There are benefits to this sort of game sprawl, but it is mostly very irritating. BattleTech and Star Fleet Battles have all been revised; holes have been plugged; broken things have been fixed. I don't understand why there is a great fear of this in the Traveller world. You'd think it'd be the first order of business.
Because, as I've pointed out before, the Traveller fanbase has got it ass-backwards. The key problem that is holding everything back is that people insist that the old should take precedence over the new. Well, in pretty much everything else I can think of, a new version of a product
supercedes the old one.
After TNE I think it's got to the point where publishers are actually
afraid to add new material for fear of contradicting something done in the past. I worked closely with one of the authors of GURPS Sword Worlds while fixing the planets for the book there, and I got the distinct impression that they were having to tread very carefully with everything they said. And that's just ridiculous.
It's especially annoying because most of the time, any changes between old and new versions aren't even relevant to the games being played. I can't imagine why anyone would want to switch to a new system mid-game when they're happy with what they're playing.
But at the end of the day I think that's what is getting in the way of fixing and patching things that need to be fixed, because there's this enormous inertia and hostility to change among a large subset (or a loud minority?) of the fanbase. To be honest, I think the most "fixed" version of Traveller around is probably GURPS Traveller, and it seems clear that those who wanted to embrace that change went off to play GT and keep pretty much to themselves (particularly given the outright hostility that some people have shown them). But with T5, Marc doesn't even seem interested in any problems with the existing systems (or even in what the fanbase actually
wants), he seems to be churning out yet another "new" system which is bound to contain more flaws of its own that will cause more problems.
EDIT: As an example: Let's say you're developing a new sector for publication. In the process, you find out that there are errors in the existing data that already exists (dodgy UWPs, star types that shouldn't exist) and also that there are conflicting dates for historical events, or dates that just plain don't make sense (e.g. something is discovered a thousand years before anyone was even in the area). The expectation seems to be that whatever is already written is inviolate and cannot be changed, so you have to build your sector around these errors and explain them in elaborate, highly unlikely ways.
In a sane environment, the developer would be allowed to make any changes necessary for things to make sense - and then when that product is release
that is the new canon. And if anyone finds any subsequent errors in that, then that gets updated and changed and the result becomes the reference for everyone to go by. But it makes no sense at all for errors and contradictions and fuzzy definitions to actually be propagated in new products because nobody is allowed to change them.
I give MWM more credit than that.
