MechWarrior/YMMV

• And the Fandom Rejoiced: The announcement of a new MechWarrior game in 2009 was met with universal approval.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Hits 4 and Living Legends pretty hard. Want to play Living Legends? Be prepared for a lot of sand. All the maps that are popular on servers involve lots and lots of sand. TSA_Sandblasted, TSA_Palisades, TC_Deathvalley makes up 90% of the populated servers.
• Crowning Music of Awesome: Mechwarrior 2 is full of this, and Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries starts playing heavy metal at the start of massive firefights.
  • For example: Mechwarrior 2 has Labrea, Circle of Equals
• Demonic Spiders
  • The Vulture B in Living Legends, which has 4 Dual Short Ranged Missile-6 launchers. While the missiles are individually weak, the missiles can be fired almost constantly, they have huge explosion effects, smoke trails that obscure the mech firing them, and the the missiles can rock the target's pilot around so much that they simply cannot fight back.
  • Aerospace Fighters in Living Legends, to many players. The Aerospace fighters can damn-near instagib many mechs and tanks with their powerful bombs, and the pilot of the fighter can come in straight down at a ninety degree angle, preventing any of the people on the ground from firing back unless they're in an Anti-Air tank. Said anti-air tanks tend to be glacially slow and the first target of the fighters.
    • The Sparrowhawk scout plane in particular is a famous Demonic Spider, for aerospace. You cannot out-turn a Sparrowhawk, so your only hope to escape is to boost as fast as you can back to base before the Shawk blows out your fuselage. If the Shawk pilot knows he cannot blast through your armor in time, he'll probably just smash you into a mountain by landing on you in midair. Before the physics were adjusted, the Shawk was also incredibly effective at ruining the day of tanks on the ground, by smashing into them at max speed, causing them to go flying across the map spinning wildly.
  • BattleArmor in Living Legends. Demonic spawns from the pits of hell, to Assault 'Mech pilots and tank drivers. They'll hop onto your head / turret, and start hacking off your limbs, rear armor, or in some cases, start blasting through the cockpit to kill the pilot directly. Attempting to bail out to kill them will only make things worse - they will hose you down with their bullet hose handheld Autocannon, or steal your 'mech to kill you and walk off. Players with BA on their heads have only one hope - their teammates, or mashing their face up against a wall and firing all their explosive weaponry to try and kill the battlearmor with splash damage - Doing this of course, requires you to reach the wall before the battlearmor damages you too much, otherwise you'll just end up blowing yourself up.
  • One mission in Ghost Bear's Legacy requires you to defend a dropship from enemy attack, which isn't so bad...until they start siccing kamikaze Elementals (mechs at least half the size of the smallest playable mech in the game, and thus a huge pain in the ass to hit) rigged with lots of explosives on you.
• Disappointing Last Level: The mission Underwater Strike in Mechwarrior 2: Ghost Bear's Legacy.
• Ear Worm: The little guitar jingle in the Mechwarrior Online gameplay trailer.
• Game Breaker: Lasers were once deemed too powerful, being Hit Scan weapons with low reload times. The most recent game adjusted the heat they produce, preventing players from equipping a lot of lasers without the risk of overheating.
  • It should be pointed out that lasers are NOT Hit Scan in Mechwarrior 2, but are in Mechwarrior 3-not sure about Mechwarrior 4. Still, that Hit Scan quality combined with huge damage and range with ER Large Lasers made Particle Projection Cannons (PPCs) utterly irrelevant.
  • "Boating", the game's term for Whoring, involves using a 'mech equipped with a single type of weapon. There are actually 'mechs that are designed for that specific tactic, such as the Longbow (missiles), Annihilator (ballistics), and Supernova (lasers). In "No heat, unlimited ammo" (NHUA) games, these configurations are more devastating. This is especially notable in the second game, where you can load up on LRMs, and as long as you can keep your distance, you can eat things alive without ever getting touched.
  • "Jump-sniping", also known as "poptarting" in the multiplayer community, involves hiding behind a ridge or obstacle, activating the jump jets, firing your weapons and dropping behind cover. This allows players to net easy kills while only being vulnerable for a few seconds. This tactic is so effective that many players employ this tactic every time, often turning a multiplayer match into a Giant Mecha version of whack-a-mole. Several game changes have been made to reduce the effectiveness of this tactic and encourage more varied gameplay.
  • The 4xELRM-20 Shiva aerospace fighter in Living Legends 0.3.2 is capable of effectively instantly killing or crippling Assault mechs in one salvo, it flies at 300kph+, and it can laugh off damage from anything short of concentrated AA fire or a lucky blast from a LBX; except it can fly at such high altitude that the AA weapons do pitiful damage and the LBX can't even get a third of the way there before dissipating. Thankfully it was nerfed down to quad LRM-20s, which have 2/3 the range of a ELRM-20.
