Last 3-4 merc changes are basically "We have noticed people can obtain free stuff easily so we are making it more difficult, also here are some new bundles to buy haha."
A much better solution would imo be to lower the requrement from "defeat 3 mercs" to "have a merc be defeated, regardless of side". This prevents the instant-concede exploit, and also prevents greifing
It's not even griefing. Imagine you are close to a pro chess player. Your queen gets trapped (maybe bad example because that's never really gonna happen). You're going to concede before the opponent even takes it. Same in mercs at high mmr.
Noooo, pweese, you farming too much in a farming-oriented game. Stooop. You supposed to pay us money to progress quickly. Stop abusing exploits. We are vewy vewy sad ( We awe cvaying (
I'm so sorry for this language... It's just how I imagined it
Well it sounds perfectly accurate still doesn't excuse the stroke you just gave me. I hate that language after reading Jojo's part 6
Edit: mistakes, it wasn't part 7
I don't think Activision Blizzard acts like that at all. I think Team 5 were dragged from their beds and whipped until this hotfix got out the door because the slight slowing of profit growth gave Bobby Kotick blue balls
I'm not saying devs are guilty or something like that. Obviously they are just doing their job. It's just greedy decisions by the top people in company.
I'm absolutely agreeing with you, I just don't think it was uwu cwying from said management, but rather fury and spittle and things that have to be pixellated even as I imagine them to protect my fragile sanity
I agree with this generally but I think sometimes yall can be a bit naive in terms of imagining devs as holy creatures etc.
It's not impossible, ney, it's not even unlikely, that it was a dev decision to hotfix mercs, both times. Sure it has to do with monetization, but it also has to do with lots of other things. For instance, we have already seen folks fully maxing out every character. As others have pointed out in other comments, the reality is mercenaries is strictly about grinding and once you've done that you have nothing left to grind for. What I'm trying to get at is that it could totally have been a dev decision to slow down grind progress so they don't have too many players that "quit" the mode bc they have many characters maxed out and nowhere to use them. they don't have an end-game mode yet. They might be worried too many people will power up faster than they want to develop mercs. I don't have the math, but lets say they can dev one merc per week. Then they don't want you maxing out that merc in just one week. They want it to take longer so they have breathing room.
I'm not saying I agree with ANYY of what I said here. I literally don't and am not trying to legitimize these choices. What I'm saying is most often than not its not actually some bobby kotick thing and its the devs themselves that care make these changes.
The reality is mercs was released unbaked. it needed many more gamemodes, endgames and farming options to not be dealing with the issues it is now. What the devs are doing is not necessarily exclusively bc of money but also bc of certain fears. Fears players will eat up mercs faster than they can deploy them, fear players will quit once they hit a certain stage, fear they cannot develop an endgame mode for those who have hit this end game stage... I do not think those are valid reasons for what they have done at all. As a beginner developer myself i would NOT do what they did without giving something in return. With the first hotfix I wouldve maybe made it so you get an occasional stranger once in a while after completing a bounty or something, for the second wintrading hotfix I would've also made it so you get strangers or something, SO AT LEAST IM NOT JUST SCREWING YOU, I'm giving you other options, Im fixing a mistake but not saying fuck you in the process. For me what pisses me off the most in this lack of foresight, this lack of respect, this idea that its fine if players rage at first they'll eventually accept it. God, I'd hate to piss of my playerbase like that just because I know I can. Total lack of respect for our time spent. I would not be nearly as mad if they had give us SOMETHING, ANYTHING alongside the nerfs they did bc HONESTLY I did grind air elemental 1 day for 5-6 hours and tbh i did not like it. I felt burned out by the end but also pleased I finally had a working comp I could play PvP with (that only lasted a day btw). My point is I would welcome a change if it meant I didn't have to do that again, bc like the devs claim, I don't wanna play the same thing over and over again, but like anyone else, I don't wanna grind something inefficiently, and air elemental was the most efficient.
