Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Sarah's Mech!

I didn’t mean to write about MWO for a while, despite some pretty big shifts in how I play the game and some neat little development tweaks.  MWO is continuing to grow and thrive, despite some hiccoughs, and as it continues to exceed any sort of “peak awesome.”  Sure, we’re still waiting for Orions, and the Clans loom large in the minds of many players (it remains unclear how the technologically superior clans will impact gameplay) but the game continues to tick forward, with new mechs continuing to emerge, new maps promised (and hopefully emerging soon) and new developments that make me proud to be a part of the Mechwarrior Online community.

The story of Sarah Parries isn’t terribly elaborate or detailed, nor does it have to be: her father, an avid Mechwarrior player, has shared it, I assume, to try and find solace and support during a tremendously challenging time in his life, and he deserves every iota of help he can get from his fellow pilots.  Amongst the general support that Jon Parries experienced came a sort of rough hewn call to arms: a poll was placed on the MWO forums asking if players would be interested in purchasing a mech chassis for charity, based on his late daughter’s favorite mech.  Player support was overwhelmingly positive and PGI, in a wonderful moment of discerning just the right piece of information from the community, declared that they would move ahead with the project.

It was mired in delays and open to some criticism (which charity would the money be going to, how would donations function, how would donations be translated, as cash given by PGI or direct donations from the player base) but recently it came to fruition.  If you clicked the link up there, you already saw what I’m talking about: Sarah’s Mech is now a real thing that people can buy.  It’s essentially a Champion mech with a custom paint job, a pretty remarkable custom paint job that shows some genuine love for the person who inspired the project and a broader sense of the charitable landscape that the mech constitutes and entry into.  Donations go to the Canadian Cancer Society, minus some transaction fees.  Mechs show up in Mech Bays around a month from now, after PGI has had an opportunity to sort everything out, since this operation is occurring largely outside of their normal infrastructure.

Charity in games isn’t new.  Penny Arcade’s Child Play is a gold standard for charitable organizations in America, as well as a watershed icon in the gaming community, and it has spawned a huge number of offshoot events and groups.  But Penny Arcade is big, and has a big community.  Mechwarrior Online is relatively small, and has a tiny community, compared to most games.  It’s a Free-to-Play game and a niche game based on an older intellectual property that many new gamers might not have knowledge of or a connection to.  It has direct competition from other newer, faster properties that build their ethos of play off of sexier, faster game styles (I’m thinking of Hawken in particular).  Mechwarrior Online isn’t the game I would expect to present a massive outpouring of charitable support in the wake of a tragedy largely removed from the lives of most of its players.

But it has.  As of my writing this, Sarah’s Mech project has made $52,000.  That means 5,200 players have made donations to the CCF on Sarah’s behalf.  I couldn’t find numbers on just how many players MWO has at time of writing, but if you look at the player base of a more popular “FPS” game (let’s disregard, for a moment, that that’s a poor generic fit for MWO, and just look at a game that’s even vaguely similar that tracks such numbers) you might get some idea of how many members a community like MWO’s might have.  Call of Duty: Black Ops II usually has around 8,000 players online at peak use times.  Let’s be generous and assume that represents maybe a third of an overall userbase (a number I frankly pulled out of my ass representing both hardcore players and casual, occasional players who might log on weekly or bi-weekly for a few hours) and say that Call of Duty: Black Ops II has around 24,000 active PC gamers engaged in its community at any given moment.

If we assume that Mechwarrior Online has a similar set of players (already artificially inflated) actively engaged in its community, we can say that around one in five players donated to Sarah’s project.  That’s pretty amazing.  The alternatives, of course, are that I’ve underestimated on either end: that MWO’s community is smaller, and that a larger number of players purchased Sarah’s Mech, which I consider an objectively awesome thing about our community, or that MWO’s community is larger than that of a AAA title that came out a year ago, which is objectively awesome because it means this niche game has a relatively robust community surrounding it which, even if it doesn’t proportionally support projects like Sarah’s Mech, is still keeping a company alive that does stuff like Sarah’s Mech.

Either way, Mechwarrior Online’s community remains a singular beacon in my multiplayer outings.  I’ve talked about its queer positivity and the affable nature of many players (though certainly not all) but this is a cut above: this isn’t just showing decency to your fellow gamers, this is working with them to make the world a better place, however slightly.  Because of the nerds who love Battletech, almost $50,000 has been donated to the fight against cancer.  That is, at the very least, commendable and, if I’m going to be superlative (and you know that super is my favorite kind of lative), a fucking awesome representation of a community that continues to make the internet and the frontier of gaming look like a better place.

UPDATE (8/5/13)

Two quick details I thought warranted a repost.  First, Sarah's Mech has now raised around $92,000, and while the number's meteoric rise has slowed tremendously that figure remains impressive.  Second, PGI recently mentioned that they have one million registered players, thoroughly debunking my previous mathematical bullshit.  Even if half of those accounts aren't actual people, and half of the remaining accounts aren't active players, that's a considerably larger player base than what I estimated and, by relation, the percentage of players participating in Sarah's Mech project is much, much lower.  That doesn't make what PGI has accomplished any less impressive, but it does mean that less than one percent of the registered player base has participated in MWO to date.