Board 8 > Mercenaries 5 Unveiling Topic: Now Hiring! [New Game]

(+) Yeah! (+)

I still don't agree with the possession ruling that knocked me outta draftmerx but I respect how they processed it. They're good civilization.
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ScareChan posted...

kidding aside trdl was obvious and I do not recall much drama stemming from decisions in Draft Mercs so I thats cool, and Kamek was a very good help to those who asked and he was always ready to contribute (also Wily best merc) so he should be great

(please another draft mercs before mercs 5 unless its up like in a month)

Given we're going to try out a new system for abilities, it may be a while until we even have, like, rules to test-drive with a draft. I wouldn't wait with bated breath for it, but if we manage to make a lot of builds we like and a set of rules we want to see in action, we might do something. We will also probably keep running handpicked battles to get a good gauge on some new merc candidates, both to keep you guys entertained and to get some data.
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I'd be happy to make some builds once the rules are sufficiently firmed up

they might not be builds anybody WANTS but hey
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Tom Bombadil posted...

I'd be happy to make some builds once the rules are sufficiently firmed up

they might not be builds anybody WANTS but hey

I'm gonna try to make an updated ability primer and build template soon. I'll have more to say once Discord stops crapping itself and I can look at some stuff from last night lul
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Cool
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Hi friendos! I've skimmed the first 4 pages and have a few comments on game length which have probably already been discussed somewhere.

Part of the reason why Mercs drags on is because it's not just that there's more going on, but there's way more to learn. More characters, more abilities, more interactions, more rulings, more everything. There's a turnover point well before Week 60 where things just get too cumbersome, especially if you don't already know all the characters. It's a turn-off for players, it's a turn-off for voters, and the matches themselves just become chaotic shit shows where it's a clear-cut ability-based stomp or some chaotic mess where you honestly can't even understand how the fight even happens in the first place. You're supposed to be able to imagine the fight happening, and the lategame really doesn't jive well with the limitations of imagination. Power creep also has to happen necessarily the longer it goes, which changes character investing strategies.

The fun in mercs is using abilities to augment fights and the early/midgame have always been good at that. The lategame is what pisses people off to no end, takes forever, and ruins lives. It can't be 60 weeks. 40 is as long as it should ever go for the main season imo.
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I just skimmed Page 7 and saw that a lot of what I mentioned about accessibility came up in the context of roster sizes.

You guys are doing good due diligence here woo
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I just read page 6, my post was unnecessary it seems since KP brought up good points.

Why I'm reading piecemeal and in reverse, I can't say.
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you just gotta take advantage of others' apathy !!!!!
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I recall having burning hatred for justin for some reason and cant remember why
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greengravy294 posted...

you just gotta take advantage of others' apathy !!!!!

One weird trick wild card teams don't want you to know about
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ScareChan posted...

I recall having burning hatred for justin for some reason and cant remember why

well you both played mercs so that's probably a good place to start
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Eddv posted...

greengravy294 posted...

you just gotta take advantage of others' apathy !!!!!

One weird trick wild card teams don't want you to know about

What Shepard does next will SHOCK you
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The more I think about it the more i lean towards 40 weeks. Between delays and elims and playoffs and events that probably comes close to a year anyway. Plus my wife will be less depressed.
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We should go for 83 weeks
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Justin was the closest thing I had to a friend in M4 *sniffle*
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Lopen posted...

We should go for 83 weeks

A man after my own heart

A mercs that isn't the Long Walk ain't a mercs

(I'm joking obviously. We still need to define a duration for our game because we've got more immediate issues to deal with, but making the game less grueling is absolutely a top goal of the admin team.)
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60+ weeks but all week events happen over the course of 2 days at a time
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As far as I'm concerned the Long Walk comparison was the best thing I ever did in Mercs. You don't win the race, you just end up the last person alive and then go insane
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Johnbobb posted...

60+ weeks but all week events happen over the course of 2 days at a time

By this you mean that they're 15 day breaks from the usual scramble? Honestly that might not even be a bad idea for letting people recover from mercs burnout tbqh. Thoughts everyone?
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Mercs aint mercs if there arent convoluted rulibgs xanatos pileups and social game head fuckery

Like if the new system is incapable of replicating "Give me your split timeline name and I'll KO myself and confuse you into thinking you picked the wrong timeline" then why even bother.
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KanzarisKelshen posted...

Johnbobb posted...