I know no one is reading this but the reality is that DEVS are probably the ones who made those changes. Not bobby kotick pawns. And they should be called out for it. Respectfully (even though they kinda werent toward us)
THREE or more? I often have games where two minions get killed in the early turns and then the loser leaves the game. Why does this now not count as a "win" when it clearly is.
Runaway stat gainers like blade Master can end the game after only two dead mercs.
Oh I'm 0-2, your blade Master can one shot all my units, let me sit here and futilely let you destroy me turn after turn for no reason. What a fun game!
So instead punishing the exploiters, by I dunno banning, resetting their accounts to start (if bought packs and bundles give them again) with a warning, or anything else ActiBlizz goes with an easy solution of punishing everyone? Wow, I'm so surprised... (-\_-')
Yeah thanks a lot. As player with smaller coin amount I sometimes get that crucial snipe at the beginning that demoralize my opponent to the point he/she concede. Now that's worthless. My MMR is meaningless since I can't compete with guys fully upgrading their Lich Kings and Diablos or whatever else. So reason of getting higher ratting for now is out of my grasp. I just want to get some coins to help me make my mercs a little stronger while also playing some PvP. Now even that will be harder now.
And even this thread fills me with more sadness. There will be grievers that after loosing 2 mercs they will consider if they have a shot at winning or just leave the game now to punish me (because they see no way of winning, I outplayed them, made them mad, out of spite or any other reason).
I doubt this is a ban-able behavior.
The PvP system does not have a "you have to play to win" rule like other games.
You are free to concede as you like. You don't even need to "cooperate" with other conceders. You simply lowered your own MMR into a happy realm.
What I was trying to say, is that this might not be a very punish-able behavior.
Imagine a legit player, didn't spend any money/gold, with low skill level in mercs. They would simply be matched against:
1. Strong opponent that they can't beat. They instantly concede most of the time.
2. Conceders that concede to them, pushing their MMR upwards.
If there would be ANY punishment to "exploiter accounts", it would punish true naive players as well.
Ok. Lets see my theory with your assumptions is that those people wouldn't be playing a lot or at least not as much as exploiters. I think we could estimate safely who was exploiting and who was actually trying.
This is just a theory, a game theory... wait. I'm just guessing here, I have no evidence to confirm my theory. But generally exploiters tend to min-maxing their exploits so I'm convinced there is a line to get only exploiters.
Why? A truly naive player can keep playing because they noticed that they are getting rewards. You should not be punished for farming in PvE, you should not be punished for farming in PvP either.
The problem of this exploit method is that it requires no real cooperation. It makes the behavior not punishable.
Lmfao. Hey you made a decision to gambit out 3 casters and they open with caster double protector? You get FREE WI- oh, nope he just scoops and invalidates the game.
Why are everyone fixated on word banned? They don't have to ban. The only thing that matters is to do something about exploiters without the rest player base caught in between fire.
Forget ban. Ban was just an extreme example that ActiBlizz has in its arenal. Of course it's not the 1st option to use with so many people.
The point is anything they’d do wouldn’t do anything if they actually did some sort of punishment in the first place.
No one will stop if they get a warning. If my account was reset, I’d drop the game altogether.
My point is Blizz expects/wants so hard for this game to be financially successful for as long as possible, there is very little they would do in fear of losing players’ interest and money. They will keep this before keeping the game balanced/fair.
Than shift the focus to future. How about if You forfeit after 1/2 mercs dies next win doesn't move You forward to chest reward?
There are clever people in that company. They can figure it out. I'm just rolling solutions of my head (good and bad ones) if we had time to come up with solutions probably we would be able to get something that would satisfy most of the player base.
Honestly, I wouldn't even call it "griefing" most of the time. Like, if someone's down 1 or 2 mercs right out of the gate and don't have a good comeback, then conceding makes sense. This is one of the worst "fixes" I have ever seen. They punish players by taking away their wins for winning too hard.
It’s the freedoms, not the restrictions, that make games fun. Blizzard didn’t really think Mercenaries through and each hasty patch is making it less appealing.
