I think a larger problem is a failure by the core player base to really recognize how Battletech fits into the current war gaming landscape. Boardgaming has changed in the last 30 years, and with Battletech staying steadfast to its original rules it has been passed by with time. There is the tendency I think for groups of fans to resist change because they fear losing something very dear to them, but the danger is that without change the game will stagnate, fail to grow and possibly even disappear. Catalyst has made great strides raising the production and art values over all, delivering if nothing else some well-produced books. People can argue the value of their content but most don't discredit the full-colour pages or the myriad of other books, such as historicals, which have been released. Yet despite these advances, the core rules of the ground game has not changed to any large degree.
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that's an attitude that should be more readily adopted by more players, the game is great but in this era of gaming it probably will not appeal to a lot of people and that's not because those players are flawed its because the game doesn't connect as well with a modern audience. Is this example definitive? No, but my prevailing feeling is that change appears to be a necessity.
I found this post interesting, so I want to share my own experiences.
Storytime. Skip the next two paragraphs if you want.
I started Battletech in high school in the late 90's when I joined a group of older kids who had a group that played every Thursday. They were experts; I was a good four or five years younger than them. They never gave me the rulebook. They just said "look, this is how you move, this is how you shoot." They gave me (and a couple of other kids around my age) a bunch of 3025 Inner Sphere basic 'Mechs like the kind you get in the introductory box set (we wouldn't have known anything about that... they were all just big stompy robots to us). Meanwhile, they brought their customized top tier homemade 'Mechs using advanced Clan tech like ER PPCs, Arrow IV with special munitions, C3 slave systems, double heat sinks, endo-steel armour and so on. They put all us young kids on one side and themselves on the other and creamed us every week. We kept at it, because we didn't realize that our 'Mechs and theirs were on a fundamentally different scale.
The second group I played with was in college. I was much more experienced, had bought a couple 'Mechs of my own, read the rulebook (one of the high schoolers gave me one of his beat up master rulebooks when he graduated). I had even read two or three of the fiction books and played the Mechwarrior 2 computer game (one of the first computer games that I owned on CD instead of 3.5" floppy disk). The college group were "professionals." Each had their own opinion about the most powerful 'Mech and they argued about it until they were close to throwing punches. Each one owned at least 100 metal Battlemech models and every TRO. They scheduled weekly games over email and would only ever play one format: a massive game with around a dozen 'Mechs per side on an 8'x6' table. Of course, their games typically lasted around 6 hours. I stuck with them for a while, but this was way too much of a time investment for a commited fan but a casual player like myself. Plus, when you played, you were always on a team with two or three of these professional players and they would criticize me very harshly if I made a maneuver which they did not feel was tactically optimized (that is, every move I made). And it was no holds barred... if you made a mistake, the other team would exploit it mercilessly and expect nothing less from you.
Ok, storytime over. My experience is not that the rules of Battletech are somehow out of date with modern gamers. It is true, games have changed a lot... games in general are a lot quicker, more simple to pick up and brightly and beautifully packaged. They have the "strategies" and "tactics" of the game baked right into the rules and clearly flagged by the designers so that a new player can instantly see the "combos" that will make a play session exciting and fun. Battletech is obviously "old school" in that regard, since you learn the effective strategies by initially failing. And failing a lot. But that is not a problem, and it can even be quite fun if you can do this with friends (or at least friendly players) and be as enthusiastic as I was to compete against your own record and do better next game. The real problem in that regard is that, at least in my experience, a lot of Battletech gamers and clubs are really toxic.
But I don't really see this as a problem with the rules. Battletech's popularity is not because of some wistful nostalgia... rather, at its heart Battletech is a really great game.
I will say that in my modest two decades with the game, Battletech has increasingly folded the "kitchen sink" into the default rules. To this day, I turn to the 3rd Edition rulebook when playing Battletech (I own Total Warfare too, but it sits on the shelf looking pretty). If you look at the 3rd Edition rulebook that came in the starter box, it is dirt simple and incredibly slim. It's the same rules as Total Warfare in essence, but 3rd Edition has a different understanding of where you draw the line between the "core" game and the "expanded" advanced rules of the supplements.
