Posted 04 June 2014 - 12:05 PM

Greetings MechWarriors,



Few things in life evoke as much emotion as artwork. Today, I am not very interested in the debate of the subject of whether beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as I am in giving you, the customers, what you seek.



The overwhelming message that we are hearing is that the Clan players want to receive the same treatment that the Inner Sphere (IS) factions received with regards to symbolic artwork. That would be defined as taking previous faction logos seen in past games and applying a "mild refresh", instead of the "Heavy Rework" the existing ones have undergone.



I should also point out that I have received at least a few "you better not change it now I love the new one" responses. The caveat is that a part of getting the same treatment as the IS means that we're not going to be able to give the players the option to choose between them. Such a change would require new code functionality to the website as well as needed changes in the game client. In this circumstance, we will have to go with the majority vote.



We are currently recreating the clan logos under the "mild refresh" process used with the IS logos. No, they won't simply be the exact old logos either since there is enough ambiguity on rights ownership of artwork to prevent such from being feasible. Additionally, this way they should fit in perfectly with the existing IS logos. Once this art is complete, Niko will put up a poll and it will be a very simple two choice poll. The "Heavy Rework" set or the "Mild Refresh" set.



Assuming the "Mild Refresh" option is selected, I wanted to explain in more detail why it might take the time it does to enter the game itself: The game client itself goes into lock down on a 2-week testing protocol to achieve approval status before release to live production. As this remains an aesthetic concern, this is not something I would ever consider a hotfix for; The best case scenario is June 17th patch. There is also the Clan cockpit content that has been created which will need to go through some changes, so it's a certainty that this particular content received on June 17th will use the "Heavy Rework" artwork. Changing that content to use the "Mild Refresh" artwork would come sometime after June 17th. date to be decided.



The silver lining is that we can make the switch on the website for use on the forums very quickly and that could likely happen within the same week as the poll. Another bonus I can offer is that we have heard the excellent suggestion of using the "Dagger Star" graphic for use as a general clan tag for those wanting to represent one of the other Clans until they can join the invasion. As to timing of the Dagger Star icon, that may have a dependency with the game client since it’s a new clan faction. I don’t have all the answers on this yet but wanted to let you know that yes we will be adding that as an option in the relatively near future.



Okay so that is the update, we are going to try our hardest to give you the customer what you want. Niko will update us with the poll as soon as we can manage.



Thanks.