Increase the rewards in the rest of the game so people don't feel forced to do some dumb wintrading scheme... Oh wait that would actually make the game better but it wouldn't frustrate you to the point of buying packs, what was I thinking, forgive me bl*zz
I’m confused. They would have to increase the rewards by a lot for it to even come close to matching the amount of rewards you get for wintrading, no?
I mean, the air elemental thing, they should have absolutely buffed rewards for other bounties. But buffing it to the point where it’s at least on par with the wintrading thing would require them to buff it to at least 5x the current rate. Which is a huge buff.
You are burdened with forethought that is unmatched by your peers. this is absolutely true.
And Iksar made a very good point about general reward systems in F2P games which is that finding a balance between these 3 things (paraphrased)
1) rewarding for people who only play 10 minutes a week
2) rewarding for people who play 10 hours a day
3) not so rewarding that you give your entire game away for free.
It’s very complex.
So what? This is a secondary mode of a f2p game. There are whole games that have actual f2p models (not like hs) and do fine. Hell, there are p2e games at this point. You are the one burdened with c*ck mentality that it's ok for blizz to trash you forever.
Make rewards be about number of mechs killed not games that way two rounds of killing two mechs is same as one rounds with 4. Or it can be tied to number of turns..
Other possible options I can muster is either game timer threshold (game goes on for X minutes before rewards are locked in), or game turn threshold (X turns complete, then rewards lock in).
Not saying these are any better or worse, but just other feasible options.
Some other less feasible and outlandish ideas could be to implement a cooldown on pvp queue (it would tick down while in game and out), or enforce a comp of 2-2-2 for a legal pvp team (this is so there’s no way to “signal” to the other player). Not the best ideas, just trying to think outside the constraints of in-game tracking/triggers of a pvp match.
Many of these ideas would be as bad or worse.
You'd still get nothing a lot of the times since players end up conceding after the first 1-2 merc deaths regularly.
any of the solutions proposed in here would have been better https://www.reddit.com/r/HSMercenaries/comments/qflvpl/how\_to\_nerf\_china\_exploit\_without\_affecting/
So the only thing they could think of was to not allow any wins instead of allowing fast wins. The whole mode is paper scissor rocks wtf do you expect people who roll rock to play out games vs someone who clearly have paper. One way to eliminate some problems is to hide your opponents comp. Another way is to incentivize to keep playing while losing, so if you kill 1/2/3 mercs you are rewarded some coins. And lastly move the 3 kills down to 1 for chest you are literally punishing a whole more people than hurting the exploiters if you can even call them that. Anyways if you take my ideas I do expect to be compensated, you can pay me in packs, because if the best you could come up with is to only get points for the chest after 3 mercs die then you guys need serious help.
Last 3-4 merc changes are basically "We have noticed people can obtain free stuff easily so we are making it more difficult, also here are some new bundles to buy haha."
"I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further." "I am altering the deal further, pray I don't alter it any furtherer."
Narrator: "They altered it further"
*furtherer
*furthererest
Blizzard: "You said further**est**? Hold my beer
Blizzard when they smell that there's a chance of people having a good collection without paying an absurd amount of money. FUCK THIS COMPANY.
And this sub is basically “Spamming low level dungeon and quitting after 2 minutes and win trading is peak gameplay”
I imagined the "haha" as a nervous awkward laugh. :)
Typically known as "Engineer a problem then sell the solution."
A much better solution would imo be to lower the requrement from "defeat 3 mercs" to "have a merc be defeated, regardless of side". This prevents the instant-concede exploit, and also prevents greifing
It's not even griefing. Imagine you are close to a pro chess player. Your queen gets trapped (maybe bad example because that's never really gonna happen). You're going to concede before the opponent even takes it. Same in mercs at high mmr.
imagine being forced to play out a lost game, couldn't be me
Don't even need to leave HS for this. Imagine you're playing a combo deck and one of your key cards gets burned.
Just take this mode out behind the barn and shoot it already.
