Clan Crocodile Tears and Propaganda

There’s a certain type of character on the MechWarrior Online forum that are always complaining about how badly off their much superior mechs are. They deliberately cry crocodile tears and pretend to be sad in order to make sure not only that their precious mechs are not nerfed but that the other factions’ mechs are never as good and they’re a plague on any balance discussion.

In case you weren’t aware, dear reader, MechWarrior Online (MWO) is a game of giant stompy robots, aka mechs (short for battlemechs), and has been around in various forms since the eighties. The latest version is played online and is a first person arena battle game.

There are two main technologies in the game, the Inner Sphere (IS) is the ‘original flavour’ that the boardgame started out with. Some time later the Clans were added with new higher tech equipment that was much better than the original. In the boardgame they eventually balanced this out with a points system but MechWarrior Online doesn’t do this with the result that Clan mechs are significantly better than IS mechs.

Normally this isn’t a problem as the game mixed the factions when creating a random team to play a battle, but when faction on faction play gets involved the difference becomes quite obvious.

MechWarrior Online players tend to fall into a couple of stereotypes: older players who started with the boardgame favour the IS mechs, a bunch of which are copied from various manga TV shows of the eighties. Younger players, who cut their teeth on the various incarnations of MechWarrior games, tend to favour the clan mechs featured in those games. Naturally there’s a bunch of people who like both types of mech but we’re not going to talk about those weirdos!

So when the older, IS favouring, players come to the forum to complain that their mechs are getting hammered, the younger, Clan favouring, players get stuck in too, and within their numbers are members of a secret clan: Clan Crocodile Tears.

Members of Clan Crocodile Tears are out to make sure that the Clan mechs are always the best, regardless of wether or not that’s good for the game. They want to maintain, or even improve, the face wrecking advantage that Clan mechs already have thanks to the poor design of the game.

So Clan Crocodile Tears are always coming up with weaksauce propaganda about how the very minor drawbacks that Clan mechs have are so overwhelmingly important that they outweigh all other considerations.


When clan mechs lose one side of their engines they are not destroyed but IS mechs are – but clan mechs get an awful 20% movement penalty when that happens which more than balances it out.

Actual Quote – ‘Omnimechs are inferior to Battlemechs in MWO because of the rigid locked equipment that you have to build around instead of being able to full customize’. Yet all clan equipment is lighter and uses fewer slots than IS meaning you can mount a lot more weapons on those omnimechs while being faster and more agile…

So I’ve drawn up a logo for this clan that shows a crocodile head in front of a blue banner of tears over a sea of salty tears that wash over the forums:

Here’s some more bonus quotes and propaganda, now with videos:

‘A pilot with an IS mech who knows how to play it doesn’t have much problems versus clan mechs. Since I started playing this game, clans have been nerfed constantly, but we adapt to the changes and get it done. So maybe you IS dudes think about improving your play style instead of blaming tech differences that are supposed to be there?’

‘Our concern is getting our asses handed to us because we can not match ton for ton with the IS during faction play due to our gutted drop decks on both scout/invasions.’ Lances107

‘by the skill tree… It seems like every IS mech is transforming into assault tanks!’