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I have tried repeatedly to get a hold of anyone in customer service about the complete lack of fiction releases in 2017. The last stories released were on October 16 & December 4th 2016. The forums are still up and running, but I rarely see any posts. Does anyone have any clue what is going on? Has the membership declined so sharply that Battlecorps has reached the point of no return? I am weeks away from a renewal and I see no reason to renew with this kind of treatment.

I purchased a subscription to their service back in 2015. I was disappointed in the service and requested a refund. It took me six weeks to finally get it sorted out. Battlecorps was a dead end. I went to the official battletech forums and posted over there. Somebody contacted me and asked me for my details. They were the one who got my refund processed. If you visit the BT forums you will also find a lot of disgruntled customers with similar stories of their non-existent customer service.

If I were in your shoes, I would head over there and see if anybody can help you out. Might save you a great deal of time. Good luck!

I have already contacted my bank to get the charges reversed. One story in almost 6 months .... I am not paying for that! I sent my bank proof from past years to show the story count and the complete failure of Battlecorps to fulfill their obligations for this subscription period. I will get my refund.

I am surprised that BC, if stories just aren't coming in, doesn't change their model. Their website states falsehoods that are not current in the present day; like the services BC offers. This is why I requested my refund way back. Still, all that fiction is just dying to be monetized in a better way. Remove their exclusive access from BC and I think people would buy them like nuts. Say on DriveThruRPG or fold them into a new service. The text on the packaging of the BC service is the only reason people are so disenchanted.

Note: I don't mean to complain or talk poorly about BC. I just think that this is an aspect that customers do not appreciate.

To be brutally frank, I'm surprised it held on as long as it has... given that from DAY ONE it was poorly planned, shoddily implemented, asked too much while providing too little, and in general was run by people who had zero qualification to be running a web-facing business.

They started out by hiring an artist not a developer to build the site, who scammed the hell out of them with flashy graphics and great talk, but then left them holding the bag when it came time to deploy it as a real website. The site has and remains an inaccessible broken mess that tells at LEAST a third of the potential audience to go **** themselves on accessibility and usability grounds ALONE.

Fixed width layout, tables for layout, JavaScript doing CSS' job, so graphics heavy it takes forever to load even on a modern connection, being too cheap to shell out for a proper security certificate, absurdly undersized fixed metric fonts, questionable colour contrasts from an accessibility standpoint, little if anything remotely resembling semantic markup or separation of presentation from content -- it's a LAUNDRY LIST of how NOT to build a website... RUN by people not qualified to run websites, by a company that despite running a web-facing business are unwilling to hire anyone qualified full-time to run ANY of their websites!

There's a reason the entire company's web presence has made a trip in the wayback machine to the worst of 1990's FASA style management and ineptitude...

Of course, DARING to point that out simply upsets their circle-jerking echo-chamber... continuing their internal trend of stamping out anything remotely resembling dissension and no matter how badly things go bits-up face-down shoving their heads in the sand like Ostrich over the entire topic.

... and that's before we talk about the authors they've repeatedly stiffed on payment, the embezzling, filing with the IRS payment amounts that contractors never received by paying into the embezzlers personal credit card from the company one then using the personal card to pay the contractor less, trying to convince contractors and volunteers to file for amounts they never recieved... THEN constantly complaining about being cash poor to anyone DUMB ENOUGH (like me) to volunteer a decade of time and services?

I personally had their accountant -- about a month or two before they stepped on my dick with golf cleats connected to a car battery -- try to get me to file with the IRS that I had received TEN TIMES the amount of money over the past year than I had for running and hosting the official site, because that's what they were recording on their side!

Shocking that the company even has its head above water in the first place. I've done work with a LOT of really screwed up jacked up messed up ineptly run businesses the past thirty years -- PARTICULARLY since I've been working in the hive of scum and villainy that is mainstream web development -- but InMediaRes/Catalyst really took the prize... and if their actions over the six or so years since I stopped being involved are any indicator, things have only gotten worse as outright criminals continue to run the company and hold onto the license.

... and that's BEFORE we talk about how the franchise continues the trend of handing out sub-licenses to the first swinging dick through the door (no offense Rick) with no thought to retaining creative control, how the result will impact the branding, or any other concern for the long-term health of the franchise as a whole. If it will give them a quick cash injection to keep the lights on for another year, who cares how badly it turns into a money pit or outright dead end in coming years -- much less the damage done to the reputation of both the company and their IP's.

