how dated and unbalanced some the elements of Battletech can be. One element that bugs me the most is the Autocannon/2 . Only dealing 2 damage for a weight of 6 tons... 6! that’s not including ammo. The Autocannon/20 which does 10 times more damage weighs in at 14 tons. Lets look at the numbers... Weight Damage Damage per Ton AC\2 6 2 0.333 AC\5 8 5 0.625 AC\10 12 10 0.833 AC\20 14 20 1.428 Machine Gun 0.5 2 4.000 Heavy Machine Gun 1 3 3.000 0.333 Damage a ton? How’s that a useful weapon? Yet a Machine Gun , that does the same damage, is 4 Damage a ton... hmm. Solution, make the AC/2 3 tons, and 2 critical slots. At 3 tons it becomes 0.666 damage per ton, a little better than the AC/5. Now it’s a weapon you want to mount. More, it’s a weapon than can be mounted on light mechs. When your mech weighs 20 to 25 tons total, having 6 tons for a weapon and 1

Image from http://www.vintagecomputing.com You’re running an MMO and charging a monthly fee, you’re down 600k subscribers, about 9 million fewer coming in per month. The pressure is on. What do you do? *cough* Blizzard *cough* WoW *cough* A) Charge the same B) Charge more C) Charge less You select A) You have one big problem: and you leave the fee as it is... you lose another million, until the next expansion, which you see a burst of players. Then start losing more players. *Sound of Pacman Dying* You select B) Raise the monthly fee. It pays the bills! Then you start losing a massive amount of players in protest, as they will not be happy to pay more per month. In the end they will leave or shop around for a cheaper rate for entertainment. No go. Ok, how about hiding the extra charges? There is one industry that has been doing that for years: the airline industry. It’s working great for the airlines... right? As you add extras to the game then you charge