It's tough finding active Battletech blogs out there!

It just is.

I don't know why this is, but it seems that as games go, Battletech isn't one that inspires people to blog about it for very long. Scrapyard Armory being the singular exception, and it hasn't been updated since the beginning of this year?

So why the heck is this?

I have my theories:

1. The game's release schedule isn't very active, or very stable right now. I know what the upcoming pages on the CBT site say, but then we see a beta for the Battletech Master Rules, part deux, a cover painting for ilClan, but has Alpha Strike been forsaken? Depends on whom you talk to.

2. The feeling that many at CGL don't have as much love for Battletech as they do Shadowrun. I had one person in the know (whose identity I will never reveal, so do not even ask) tell me that Battletech was seen as a loss leader, as compared to Shadowrun and that there was some enmity between the two teams.

3. Do we the fans bear some responsibility? I am an old grognard whom at 11 years old was eagerly leafing through his copies of the 4th Succession War atlas and just going "wow". We got spoiled under FASA in the 3025 years. We did. The Clan years were good too. But something happened around the mid to late 90s as the game moved into the 3057-8 era. The quality of the writing declined on the sourcebook side, this continued for a while, until Fanpro came along. Was the Jihad the best executed idea? No. But Battletech is a game that must evolve, and Fanpro, for better or worse was stuck with the Jihad and the changes Clicky-Tech wrought. They did the best with what they had.

And how did a lot of fans react? "If you don't love 3025, hippie, then get the hell out of CBT." A lot of fans, I hate to say it, did just that. Can we blame them?

So, we are left with a game in limbo. A game that like a shark, must keep swimming forward to survive. If we do not swim forward, we will die.

I for one, do not want Battletech to die again. I don't want us to just be some new hot property for a computer game (which does look good by the way). I want us to live and breathe again. We must do this, for the sake of the game.

How do we do that? I have my opinions, which I plan to keep to myself. This isn't the place for that. This is food for thought put out to you, the reader. So, tell me readers. How do we move forward, how do we get our game back on top again?

Because I am damn tired of looking up from the bottom.