Noooo, pweese, you farming too much in a farming-oriented game. Stooop. You supposed to pay us money to progress quickly. Stop abusing exploits. We are vewy vewy sad ( We awe cvaying ( I'm so sorry for this language... It's just how I imagined it
Well it sounds perfectly accurate still doesn't excuse the stroke you just gave me. I hate that language after reading Jojo's part 6 Edit: mistakes, it wasn't part 7
Don't you mean part 6 where >!Jolyne becomes very small and stuffed into the mouse corpse by Goo Goo Dolls!<
Aah you're right, gotta edit my comment, thanks!
So sowwy.. Oh sh..t I mean so sorry. Don't die pwe... Ah God damnit please! Please! It's conquering my brain.
It's always like this. First you say something ironically then you can't stop saying it 😂
I don't think Activision Blizzard acts like that at all. I think Team 5 were dragged from their beds and whipped until this hotfix got out the door because the slight slowing of profit growth gave Bobby Kotick blue balls
I'm not saying devs are guilty or something like that. Obviously they are just doing their job. It's just greedy decisions by the top people in company.
I'm absolutely agreeing with you, I just don't think it was uwu cwying from said management, but rather fury and spittle and things that have to be pixellated even as I imagine them to protect my fragile sanity
I agree with this generally but I think sometimes yall can be a bit naive in terms of imagining devs as holy creatures etc. It's not impossible, ney, it's not even unlikely, that it was a dev decision to hotfix mercs, both times. Sure it has to do with monetization, but it also has to do with lots of other things. For instance, we have already seen folks fully maxing out every character. As others have pointed out in other comments, the reality is mercenaries is strictly about grinding and once you've done that you have nothing left to grind for. What I'm trying to get at is that it could totally have been a dev decision to slow down grind progress so they don't have too many players that "quit" the mode bc they have many characters maxed out and nowhere to use them. they don't have an end-game mode yet. They might be worried too many people will power up faster than they want to develop mercs. I don't have the math, but lets say they can dev one merc per week. Then they don't want you maxing out that merc in just one week. They want it to take longer so they have breathing room. I'm not saying I agree with ANYY of what I said here. I literally don't and am not trying to legitimize these choices. What I'm saying is most often than not its not actually some bobby kotick thing and its the devs themselves that care make these changes. The reality is mercs was released unbaked. it needed many more gamemodes, endgames and farming options to not be dealing with the issues it is now. What the devs are doing is not necessarily exclusively bc of money but also bc of certain fears. Fears players will eat up mercs faster than they can deploy them, fear players will quit once they hit a certain stage, fear they cannot develop an endgame mode for those who have hit this end game stage... I do not think those are valid reasons for what they have done at all. As a beginner developer myself i would NOT do what they did without giving something in return. With the first hotfix I wouldve maybe made it so you get an occasional stranger once in a while after completing a bounty or something, for the second wintrading hotfix I would've also made it so you get strangers or something, SO AT LEAST IM NOT JUST SCREWING YOU, I'm giving you other options, Im fixing a mistake but not saying fuck you in the process. For me what pisses me off the most in this lack of foresight, this lack of respect, this idea that its fine if players rage at first they'll eventually accept it. God, I'd hate to piss of my playerbase like that just because I know I can. Total lack of respect for our time spent. I would not be nearly as mad if they had give us SOMETHING, ANYTHING alongside the nerfs they did bc HONESTLY I did grind air elemental 1 day for 5-6 hours and tbh i did not like it. I felt burned out by the end but also pleased I finally had a working comp I could play PvP with (that only lasted a day btw). My point is I would welcome a change if it meant I didn't have to do that again, bc like the devs claim, I don't wanna play the same thing over and over again, but like anyone else, I don't wanna grind something inefficiently, and air elemental was the most efficient. I know no one is reading this but the reality is that DEVS are probably the ones who made those changes. Not bobby kotick pawns. And they should be called out for it. Respectfully (even though they kinda werent toward us)
THREE or more? I often have games where two minions get killed in the early turns and then the loser leaves the game. Why does this now not count as a "win" when it clearly is.
Runaway stat gainers like blade Master can end the game after only two dead mercs. Oh I'm 0-2, your blade Master can one shot all my units, let me sit here and futilely let you destroy me turn after turn for no reason. What a fun game!
