“The mech is bad on purpose because the designer was canonically an idiot” is the most Battletech thing I’ve ever heard. I love it.

Reasons to field a mech, 1. it looks cool. 2. It came in the same box as a mech that looks cool.

"The designer was canonically an idiot" is up there with "this mech was designed for a battlefield role that literally never materialised," as well as "yeah it's shit but it's also dirt cheap and easy to resupply and that matters a lot when you have to spend money on it," and "this mech would be really good if the thing it was good at was actually in the game."

Anyone who had an Atlas taken out by a Locust. Because it rammed you. Then you fell on it. That caused a crit to it's machine gun ammo. That detonated 400 points of pure silly death. Knows this.

"Any tactical situation on the battlefield can be solved by the application of the correct numbers of Vindicators."
~manual of the 1000 correct actions, Capellan Confederation

Its called a trash can, not a trash cannot!

I don't remember the games I played well and won, but I do remember the time I successfully did a death from above against a submarine.

The Battletech community is best summarised by its favourite 'Mech: the Urbanmech.

The Urbanmech is beloved not because it's a good 'Mech, or even an average 'Mech. The Urbanmech is the 'Mech you get because everything worth using has been blown up or claimed by someone more important than you. It's the 'Mech of choice for the last line of defense, or the Hail Mary last-ditch gambit. It's the 'Mech for when when you've run out of everything but targets. The smart play would be to just give up, to lay down your arms and surrender to the mercy of your foe.

But if you were going to take the smart option, you wouldn't be an Urbanmech pilot. For you, the idea of a suicidal last stand gets you hyped, because this is your time to shine! You're going to charge forward at a blistering 32kph, put your crosshairs firmly over the cockpit of a 'Mech twice your tonnage, and blow that bastard to Hell. You are going to prove your 'Mech is a trash CAN, not a trash can't. They are going to remember you for what you do today.

And sure, 9/10 Urbanmech pilots explode long before that happens. Half of them probably Stackpole before they even fire a shot. But it is the last tenth that ensure the legend of the Urbanmech never dies.

Thing is, the 'canonically designed by an idiot' gets balanced by 'if it's stupid and it works, it isn't stupid'.

I remember once some newbie on the forums asked why there were so many designs that just sucked. This person loved Omnis and Clan Mechs, those in the know understand that part of our life cycle as fans, and they wondered about the other designs.
One of the playtesters, or maybe writers at the time, commented along the lines of "If we built Mechs for optimization, there'd be probably 10 Omni chassis and this game would have nothing else to say."

That is one of the reasons why Battletech lasts long: even the units are characters.
Some games will have a write up like: "The Liberation unit is an Assault worth X amount of points, good for these tactics...."
Meanwhile in Battletech the write ups are akin to some business insider cracking open a beer and saying: "Alright you wanna know WHY the Defiance costs two and a half Warhammers and still sucks? It starts with a business deal and ego...."

Some games live for that competition scene and more power to them if they can keep a steady community going.
Battletech has mostly been for story, either the game's official one or whatever story your table makes. As long as its a fun one, its a good one for you.

I need to use: "Because the designer was canonically an idiot." to explain a bad mech design asap. Thank you for that.

The only competitive BattleTech I ever played was ages ago at a local con. It was called the Anvil Tournament. Essentially it was a 100 mech battle royale. When you destroyed another 'mech, you took its miniature and crushed it with a sledgehammer on an anvil. The winner received a trophy constructed from the crushed bodies of the fallen. It was wild, totally unbalanced, and absolutely awesome!

Your opponent not having fun is one of the biggest buzz kills out there.

The true meta: Urbanmech with the heaviest gun you can find.

As I imagine many newcomers to BattleTech did in the late '90s, I brought the mentality I'd learned from Mechwarrior 2 and used the unit design rules to create a series of idealized machines. It took a while, but I did eventually learn the joy of coming to the table with stock record sheets for a handful of mismatched military-industrial shitbuckets, designed by marketing execs, built by corner-cutting contractors, and paid for by generals who forgot how war works.

It's one of the reasons I have a special fondness for the Vindicator - it was conceived almost entirely as an economic and political move designed by committee, but somehow turned out to be a solid mech in spite of that.

The Mechwarrior 4 Intro was a brilliant way of introducing the game to me. It gets across the "I may go down, but this is going to be one hell of a fight."
And sometimes one PPC shot to the head and you're done. It's just the way it goes!

I would like to add that it's not just the lore.  BattleTech, in it's earliest incarnations, was also a quick and dirty RPG.  It had small touches of roleplay elements like gaining experience and improving a pilot.  (At first it was through kills, but shifted to actively participating in a battle.)  So, you have a reason to get invested in a pilot or team and watch them grow.   Add on to that the construction rules that allow you to either make completely new designs, or tweak a design you like so it doesn't suck so bad, throw in advancing technologies to improve performance as upgrades, and the sky's the limit.   THEN you have the extensive lore that makes for a great map for your pilot/team to navigate in, special events to potentially participate in and see if you can change, or simply ride out in a side story series of games. Or you can blaze your own trail, establish a world to rule and try to conquer the surrounding systems to form your own star empire.

That's what initially got ME hooked into BattleTech, and it's what kept me playing.

Then, there's also different scales of play from older alternate games.  The personal side of the RPG, or BattleTroops.  The company to regimental side with BattleForce and Empires Aflame, and the Empire-building of the Succession Wars.  And, space battles with Warships!  They have Warships!  

It's not all perfect.  I've tweaked quite a few things for larger scale games from the different systems to get a custom feel that I enjoy, but, there's a LOT to work with.  And, some of it just needs a slight tweak to be golden.

I may own 4 black pythons and a printer that can make infinite savannah masters but i sure ain't gonna do that to someone unless we were doing a meme battle

battletech was made when wargaming was campaign driven for an overall narrative playing experience.   the mid 90s saw a shift in war gaming into a competitive tournament style of play.
it's the long standing battletech fans that have kept the game from deteriorating into the cesspool of 'hey, do you remember X game?'

4 decades of playing this game and I still learn new things every time I roll the dice.

Fun fact, if people were building "meta armies" in Battletech, you would see hordes of infantry and tank companies with artillery and/ or air support and more or less zero mechs on the tables. But mechs are way too cool to do that.