Mechwarrior Online Offers "Sarah's Jenner" For Cancer Research

[Andy Chalk]

Mechwarrior Online Offers "Sarah's Jenner" For Cancer Research

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Mechwarrior Online is raising money for the Canadian Cancer Society through sales of "Sarah's Jenner," a special hero mech based on a model favored by a five-year-old player who died of brain cancer in May.

In May, five-year-old Sarah Marie Alida Parries [http://mwomercs.com/forums/topic/119110-for-sarah/] of Vancouver died after a struggle with inoperable brain cancer. She was a fan of Mechwarrior Online, which she played with her father Jon; her favorite chassis was the Jenner with Streak SRMs, "because she liked to lock on" to enemy targets. She also got a blast out of running around with nightvision engaged, blazing away at bad guys with medium lasers.

In the wake of her passing, many members of the MWO community called for the creation of a special "hero mech" in her honor, and today Piranha Games announced that it has done just that. "Sarah's Jenner" is on sale now for $10 and will remain available until August 20, with all proceeds going to the Canadian Cancer Society.

Because of the special nature of the mech, it cannot be purchased for C-Bills, nor can it be sold, and each player may only purchase one. To encourage players to contribute, Sarah's Jenner will not require a standard mech bay for storage but will instead come bundled with its own exclusive bay. For gameplay purposes, the mech will be treated as a regular JR7-D, with a ten percent experience boost per match.

This is an absolutely wonderful gesture on the part of the Mechwarrior Online team and the community is responding brilliantly, raising over $6000 less than an hour after the initiative went live. Sarah's Jenner may be purchased at Mechwarrior Online forums [http://mwomercs.com/sarah].




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[MetalMagpie]

That's such a lovely thing to do. Full respect to Piranha Games and the MWO community.

 

[Hammartroll]

"She also got a blast out of running around with nightvision engaged, blazing away at bad guys with medium lasers"

something about the medium lasers struck me as being awfully cute

 

[LordLundar]

Ah good, she went with the Streaks. Good girl. Iron sight SRMs are a pain to deal with.

And this is awesome. The teddy bear on the leg was a nice touch. I love it. :3

 

[RicoADF]

Such an awesome thing to do, kudos to Piranha Games and bonus points for making sure it's not being exploited to resell for profit by others.

I'll be grabbing this in a few hours (waiting for pay to come through)

 

[geldonyetich]

Nice of them to offer to donate to cancer proceeds, but I still won't play their game until they offer an alternative ruleset where the different weapons have varying accuracy. An alternate ruleset so the rest of you can keep playing the game wrong if you want to, but let me play it right.

I've seen recent gameplay footage of Mechwarrior Online and, sure enough, everybody's using medium lasers because the Battletech weapon balance is completely broken that all other weapons (except maybe LRM for harassment purposes) are a waste of time. Variably weapon accuracy is the reason why a large laser does only 3 points more damage than a medium laser but weighs several times more, has a worse heat ratio, takes up more critical space, ect. The whole game was designed around that balance.

It was similarly broken in Mechwarriors 2-3 because of this. Mechwarrior 4 completely threw out the old construction rules because of this, and was better for it, since the old construction rules are not balanced for pinpoint accuracy at all. Apparently Mechwarrior Online decided to be more faithful to the old construction rules while still making that cardinal "all weapons have pinpoint accuracy" mistake.

Variable accuracy so core to the design that it's even the way sectional armor is supposed to work, with the armor on a mech working as a unit. Pinpoint accuracy makes it relatively easy to just pick off sections at will, which turns the whole idea of having sections into nothing more than a liability. I'm not sure how faithful Mechwarrior Online is to sectional damage so maybe that's not as big of a deal - Mechwarrior 4 largely removed several redundant armor sections because of this to solve the problem.

Maybe it seems a bit draconian I'd put game balance ahead of a cancer research promotion gimmick, but that's just how strongly I feel about this. I've had to slog through several Mechwarriors with this problem. Won't somebody just make a flippin' Battletech simulator that has variable weapon accuracy already? We haven't had one since Mechwarrior 1. I would love to help save people from cancer, but must my reward be the rights to pilot a mech that exists only in an example of the reoccurring butchery of an extremely important aspect of my favorite tabletop wargame IP?

 

[Jesse Billingsley]

Nice of them to offer to donate to cancer proceeds, but I still won't play their game until they offer an alternative ruleset where the different weapons have varying accuracy. An alternate ruleset so the rest of you can keep playing the game wrong if you want to, but let me play it right.

This isn't about what you want you know...This is about Sarah...

Kudos to Piranha for having the courtesy of naming a mech after one of their players so she may be remembered forever. Even though I don't have the game myself, as a Mechwarrior fan, I have to tip my hat to you guys.

 

[geldonyetich]

This isn't about what you want you know...This is about Sarah..

It's about both, you bleeding heart. They're basically leveraging sympathy over a five year-old succumbing to cancer to sell something. Yet, I don't really want to malign them for this, because if they're going to donate some cancer research money, that's ultimately a good thing. I hope this move pays off great for them, lets have more companies do that.

How this becomes about what I want is because they're doing this because they want me (and everybody else) to play Mechwarrior Online. That's the whole point of this move, it's a hook to get people to buy this Jenner variant out of their micro-transaction store and maybe even get some people with those feels to play the game who weren't already.

Unfortunately, I already want to play Mechwarrior Online, I think the game looks awesome, but I can't as long as I find something so critically wrong with it that I can't. Fix that, and I'll buy five Sarah Jenners. Then I'll stackpole them until it causes passive kemotherapy leave the game and cure all cancer everywhere.

 

[geldonyetich]

Hi, yes, first of all I'd like to say "you're an idiot" for several reasons.

First of all, saying "i know how the game works because I've watched other people play it" is just absolutely ridiculous. You don't know how the game plays, you don't know what the mechanics are like in real time, you don't know anything about it other than you've seen some footage and that's that. To do so is ignorance at its finest scale and it's like saying you know what it was like in Vietnam because you watched Full Metal Jacket and We Were Soldiers. Unless you've experienced something firsthand, you've got no friggin' clue what you're talking about.

For example, Medium Lasers are not the 'go-to' for anything. They're a good brawling weapon and are used for stripping away an opponent's armor so that your other weapons (SRMs for example) can deliver the final killing blow and they ALSO do not deal all their damage upfront. 'Pinpoint damage' is not nearly so easy either as an experienced and capable MechWarrior knows how to twist his torso and maneuver in such a way that the damage will be spread across the different sections of the torsos and to the arms.

You're also suggesting something that completely removes player skill from the equation and is better suited for a turn-based RPG. 'oh i died because the dice decided that i don't hit that guy' works fine for table top but not for a real-time game, especially one as competitive in its nature as MechWarrior.

Secondly, your reading comprehension is apparently lacking because PGI is making absolutely nothing from this. Zero. Zip. Nada. Nil. 100% of proceeds go to the Canadian Cancer Research foundation.

So do us all a favor, take your cynicism and your pettiness and go the hell home.

You know, some people know how to respect the opinions of others, even if they don't particularly agree with them. This is something else.

In any case, I read everything you had here and already knew all of it, so as far as I can tell you're just being insulting and deliberately misinterpreting me in the worst possible way because you've decided you don't like me.