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[size=80][color=#114488][i]
It seems very queer that we invariably entrust the writing of our regulations for the next war to men totally devoid of anything but theoretical knowledge.[/i][/color][/size]

There was a lot of backroom and PM talk among the subscribers at Battlecorps when I pointed this out in 2011, and it explained so much of why Battlecorps, and Battletech by association, was struggling. I personally feel Loren Coleman used Battlecorps as his cash cow to repay all the stolen money. Battlecorps was releasing 60+ original stories/scenarios a year from 2004 to 2009 (5 to 1 ratio of stories to scenarios), and then in 2010 the ratio of stories to scenarios drastically changed to almost 1 to 1 (32 novels & 27 scenarios + others), and then in 2011 to flipped to almost 1 story for every 2.5 scenarios released (19 stories & 52 scenarios + others). After that is was all downhill with 2016 only releasing 12 stories & 2017 not having ONE SINGLE STORY RELEASED. I have always felt that Loren Coleman was nothing but a thief and needed to be permanently removed from any dealings with Battletech ... he is bad for the game. Instead he lives in his mansion acquired from his Battletech thefts and continues to take us all for a ride. My two cents.

[mod hat]
Removed both of Chip's nonsensical posts (one from each of the accounts he uses here) and a reply to one of them.
[/mod hat]

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[b]When life gives you lemons, throw them back and ask for cookies.[/b]
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When BattleCorps was selling my programs, toward the end I had a heck of a time getting paid for them. I eventually had to ask them to no longer sell them. It's a shame, though.