60+ weeks but all week events happen over the course of 2 days at a time

By this you mean that they're 15 day breaks from the usual scramble? Honestly that might not even be a bad idea for letting people recover from mercs burnout tbqh. Thoughts everyone?

oh i was joking

saying that 60 weeks in game would happen in 120 days irl
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Johnbobb posted...

KanzarisKelshen posted...

Johnbobb posted...

60+ weeks but all week events happen over the course of 2 days at a time

By this you mean that they're 15 day breaks from the usual scramble? Honestly that might not even be a bad idea for letting people recover from mercs burnout tbqh. Thoughts everyone?

oh i was joking

saying that 60 weeks in game would happen in 120 days irl

but think about how action packed those 120 days would be tho
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ScareChan posted...

I recall having burning hatred for justin for some reason and cant remember why

i think it was because of raiden

but i'm too lazy to look into it
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I still think it's kind of funny how Raiden was a 6, Armstrong was a 5, but Raiden only beat Armstrong because he was distracted by a dog
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I thought we put Armstrong at a 5.
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Armstrong was a fair deal below mercs Raiden.

I'm not saying Armstrong wasn't probably under upkeeped. I'm just saying it's misleading because mercs Raiden is stronger than boss fight Raiden pre dog distraction.
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I so want to be in but the time commitment scares me... someone help! lol
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no it was nongame stuff

something about irl stuff and justin being an ass
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Work progressing smoothly still. Currently discussing the possibility of gradually introducing mechanics into the game. Among a few other topics, the admin team today discussed...

-Lowering the initial infra gains to mitigate the sheer impact the first few matches have, and raising the gains on the back end of the season to match (to 2 and 4 respectively probably). This is to make the game less punishing and swingy early on.

-Either randomly sticking people in a pool of 6 or 8 players, or arranging predefined matches for the first cycle, to allow players to learn how the ability system and rosterings/terrain bidding works without forcing them to do the declaration bids thing that went down in M4. It was not a good idea in hindsight.

-Introducing a way to refund mercenaries. Initial thinking is a hirable PS multiple people can hire at any given time, whose upkeep changes based on your pool and who would probably come in like, 3 to 5 cycles in. You attach him to a merc and build up a refund on the merc's min bid week by week, which you can cash in during results. After a certain period of time passes, the PS takes the merc away forcibly, refunding the whole min bid. If you remember the That Man idea from M4, something like that but refitted for serious use. Probably bars ability usages while attached to a merc I think?
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I like the first two ideas (maybe rando the first matches and then do like a swiss system thing for the rest of the cycle?)

Refund seems like a good idea. The PS idea seems overly complicated but thinking through it I don't see a way to simplify it
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if your goal is making parity between teams you should have a waiver wire after x amount of weeks where teams with worst records get first crack at new mercs
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ScareChan posted...

if your goal is making parity between teams you should have a waiver wire after x amount of weeks where teams with worst records get first crack at new mercs

I don't think this really helps because the problem isn't, at least IME, that you can't buy something (we are working super hard to make sure that is not the case. I don't think I mentioned it, but we want to significantly expand the weeks 1-5 merc pool so that cases like 'oopsie I need a high tier merc to compete and none are coming out for five weeks, guess I'm fucked!' never happen again). The problem is you have a merc that was poorly written, too weak, or otherwise dead weight and you can't get rid of them. I had Marcus Fenix and Shirou, for example, and dropping one of those was what allowed me to bounce back and buy Vergil and Tira. Ideally we shouldn't need a specific 'refund a merc' event to allow these kinds of comebacks to happen, but on the flipside it also shouldn't be as free a thing to do as it was there.
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KanzarisKelshen posted...

I don't think this really helps because the problem isn't, at least IME, that you can't buy something

This is absolutely not true. There was a very long stretch of the game where for want of a 5 I was having to put a lot of money on the line in buydowns.
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my point is more whoever is winning the most can pricelock weaker teams out of the premium mercs they want down the line. What you are saying now is just be happy with the opening pool because its larger
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Yeah this was absolutely the case - johnbobb and I got into a massive bidding war over Turok and I was forced into buying Strider which at the time looked like a really sub-par purchase (and ended up being the key to my victory over Ganon but shhh)
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Waiver wire also goes with your idea of groupshare supports

No one has bought Dedede for 5 weeks? Make him available as a 1 week rental at a cheaper rate
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like I would have loved to hoard more lowbies for fun combo abilities but I had to save and try to wait to buy higher teir mercs so my fun stuff had to go to the wayside.
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AP absolutely does make a waiver wire/deckbuilder style of game player more possible.
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KanzarisKelshen posted...

