LogFAQs > #972590707

Mercenaries 5 Test Run, Post Mortem

The Test Run has come and gone, and what a ride it was. Much to the admins' satisfaction, the roster had no weak links. Everyone fought tenaciously for their wins, and the teams each looked like they could beat each other and it mostly just depended on the tier and the setup. 'Any given Sunday' was very much in play here. In this series of posts, I'll provide a breakdown of what I saw, week to week, and my thoughts on it. Questions and comments are, of course, welcome.

Week 1

Week 1 was split in two halves.One was the initial buying period, and the other was the Panic Period (TM) once people realized bounty hunters existed. The buying period saw remarkably interesting team cores be formed, and overall, went as expected. The panic period, a product of several readers not reading the rules too closely, was very funny but also gave the admin team a few realizations:

A) Bounty Hunters could be spammed. People argued 4/weeks were bad independent of BHs existing, and on this point I steadfastly disagreed (4/weeks are, historically, the recipients of the most powerful ability suites in Mercenaries -- just see M4 Doomguy, Golbez, Flynn or Alucard for some examples -- they possess strong battle worth that can reinforce low tier but also brutal ability muscle as a rule). Being able to punish even a single 4/week by getting two or three 3/weeks, however, was certainly too powerful.

B) Bounty Hunters mattered they mattered too much, sure, but Mario vs Bowser and DK was a phenomenal look at the impact a clever BH pickup could have (more on Mario in a second). The mechanic needed adjustment to be fair, but it was worth fighting to preserve it.

C) War(time) had changed. The years and build tweaks had created a fascinating new landscape. Mario being not only useful but genuinely match-swinging was the obvious example, but Jinx, Sagat and Gordon Freeman being argued to potentially fight Samus was both terrifying and fascinating. Who would've thought that could ever happen in previous iterations of mercs?

D) We needed more money. Leaders bankrupted themselves into oblivion the instant week 1 hit. Even doubled infra gains weren't going to allow for even a single reinforcement to happen in a reasonable timeframe (except for JC, who saved some $$$ ahead of time). If the matches were gonna be more than cripple fights, a cash infusion was necessary. This applied to the main game, too -- 3 AP to use on crippling an average of three mercenaries was just too much. Overwhelming ability firepower makes matches too easy and undebatable. In general, my prevailing theory is you need AP + 1 viable battle mercs (read as: pseudo-support 1/weeks do NOT count here), ramping gradually to AP + 2 battlemercs over time (and will likely be AP + 3 circa playoffs time as teams go all out and deploy massive amounts of firepower at each other), to have a good and fun mercs season.

It was a good week, though. The admin team was pleased with the matches and the players came out to play. A good start for this mini-season.

Week 2

Not a lot to say about this week. In a lot of ways, it was a continuation of the first. The chief notable thing was that Raiden was paid down to mid...and lost, hard. Bounty Hunters proved to be a counter even to the might of full-fledged 7/weeks! Something had to give.

Results brought some notable changes. We deployed our first set of mercenary hotfixes to make some more appealing, we injected 100 GP into the system, and we began plotting fixes to bounty hunters. We had time, as next week was a High week, to get this right.