LogFAQs > #971566126

Lopen posted...

The big reason for the GP cost is to narrow down the ability targets and give a drawback to doing so.

But you don't necessarily need to implement that via GP. There is that whole fatigue mechanic that exists which would probably be sufficient.

But yeah more slots to me is where the money is for balancing pay downs. I'm not sure why this wasn't discussed more in the development. If there was one thing I felt M4 really did wrong it was pay downs.

The answer is largely that we wanted to see if we could implement a symmetrical answer to paydowns via Bounty Hunters, mostly, instead of just punishing paydowns even harder. Teams that lean top heavy have the natural disadvantage of dealing with abilities less well to begin with and costing more gold at every step of the game. Rather than nerf them further, we felt letting people maintain battle power parity by accepting economic parity (that is, reduce that very significant gold advantage to gain tools to reduce the enemy's power advantage) was worth trying first. It's already an issue that going top-heavy is actually very hard to make viable due to getting less money, which goes counter to Mercenaries being, hypothetically, a game where you can play with your favorite gaming characters and be valid. We wanted to see if a soft touch of 'abilities are usable much more often and you can pay to throw even more of them out if you want' could balance paydowns first before going straight to harder nerfs.