-Introducing a way to refund mercenaries. Initial thinking is a hirable PS multiple people can hire at any given time, whose upkeep changes based on your pool and who would probably come in like, 3 to 5 cycles in. You attach him to a merc and build up a refund on the merc's min bid week by week, which you can cash in during results. After a certain period of time passes, the PS takes the merc away forcibly, refunding the whole min bid.

Hi Tom Nook, how are you today?
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you know what else I would like to see more of

hidden abilities

like how we got babies with chrom or whatever it was

but maybe allude to them having a special ability but not requirements or something
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Eddv posted...

KanzarisKelshen posted...

I don't think this really helps because the problem isn't, at least IME, that you can't buy something

This is absolutely not true. There was a very long stretch of the game where for want of a 5 I was having to put a lot of money on the line in buydowns.

I did say 'we're working hard to make sure this isn't the case'

Like the assumption is nobody needs to buy Garrus Vakarian just because they need a 6 because we'd be piss-poor admins if we failed to address such a simple issue.

ScareChan posted...

my point is more whoever is winning the most can pricelock weaker teams out of the premium mercs they want down the line. What you are saying now is just be happy with the opening pool because its larger

The opening pool and the revealed mercs as well, mostly. A large part of why you probably won't see M5 for a bit is because we need to make a ton of builds in advance so we avoid the issue of build drought that leads to limited options. The dream would be to release 6-7 fighty mercs week in week out and one or two PSes. We'll see if that can be managed.

ScareChan posted...

like I would have loved to hoard more lowbies for fun combo abilities but I had to save and try to wait to buy higher teir mercs so my fun stuff had to go to the wayside.

We're working out ways to win the game while deliberately sacrificing a tier a fair amount. The 'bounties' system I mentioned a while back, for example. You will still 100% have to fight money with money if somebody does paydowns, but that's kind of the point because the only way to win for 'cheap' should be to build a merc squad that crushes in all tiers. Winning in your weak tiers otherwise should require burning cash.
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ScareChan posted...

you know what else I would like to see more of

hidden abilities

like how we got babies with chrom or whatever it was

but maybe allude to them having a special ability but not requirements or something

We're proooooobably not gonna do hidden abils much just because it's more fun to incite players with something they can see than hope they're brave/stupid enough to try something. For example, Kain is probably going to get an ability related to breaking his legendary losing streak indicating that yes, something good will happen if you're ballsy enough to become the hero he deserves.
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DeathChicken posted...

KanzarisKelshen posted...

-Introducing a way to refund mercenaries. Initial thinking is a hirable PS multiple people can hire at any given time, whose upkeep changes based on your pool and who would probably come in like, 3 to 5 cycles in. You attach him to a merc and build up a refund on the merc's min bid week by week, which you can cash in during results. After a certain period of time passes, the PS takes the merc away forcibly, refunding the whole min bid.

Hi Tom Nook, how are you today?

Which version of Nook are you referring to, DC? All I recall is the TR version that IIRC let you buy stuff from him?
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KanzarisKelshen posted...

ScareChan posted...

you know what else I would like to see more of

hidden abilities

like how we got babies with chrom or whatever it was

but maybe allude to them having a special ability but not requirements or something

We're proooooobably not gonna do hidden abils much just because it's more fun to incite players with something they can see than hope they're brave/stupid enough to try something. For example, Kain is probably going to get an ability related to breaking his legendary losing streak indicating that yes, something good will happen if you're ballsy enough to become the hero he deserves.

Well stuff like that is what I mean. You can tip them off there is something to gain and idea of how to achieve it, just dont be cryptic

like if there are 2 similiar mercs in Ike and Chrom and Chrom has a special ability thats a mystery that sounds more appealing even if his combat worth is not as high. you get what I mean
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speaking of chrom

how come there are no Tokyo Mirage Session write ups. Chrom with TMS abilities is much stronger than vanilla chrom. His elemental stuff is great. Plus a session ability would be really fun
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I think hidden abilities are cool if they don't explicitly favor the purchaser. Lucina was cute because anyone could buy her so it wasn't imbalancing in favor of the one who bought Chrom. It's pretty hard to think of a lot of concepts that work that way though.
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Let's get our lucina in the contest
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Oh that was just me thinking that kind of thing fits Tom Nook in general, holding a character in indentured servitude

Also Recette, but she was fun as is
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I'm still glad we let ffd get all the dumb infra altering abilities so he had to just come in every week and correct his econ
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