Letter from the Administrator: Backwards, Forwards and Back Again

Fellow MechWarriors,

Prepare for a mutha' truckin' wall of text! There is no TL; DR cause if I have to write all this then by god you are going to read it (or not).

WHAT WENT RIGHT THIS YEAR?

It has been a hell of a couple of months these last couple of months eh? We've implemented a completely new forum platform, imported as much of the old data as we possibly could, cleaned said data up to fit the new format, migrated to a completely new server to handle the increased server load AND installed a security certificate at the request of some of you guys. Hell we've even produced new themes and video content for the site. You guys, the community at large, have been instrumental in making this happen with your requests and challenges as well as Benefactor support.

Other milestones include breaking 5000 registered members for the forums (and already almost half way to 6000) and breaking 10,000 unique visitors in one day; this now happens regularly whenever new mechs are released. What started as "the little site that some people laughed at" has evolved in to the defacto place to go for information, discussion, debate and builds.

We've added Staff to the mix this year. With the addition of several moderators and a developing content creation team we have right sized our resources to meet the increased demands of the site. We will never be the Forum Nazi that other people have experienced elsewhere but now we have people, spread across the globe in different time zones, who can help manage and maintain the site. If you have any issues with any of them please speak with me directly.

WHAT CHANGED THIS YEAR?

We have always been a fan site that prided itself on being "for the community, by the community" and as such, our limited partnerships with other fan sites, have evolved to reflect the true impartiality that we tout as our mission statement.

PGI has taken great strides in an attempt to bring the community closer to them and vice versa. That being said, this has often times led to people feeling that the new spokespersons are simply repeating scripted, and well rehearsed, propaganda at the behest of our PGI Overlords, all the while getting paid to do so. Whether that is true or not is not for me to say or speculate upon. MechSpecs has always been the place where you will get the real updates as seen, and experienced, by the community itself; if a mech is shit we will say it is shit. If features within the game are totally useless we will tell you like it is. The inverse of this is that if something is good, or worth the money, you can trust that we will tell you so, provide context as to why we feel this way and encourage you to make your purchase decisions based upon fact, not marketing creativity.

WHAT THINGS ARE YET TO COME?

So, what is coming in 2015? Well, assuming that MWO will still be here in 2015 (and we're betting that it will) we will continue enjoying, playing, trash talking, loving, hating, frustrating, Mechwarrior Online.

I recently began recording, and producing, the PUG Life series of Benefactor videos and these seem to have been well received by our Benefactors. What is PUG Life? PUG Life is a series of videos that are released on a weekly/semi weekly basis (the next one will be after the holidays). In it I take one of the more popular builds on the forums, chosen by the Benefactors themselves, and run it through a series of 3 back to back PUG drops; no editing, no picking the perfect matches, no seeing what the maximum damage I can do is and then posting. This is a raw and real series that gives you the breakdown on a specific mech build as piloted by me, joe-average-pilot. These will continue on for the foreseeable future as there is a large diversity of mech chassis/builds on the battlefield these days and I have pseudo gotten back in to playing MWO in a moderate capacity (pretty much as a PUG..... for now).

What else is coming? Well, we have had requests for custom themes specific to Clans, Houses, Factions etc. and we are going to begin working on these over the holidays. I will probably go House, Clan, House, Clan etc. and then eventually round that out with pirate/periphery faction themes. These will be available to Benefactors only; sorry. The revenue generated from those donations help keep this site going and evolving. In the digital universe, even our hobbies are expensive!

In closing, I did want to make a special shout-out and thank you to some of the Benefactors, Space Pimps and Moderators here on MechSpecs as they banded together and secretly plotted to acquire a Christmas gift for me. I think they just wanted me to have some more mechs to do PUG Life videos on but regardless the Wrath Pack is now in the bucket and on the docket of "Things To Do in 2015". Yes, I will be reviewing builds on all of these mechs when they become available to help give you guys some context/information when making your purchase decisions; nobody wants to buy another Locust, ya know? So, to you guys that were involved, I say thank you.