Wow, what a thread. It took me days to get through it all! Why did I bother? Because I am actually interested in canon as well. Not die-hard, but like others I like changes to make sense, i.e. at least be explained because it helps the enjoyment from being taken away.
Just as a related example, I used to be a big Transformers fan back in the day when it was out in comics and cartoon. I didn't really follow it after that because there were too many changes and it was just getting weird, like the marketers were trying to milk it for all it was worth and the fun was gone. So then this movie comes out, and I am all braced for changes, but some things I had a hard time with. Why isn't Bumblebee a VW Beetle? Why did they have to change Optimus Prime's look? I mean, I could take changes, but at least some things should be sacred, right? So despite how good I otherwise thought the movie was, these things took away from it. And yes, I'm sure that the kids today who know nothing of the old comics and cartoon care nothing about them.
However I went looking online and actually found out why these things were changed. For one, Bumblebee was changed because they didn't want him to talk (for a reason they gave) and thought that he'd resemble Herbie too much. Ok, I can give them that. As for Optimus, they had made a decision to make all the Transformers retain their mass when they transformed, and they needed him to be a certain size. Only that kind of truck was in that size class, so it was the only one they could make him.
Alright, now I know, and that makes it better. Not all better, but at least I understand the changes, and so they don't take away from it nearly as much. Now I am really excited about the sequel. Basically a happy customer. (I really preferred the Dreamworks comics where all of them were authenitic in look and still they made a great comic out of it!) The changes don't bother me as much once I understand them, but this attitude I've seen of "the old-timers should just accept it and get over it" is basically telling a whole segment of your customer base to f-off. That I didn't appreciate and I think was the source of a lot of the heat around here. I did appreciate Matt's explanations, whether I agreed with them or not. If those were presented sometime earlier a lot of this might have been avoided, but I know that there were a lot of complex factors at work so who knows. I just hope that it's a lesson for next time.
So about this errata idea, I noticed someone mentioned a while back about the problem with submitting them via forums, and that perhaps it should be a bit more formalized. I would like to submit, just as a suggestion, perhaps using something like software bug-tracking for this. Basically someone submits a form like a report, with pre-designed fields like "Product" and "page number", etc. and that goes to a database that people (either just MG or perhaps everyone in case their idea has already been submitted) can check, and change the status on ("Pending", "Rejected", "Awaiting Inclusion", stuff like that) depending on what gets decided. I know that some tracker software is designed to be used for any kind of information tracking, and would be easily customizable for this. Unfortunately the only one I am familiar with is part of the TikiWiki CMS system, and that would likely be overkill just to use that one feature, but perhaps other systems can be similarly customized. If not, then the other features of TikiWiki can just be shut off and not used. Anyway I just thought that I'd throw that out there in case someone finds it useful.
In the meantime there is a lot about MgT that has me excited and my friends and I are trying it out. Some of the basic rules we don't like so far but we're trying to see if they are really detracting or not in play. If so, then we'll likely just use large sections of it (like chargen) for use in MT. And we're certainly looking forward to trying out B5 once we pick it up.
