I wasn't entirely sure about them at first myself, to be honest. My main goal was to simplify them while keeping the same number by renaming them. You'll notice that we don't have four different grades of sergeant anymore, for example. I was also going to put some German in there, but I couldn't figure out how to pronounce most of them.
Simplification is a good thing, in this case. I always thought the IS tended to go way overboard with these. I'm pretty sure that the LCAF has more ranks than it has mech classes.
(then again, I am a Lyran fanboy and thus should shut up.)
As for the German, pronunciation shouldn't actually be an issue. It only seems weird, it's actually pretty straight-forward. If you need help, just let me know.
What do you think of the proposed ranks at the end? Like them both? Hate them? Like one, hate the other? Praetorian?
I thoroughly approve of them!
The Praetorian is concept-wise awesome.
I just worry that we won't get much of a chance to hand these out. With the Mercs4free dead for now (and the Mechwarrior4 Foundation Group supposedly busy trying to convince M$ to hand out a license for free distribution), I doubt the Tigers will grow considerably in the near future. Heck, I don't even know if all the guys still have their installs. TF I haven't seen for months, and DJ hasn't checked in yet to confirm status of his install.
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While we're at it, here's a piece of info on Mercs4free from an announcement that was made between the years (Dec 28).
We can no longer maintain MechWarrior4 internally and we believe MechWarrior4 will continue to grow and prosper under the new direction of the MFG. We plan to continue working with MFG to ensure MechWarrior4 continues to function for the community. Allowing MechWarrior4 to move on allows us to gear up for dedicated development on our to be announced title. We will keep the community updated on the status of MFG's transition and we will let everyone know when their servers are functional.
Note:
- The MFG doesn't exist on the web apart from this announcement and a few forum posts by ex-devs. Which is understandable (since they don't even know whether they'll get the license), but more than frustrating.
- "Keeping the community updated" so far has been restricted to telling people that negotiations with M$ are on-going.
- Their "to be announced title" turned out to be a MMO to make shiny monies. I love how they tout their "Free-to-Choose: New Revolutionary Model", despite the fact that it's the same old pay2win scheme people have been using ever since the whole Free-to-play thing started.
I really don't like bashing these guys, since they've done an admirable job maintaining the free release for the last years and have had some pretty rough times (I don't even know everything that happened to Jeho, he was one of the lead devs for a long time until he essentially received several critical hits from Real Life. Darn, I miss the poor guy. Wonder what he's up to nowadays...). But holy frak, what a way to put an end to this.
It's actually quite sad - I remember listening to the podcast they did about Mekpak4, and the models they showed around of the Neuromancer and Turkina, saying they wanted to slowly migrate all the MP4 stuff to MP3.1. That was the status quo when I left - with hotfix 0030c in my hands and hoping there'd be a new version in a few months.
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Should this MFG ever manage to get a distribution license from teh M$, I think it's going to take a few months, so for now it's best if we keep this organized tightly. (It might also be interesting to see if anyone's up for an MC2 or MegaMek match, since we're already in the universe.)