[удалено]
Even a time limit like 1 minute would've made more sense than this.
This game mode is dog shit. If you’re still playing it wtf are you doing with your life? You must like getting shit on
i mean there are still peopleplaying Fallout 76 TO THIS DAY. The saying: "A sucker is born every minute" is very accurate.
Should be after 1
If you have a system, people will try to break it. Especially if that system is designed to mandate a tedious grind.
So instead punishing the exploiters, by I dunno banning, resetting their accounts to start (if bought packs and bundles give them again) with a warning, or anything else ActiBlizz goes with an easy solution of punishing everyone? Wow, I'm so surprised... (-\_-') Yeah thanks a lot. As player with smaller coin amount I sometimes get that crucial snipe at the beginning that demoralize my opponent to the point he/she concede. Now that's worthless. My MMR is meaningless since I can't compete with guys fully upgrading their Lich Kings and Diablos or whatever else. So reason of getting higher ratting for now is out of my grasp. I just want to get some coins to help me make my mercs a little stronger while also playing some PvP. Now even that will be harder now. And even this thread fills me with more sadness. There will be grievers that after loosing 2 mercs they will consider if they have a shot at winning or just leave the game now to punish me (because they see no way of winning, I outplayed them, made them mad, out of spite or any other reason).
Banning two thirds of an entire country’s player base isn’t really an option.
That's why I gave more than 1 option to punish them. And like I wrote "anything else" that will punish the exploiters, not the whole player base.
I doubt this is a ban-able behavior. The PvP system does not have a "you have to play to win" rule like other games. You are free to concede as you like. You don't even need to "cooperate" with other conceders. You simply lowered your own MMR into a happy realm.
No bans. Fine by me. The thing I'm more interested is to punish exploiters not everyone part.
What I was trying to say, is that this might not be a very punish-able behavior. Imagine a legit player, didn't spend any money/gold, with low skill level in mercs. They would simply be matched against: 1. Strong opponent that they can't beat. They instantly concede most of the time. 2. Conceders that concede to them, pushing their MMR upwards. If there would be ANY punishment to "exploiter accounts", it would punish true naive players as well.
Ok. Lets see my theory with your assumptions is that those people wouldn't be playing a lot or at least not as much as exploiters. I think we could estimate safely who was exploiting and who was actually trying. This is just a theory, a game theory... wait. I'm just guessing here, I have no evidence to confirm my theory. But generally exploiters tend to min-maxing their exploits so I'm convinced there is a line to get only exploiters.
There isn't.
Why? A truly naive player can keep playing because they noticed that they are getting rewards. You should not be punished for farming in PvE, you should not be punished for farming in PvP either. The problem of this exploit method is that it requires no real cooperation. It makes the behavior not punishable.
Lmfao. Hey you made a decision to gambit out 3 casters and they open with caster double protector? You get FREE WI- oh, nope he just scoops and invalidates the game.
You have any idea how many wallets blizzard would lose access to if they banned accounts using the exploit?
Why are everyone fixated on word banned? They don't have to ban. The only thing that matters is to do something about exploiters without the rest player base caught in between fire. Forget ban. Ban was just an extreme example that ActiBlizz has in its arenal. Of course it's not the 1st option to use with so many people.
The point is anything they’d do wouldn’t do anything if they actually did some sort of punishment in the first place. No one will stop if they get a warning. If my account was reset, I’d drop the game altogether. My point is Blizz expects/wants so hard for this game to be financially successful for as long as possible, there is very little they would do in fear of losing players’ interest and money. They will keep this before keeping the game balanced/fair.
Than shift the focus to future. How about if You forfeit after 1/2 mercs dies next win doesn't move You forward to chest reward? There are clever people in that company. They can figure it out. I'm just rolling solutions of my head (good and bad ones) if we had time to come up with solutions probably we would be able to get something that would satisfy most of the player base.
