I also LOLed at him saying mechlab comes from PnP. That's not true --at all--. I think the first instance of *easy* pre-battle weapon swapping was Crescent Hawks Inception, though I don't think it was called 'mechlab' at that point in time and I think you still had to walk around in circles to burn the time away. MW2-mercs and Mech Commander popularized the term and made it the 'build your own mech' concept it is today. The mechlab feature was added FOR video games to begin with.
In PnP there was detailed sections of the rules involving weapon replacement and jury-rigging. It took time, money, and involved some serious risks. Prior to omni-tech it wasn't a good idea to reconfigure a mech unless you absolutely had to or unless you happened to have obscene amounts of C-bills and the best techs in the inner sphere to play with (ala solaris 7). Battlefield swaps often ended in weapon jamming, or even explosions. That's PnP - you didn't just shuffle weapons around at will. Mechlab is a video game concept, since players generally don't like to wait in real time for technicians to do their work, don't want to spend all their money to play with different weapons, nor do they like entering a battle and blowing their own arm off the first time they fire. Though tbh, I think I'd personally enjoy the latter lol.
Granted, for quick matches, most players just built whatever they wanted for the fun of it. But that wasn't so much by the rules, as in spite of them.
I also LOL at him suggesting that Mechs should automatically dominate the battlefield. That's a MW-kiddy's claim, not a PnP nerd's claim. Mechs didn't always dominate in PnP. Go read the very first BTech novel - Decision at Thunder Rift. Grayson is killing mechs with 'jeeps' and sachel charges even before he gets his own mech. But in spite of that mechs still have very specific advantages. In PnP a tank could be just as tough, much cheaper, but seriously restricted in mobility and operating environment. Few tanks were designed to operate in vacuum, or drive under water, for example. In MWLL as currently implemented the weakness of vehicles isn't really highlighted, since there are no objectives to achieve. If you had to take 4 points on a map, had to cross numerous terrain obstacles and didn't have all day to do it, I think you'd discover very quickly why the more mobile battlemechs are already superior as they are implemented *right now*.
As for battlearmor, I find it ironic that while he (erroneously and backwards from the truth) claims that mechlab is pnp and not meant for Video games, he fails to understand that Battlearmor's strength is in itself a concession to the video game environment, instead of being bound to strict pnp rules. If 5 BAs were equal to a mech (5 to a point, ala clan organization), almost no one would play one, and we'd never see them (short of ejections). When you see a BA, think of it as a team of 5. It works out just fine, and tbh after the lag fix BA might just be too easy to kill for anyone who can aim worth a damn. Although we sometimes meet a BA purist who makes us eat those words, it's not very often.
