There are a lot of advantages to customizing your mech. You can mix and match components to your exact specifications, and build a machine that’s perfectly suited for the way you like to operate! You can express yourself through your vehicle’s design, and show off your individuality and creativity! You can remove those annoying legally-mandated power throughput limiters on your beam weapons, and imagine the looks on enemy pilots’ faces when you blast right through the 6-foot-thick concrete wall they thought they were taking cover behind! (Just slap on a couple more heatsinks, it’ll be fine, all these off-the-shelf units are overdesigned anyways.)
The biggest disadvantage to customizing your mech is that sooner or later, some dumbass kid is gonna decide you’re their Fated Rival or some crap like that. They recognize your mech after a couple consecutive battles, start going out of their way to pick fights with you, shout angsty bullshit over short-range comms and expect you to respond with something dramatic - it’s a pain in the ass, and the little bastards are almost impossible to shake off.
I used to think this sort of thing was only a problem for the kinds of smug assholes who give themselves stupid nicknames and pilot flashy overpriced mechs, painted Shoot-Me-First Red and freshly polished before and after every mission. My current custom model is scrapped together from a rusted-out Octavo, armor plating I tore off a New Dawn Bishop when nobody was paying attention, and a Heracles servo array with the input cables awkwardly soldered to connect to a Blackstone tritium power converter. Most people mistake it for an abandoned wreck, right up until it’s taking them down with a jet-boosted leg sweep. And yet, somehow I ran into the one dumbass melodramatic enough and desperate enough to want an epic confrontation with me and my custom-built shitbox.
We ran into each other during an operation in a raging thunderstorm, which is catnip to these moody little twerps. Dark clouds overhead, rain pouring down, distant lightning flashes - perfect ambience for a life-or-death showdown. Personally, I think it’s perfect weather for stealing mechs from the junkyard and letting the rain wash away the tracks, but the captain was very insistent that this mission was Time Sensitive, so I just had to hope the weather would hold long enough for me to do some Salvaging after we finished up. Anyway, some of the rain was getting in through my chassis and onto the tritium power converter. It’s not any more dangerous than normal, no matter what the worrywarts in Engineering say, but the water sparking and vaporizing makes a very distinctive whine that I’ll admit does sound sort of like a suspenseful musical sting. My alleged archrival was really working herself up, yelling about the Threads of Fate or whatever while taking swings at me with the most pointlessly tacky energy sword I’ve ever seen. Meanwhile, I was out of missiles, and I’d completely drained the power cell on my beam rifle. I tried calling for backup, but Holster and Radian were both occupied, something about a concrete wall collapsing. I was on my own.
I was mentally preparing myself for an obnoxious drawn-out slugfest, when suddenly I had an epiphany. I snapped one of my mech’s coolant lines, and then overcharged a leg motor to spark it. Everyone back at base keeps nagging me about how my drums of surplus Terra-Luna coolant gel were declared unsafe even before they passed their expiration date, but the bright purple chemical fire now wreathing my mech was exactly what I needed as I took the most dramatic and imposing stance I could come up with. See, the great thing about this sort of pilot is that they value drama more than any sense of tactics or self-preservation. My “nemesis” immediately charged straight at me, and directly into the coolant fire. When I assembled my mech’s core systems, one of the most important factors I considered was which components could stay more-or-less functional when my auxiliary systems caught fire. The 0081 Gemini facing me, however, was not built with any such contingencies in mind. I was finally gifted with blessed silence on the comms as the Gemini’s computer melted, and saw the ejector seat fly off into the distance while I shut off my coolant and activated my class-N fire extinguishers.
I like to think everyone learned a valuable lesson that day - the Gemini pilot learned to cut out the bullshit heroics, I learned to always keep a spare beam rifle cell handy, and Holster and Radian learned not to step in the bright purple puddles with exposed wiring. That’s the best thing about customizing your mech - it’s educational, for you and for everyone around you as well. And in the end, isn’t that what really matters?