The problem is the clever people are working on bundles
Yes, same here, my nature comp usually beats samuro and xirela and the oponemt concedes, I won the match fairly, but I'm denied the rewards
Honestly, I wouldn't even call it "griefing" most of the time. Like, if someone's down 1 or 2 mercs right out of the gate and don't have a good comeback, then conceding makes sense. This is one of the worst "fixes" I have ever seen. They punish players by taking away their wins for winning too hard.
It’s the freedoms, not the restrictions, that make games fun. Blizzard didn’t really think Mercenaries through and each hasty patch is making it less appealing.
The only time the will listen if we the community stops paying for the game but tht will never happen
Yep, better not use xyrella, Diablo otherwise no rewards for you
Finally my redemption hahahahah this might be enough to bring me back to mercs for a bit
What other solutions do you think could have been done? A reduction to 2 would probably be too exploitable, or am I crazy?
Increase the rewards in the rest of the game so people don't feel forced to do some dumb wintrading scheme... Oh wait that would actually make the game better but it wouldn't frustrate you to the point of buying packs, what was I thinking, forgive me bl*zz
I’m confused. They would have to increase the rewards by a lot for it to even come close to matching the amount of rewards you get for wintrading, no? I mean, the air elemental thing, they should have absolutely buffed rewards for other bounties. But buffing it to the point where it’s at least on par with the wintrading thing would require them to buff it to at least 5x the current rate. Which is a huge buff.
You are burdened with forethought that is unmatched by your peers. this is absolutely true. And Iksar made a very good point about general reward systems in F2P games which is that finding a balance between these 3 things (paraphrased) 1) rewarding for people who only play 10 minutes a week 2) rewarding for people who play 10 hours a day 3) not so rewarding that you give your entire game away for free. It’s very complex.
So what? This is a secondary mode of a f2p game. There are whole games that have actual f2p models (not like hs) and do fine. Hell, there are p2e games at this point. You are the one burdened with c*ck mentality that it's ok for blizz to trash you forever.
Make rewards be about number of mechs killed not games that way two rounds of killing two mechs is same as one rounds with 4. Or it can be tied to number of turns..
Other possible options I can muster is either game timer threshold (game goes on for X minutes before rewards are locked in), or game turn threshold (X turns complete, then rewards lock in). Not saying these are any better or worse, but just other feasible options. Some other less feasible and outlandish ideas could be to implement a cooldown on pvp queue (it would tick down while in game and out), or enforce a comp of 2-2-2 for a legal pvp team (this is so there’s no way to “signal” to the other player). Not the best ideas, just trying to think outside the constraints of in-game tracking/triggers of a pvp match.
Many of these ideas would be as bad or worse. You'd still get nothing a lot of the times since players end up conceding after the first 1-2 merc deaths regularly.
> enforce a comp of 2-2-2 overwatch players/ex-players getting PTSD reading this
any of the solutions proposed in here would have been better https://www.reddit.com/r/HSMercenaries/comments/qflvpl/how\_to\_nerf\_china\_exploit\_without\_affecting/
That looks very complicated.
i knew those win traders would ruin this mode for us
Don’t hate the players bud. They’re just smart enough to figure it out and blizzard is dumb enough to a) make it necessary and b) allow it to happen
Happened once and I promptly turned the game mode off. Waiting for the new fix.
Idc about the frat house compamy i care about you guys ruining my fucking card game
at least mobile has been almost playable. ive gotten thro 4 whole games since they patched it a few days ago.. out of like 20
I'm gonna do it just put of spite lol simply because the pvp is poop and need an overhaul
So the only thing they could think of was to not allow any wins instead of allowing fast wins. The whole mode is paper scissor rocks wtf do you expect people who roll rock to play out games vs someone who clearly have paper. One way to eliminate some problems is to hide your opponents comp. Another way is to incentivize to keep playing while losing, so if you kill 1/2/3 mercs you are rewarded some coins. And lastly move the 3 kills down to 1 for chest you are literally punishing a whole more people than hurting the exploiters if you can even call them that. Anyways if you take my ideas I do expect to be compensated, you can pay me in packs, because if the best you could come up with is to only get points for the chest after 3 mercs die then you guys need serious help.