  • The Shiva E assault jet fighter (Flying Beatstick, Beatstick Shiva), which has 2 LBX-20 shotguns and 2 LBX-10 shotguns, with advanced Bloodhound radar. A single salvo from both LBX-10s is enough to effectively instagib anything else flying in the sky, firing all the guns at once is enough to leg most mechs in a single hit. The Shiva E is also incredibly cheap (a mere 87K, less than most heavy mechs), and has enough armor to laugh off attacks from anything besides another Shiva E (which kills it in one hit)
  • Legging (destroying a mech's leg) in Mechwarrior 3 resulted in a mech instantly being destroyed. Legs can be attacked from any angle, and aren't particularly hard to hit if you aim for the hip. The legging being so broken in MW 3 caused a knee-jerk reaction to legging in the later games, causing people to curse you out when you leg them, even after legging was nerfed to simply reducing your speed (in MW4) ^[1], or causing your mech to fall over but remain functional (in Living Legends) ^[2]
• Goddamn Bats: The mission designers for Mechwarrior 4: Vengeance seemed to be inordinately fond of the Uziel, given how many of them you run into. Their Interface Screw-inducing PP Cs, long range, and surprising durability, combined with the fact you tend to encounter more than one in every single mission, will eventually drive pilots mad. The Black Knight expansion one-ups this with the even more annoying, even more powerful, even tougher to kill Mad Cat Mk. II - You will see more of these Clan mechs used by your Inner Sphere enemies in the last op alone than you will see in Clan use ever in Mercenaries.
• Good Bad Bugs
  • Early versions of Living Legends allowed mechs to enter any building so long as their feet lined up with the entrance and the entrance could fit an infantry player. What this basically meant, is an Atlas could walk through a 1 story tall warehouse (with the torso sticking straight through the building's roof) and come out on the other side to attack an enemy who thought he was safe.
  • The Thor and Loki mechs in Living Legends have slightly broken skeletons on their legs. When they are destroyed or legged, they'll go catapulting through the air spinning around wildly before landing on the ground. Very rarely when they're legged, it'll be catapulted over a thousand meters away and fall off the level.
  • In the third game the penultimate mission was played in a cavern above a lava lake. It was possible (at least on some patches) for one enemy to misstep and drop inside the lava - where he exploded with enough force to complete a couple of the objectives.
  • The developers for Living Legends remark on the transport VTOLs causing a number of... interesting physics bugs when transporting stuff, such as when transporting a tank. The tank will spaz out, crushing anyone inside the VTOL, then explode inside the VTOL killing both at the same time. Some players suggested adding the VTOLs anyway because it would look hilarious.
• Memetic Mutation: The hula girl bobble in MechWarrior Online.^[3]
• Most Annoying Sound: "HEAT EXCEEDING RECOMMENDED LEVEL, SHUT DOWN IMMINENT."
• Narm: The cinematics and voice acting in MechWarrior 4: Vengeance.
  • Narm Charm
• Scrappy Level: Escort Missions.
• Sequel Displacement: From 2 onwards. Mostly a case of Even Better Sequel.
• "Stop Having Fun!" Guys: Legging (destroy a mech's leg) is a major taboo in all games, after the train-wreck balance that was Mechwarrior 3. To elaborate, in Mechwarrior 3, if you destroyed a player's leg, he would instantly be killed; much faster than blasting out their torso (to be fair, legging held the best chances to salvage a 'Mech and most of its equipment short of a headshot in Single Player mode in Mech3). Later MW games nerfed legging, hard. In Mechwarrior 4, destroying a leg only slowed down a player; you had to pump huge amounts of ammo into their leg to kill them after "destroying" the leg. In Living Legends, destroying a mech causes it to ragdoll; but the player still can aim the torso, and use jumpjets to flail around. Many servers outright ban legging in Living Legends, and in other servers (or in MW4), doing it elsewhere will cause people to call you a "****ing legger"
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Fans of the second and third games, regarding the fourth.
  • There is also a group of MW 4 Players referred to as "Old Guard", regarding various (almost all) changes made by Mektek to the fourth game after the free release.
  • Tanks, Aeros, VTOL, and Battlearmor actually be good in Living Legends caused the mod to have a lot of this when MW4 vets started playing.
• Tier-Induced Scrappy: The Mad Cat B in Living Legends, which is a min-maxer's wet dream. The Shiva E (Jet fighter with a bunch of giant shotguns on it) falls into this as well, often being outright banned from scrims, since if often ends up killing the entire enemy team, single handed. Or the team just fields as many of them as they possibly can. The most effective counter to a Shiva E? Another Shiva E.
• Too Dumb to Live: All mechs in the Mechwarrior 4 games are fitted with searchlights to help them see at night... searchlights which have no 'Off' button and are visible from a long distance away in the dark. And since they're mounted on the center torso, they happen to make great bullseyes. Because of this it's easy to rack up kills on Mechs you can't actually see just by shooting at or just above the searchlight.

1. ↑ Destroying a leg would prevent a mech from reversing, and slow them down significantly. Destroying both legs would destroy the mech
2. ↑ Destroying a leg causes the mech to fall over to the ground, but they remain completely functional - including their guns and jumpjets, so they can still shoot and flop about on the ground.
3. ↑ It was present in the cockpit in the 2009 trailer, and was advertised as a way to customize the inside of the cockpit. When Online was announced, players kept pestering Piranha to keep it in, which they did in the Atlas video trailer.