_________________
Rick
~~~~~
[email]rick@heavymetalpro.com[/email] [img]http://www.heavymetalpro.com/countries/flag-us.gif[/img] [img]http://www.heavymetalpro.com/countries/ ... rolina.gif[/img]

* There are 10 types of people in this world. Those who understand binary and those who don't. *

Just seems like this ship could be righted to its original intended course, if someone were to come in and make some changes. If BC isn't salvagable, replace the service and get this going again. I personally felt that this was huge and it is now such a shame that these short stories have stopped. BattleTech, like other sci-fi universes, really takes on a pulse of its own through these scattered short stories. I'm happy with where they started. Just so sad by where things currently stand.

I don't know what exactly happened, didn't happen, or came to light in 2010. I mean, I've read all those comments about Loren Coleman or CGL as a whole on various forums... yet somehow, the entire affair-or-maybe-it-wasn't-after-all died with a whimper. The bankruptcy process was stopped and CGL retained the license. A lot of criminal charges were bandied about yet apparently no one was convicted of anything in the end.

Not paying your freelancers and defaulting on monies owed may be bad business practice, but it's only criminal in outlier cases.
I've freelanced a bit in the RPG industry and I can attest that the problems seem to be endemic.
As for CGL/IMR/BattleCorps specifically, I'm a small-time BattleCorps author and I've been paid (albeit late) for all four stories that I had published there - and even a cent more per word than the submission guidelines said I should expect.

As for BattleCorps apparently going belly-up - yes I can read the writing on the wall. I've been told the website is an unsalvageable mess and need to be totally redone. I've also been told that they want to migrate BattleCorps to a new site eventually, that it isn't dead, and that they're still seeking submissions. Nothing of this is official, of course. I'll be interesting to see if they keep up the current business model.

Submissions suitable for publication were apparently the problem in recent years - Jason Schmetzer and Phil Lee both said that they had too few story submissions worth publishing, and too many rejections. Also, I can attest to a surprisingly deep factchecking process, and I believe regular CGL sourcebook factchecking is taking precedence over BC story factchecking, creating a bottleneck for new publications where BC had to take the back seat.

I haven't followed much of the behind the scenes stuff. I've only been a customer and read a few forum threads where people are voicing their frustrations. So it was nice to learn about some of what is going on behind the scenes. Thank you very much for sharing Frabby

I used to subscribe to Battlecorps. I felt I wasn't getting enough for my money and let my subscription expire, and haven't bought a new Battletech product in several years now. When the company gets its head out of its arse and starts caring again about the old guard players who kept Battletech alive through the troubled years, let me know.

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Be careful what you wish for. I might let you have it.

As a web developer, I can honestly say that describes it the day it launched -- as someone who maintained the official Classic Battletech website for nearly a decade, I can honestly say the compromises I made to meet the whims of those running things that didn't surprise me one iota given the laundry list of problems I was never given the money, manpower, or control to fix.

... and I didn't put half the effort into that site I should have, but that goes with what I was getting paid for it not even covering the cost of hosting it. To then have their accountant call me wondering why I wasn't filing taxes for ten times the amount I was getting paid because that was what was showing on their books? Their general apathy about what was the only real face of the product at the time sure as shine-ola didn't help matters, an apathy and ignorance only further emphasized by the current inaccessible broken insecure train wreck of turdpress they have in place now... Turdpress, for people who know dick about running a website, BY people who know dick about building a website!

That they had some art faygelah scam artist who knew jack about actual web development saddle them up and take them for a ride with the TRAIN WRECK of how not to build a business website that they quite clearly have? DOOMED them from the start. Again, I'm SHOCKED it has held on as long as it has given that from a usability, speed, and accessibility standpoint the site might as well be something slopped together by a pre-teen in 1998 using Frontpage or Nyetscape composer.

Just to give an example, see this ignorant halfwit BULLSHIT:

	<body bgcolor=#000033 style="margin: 0">
		<table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0 width=100% style="height: 100%">
		<tr><td><div class="header" align=center>
		<table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0><tr><td>
<a href="index.html">
<img src="https://d3eokp2tauoved.cloudfront.net/BC2/img/logo01_hq.jpg" width=256 
height=80 border=0 alt="BattleCorps" /></a></td>
<td class="loggedIn" align=right valign=bottom
style="background-image: url(https://d3eokp2tauoved.cloudfront.net/BC2/img/atlas01_hq.jpg)">
<img src="https://d3eokp2tauoved.cloudfront.net/BC2/img/1.gif"
width=444 height=21 border=0 alt="" title="" /></td></tr></table></div>

Doing the job of:

<body>

<div id="top">
	<h1>Battlecorps</h1>

... and that would even be keeping the same (broken inaccessible fixed width asshat) appearance. Fixed width layout, inaccessible fixed metric fonts, overuse of images making the page take forever to load, and wasting 21k of markup on delivering 1.26k of plaintext and four content images -- EASILY six to eight times the HTML alone that should have been used.

They were saddled up and taken for a ride by an art faygelah under the DELUSION they know what design is. Whoever built that site isn't qualified to shine shoes for a living.

But to be fair, I say the same thing about the current Battletech logo which doesn't fit the print products, doesn't fit websites, it just doesn't fit anything other than "oh look at how some artist spanked it on a graphics tablet" -- which is why when I was being told to use it I ended up damned near reworking it from scratch... I also say the same thing about damned near every logo in the "field manuals" of the past fifteen years, just wanting to say "how the hell are you gonna stencil that with a spraycan in thirty seconds?!?" It's what happens when you let artsy fartsy types spank it in the corner with zero concerns for limitations of the target medium, accessibility norms, or any of the actual engineering concepts that separates design from art.... and right now there are FAR too many artists dicking around in Photoshop or Illustrator under the DELUSION that they are designers.

Though we're talking the company that went with a puke green for the company logo that was below accessibility/legibility minimums, and trusted their marketing dipshit artists opinion on that when they said "It's unique, nobody else is using this shade" without considering WHY nobody else was using it!

Form over function artsy fartsy BS so typical of what happens when artists take over an industry... screwing the consumer AND the client as they hock their hoodoo-voodoo bekaptah asshattery. You'd almost think they were Mac ****ots.

But no, lemme tell you what I REALLY think.

-- edit -- manually added carriage returns to code sample as apparently there's no max-width set on <pre> tags in phpBB... speaking of developer ineptitude..

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[size=80][color=#114488][i]
It seems very queer that we invariably entrust the writing of our regulations for the next war to men totally devoid of anything but theoretical knowledge.[/i][/color][/size]

And to echo Deathshadow's comments about artist in charge at CGL, Brent Eans, their Art Director, has been named the new Battletech Line Developer.

http://bg.battletech.com/news/catalyst- ... tech-line/

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[b][color=#BC851A]Wielder of the Ferro-Carbide Bat of Doom™[/color][/b]
[color=#400080][i]I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.[/i] - Confucius[/color]
[img]http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a199/ ... ng/EI3.png[/img]

They couldn't spell CSS?

_________________
Rick
~~~~~
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* There are 10 types of people in this world. Those who understand binary and those who don't. *

O.K. We have new Developer and Assistant positions for the Battletech line. What is Herb doing?

I believe he is not with them anymore.

_________________
[b]When life gives you lemons, throw them back and ask for cookies.[/b]
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