Board 8 > Mercenaries 5 Test Run, Week 3 Results: PAN-DAE-MO-NIUM!

(+) Yeah! (+)

Mewtwo > JC
Gravy > Aria (Close! 9-7)
Eddv > Boko (Close! 9-5)

Congratulations to the savage nobles who dominated their matches cleanly and the cultured thieves who scammed one out this week.

Assign experience here. Builds and letters will come at a later time! We also have yet more tweaks and system changes incoming, as always, as well as rolling out the second cycle's tiers. Exciting!

Your declaration order for next week is:

Gravy
Aria
JC
Mewtwo
Eddv
Boko

IMPORTANT COMMUNIQUE FROM THE ADMINS:

Good evening, dear leaders. This evening marks the formal conclusion of our first testing cycle. A lot has happened since we first set out to push the Mercs 5 systems to their limits together. We've seen crazy matches; boring matches; repeated matches; and a remarkable amount of stunning, miraculous upsets that brought some of us great joy, and others great despair. The events of this cycle are honestly worthy of a proper post mortem (which might be posted tomorrow or later tonight), but for now, what we wish to say is this:

We've seen you. We've heard you. And we're here to change the game.

As of this posting, the following tweaks are applied to the rules, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY. Going from least to greatest:

-The Imbued tag has been implemented, representing mercenaries whose bodies have been augmented past their normal limits by supernatural modifications (NOT tech). The following mercenaries are now considered Imbued: Aigis, Albert Wesker, Ashley Winchester, Cloud Strife, the Doom Slayer, Estinien Wyrmblood, Eunie, Jesse Faden, Jinx, Kefka, Kirby, Samus Aran, Selvaria Bles, Sephiroth, Slave Knight Gael, Sol Badguy, Tusk and Zenos viator Galvus. If you feel any mercenary should have this tag applied but wasn't listed here, please let us know. Wiki pages are currently being updated to reflect the new tag's implementation. Refer to the mercenaries' pages for more information on how the tag has been implemented.
-Samus and Rika's Universe's Greatest Bounty Hunter and Time Loop abilities are being reworded for additional clarity. These pages will be updated shortly. In the case of Rika, we are also attaching a new picture that more clearly indicates how her passive scales with time, courtesy of Tirofog and Dante's combined efforts. Much love to them for this.
-Lastly, BOUNTY HUNTING RULES HAVE BEEN CHANGED. We see how Bounty Hunters were used to utterly hose mercenaries that would have livened up low and mid tier battles and we are taking action against it. We are also heavily nerfing the amount of free AP received (to +1 per two points of upkeep above tier an enemy team is fielding), and decoupling it from specific mercenaries to make ability phases less braindead. We want paydowns to be possible to fight against, but the original BH implementation swung too hard the other way and made them very risky and low value propositions. We hope that this newer, more moderate implementation, coupled with the generally higher power level of low and mid mercenaries across the board will suffice to provide proper counterplay to paydowns that doesn't involve simply hosing them under double or triple the default AP cap's worth of abilities. For more details, refer to the Rules document. Questions are welcome!

That is all for now. Tiers will be rolled and posted shorty, as will builds.

Builds were, in fact, posted soon...in the Discord. Here are the upcoming week's builds.

http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/2b
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/ganondorf
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/geralt-of-rivia
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/the-impostor

http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/jim-raynor
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/juri-han
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/king-ii
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/little-mac

http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/master-chief
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/metal-gear-ray
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/sabin-figaro
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/sora

http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/solidus-snake
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/subject-delta
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/sylvando
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/the-three-lords

Thank you for your patience, everyone. We look forward to experiencing the back half of this test run with you.

:)

We're glad that that particular upgrade has consistently raised eyebrows. Toobs didn't really need incredibly potent abilities to sell herself (though we feel the ones she got are all fun and strong), but we wanted to lean hard on giving her a theme of 'finality' and 'meaning', as existentialism is such a strong theme for Nier Automata. Wretched Weaponry is maybe the peak of that -- and also an extremely stylish way to commit mercs suicide if anyone grows too tired of playing but does not wish to hand their team over to someone else.

Additional Announcement:

The following bulletpoint will be added to the opening post of battle topics going forwards. A version of this existed as far back as Draft Mercs M4, but it was lost to the sands of time. A recent match (hi JC/Mewtwo) reminded us to bring it back.

-No mercenary can ever start in a location where they would die instantly, destroy the arena merely by existing in it, or end up ringed out of the terrain before abilities. If there's no room within a terrain to fit them, the terrain will stretch out until there's at least one yard of available, moving, safe space. Attacks may not damage the terrain enough to cause automatic deaths or ring-outs, save with a conscious effort.

(in case the latter bit seems odd, it's 'kefka doesn't blow up Spekkioland to bits instantly just by casting Ultima at enemies', basically. We don't expect this to come up, but better to cover bases than not.)

you better believe i was ready to argue sahelanthropus blows up spekkioland

Oh man does 2Bs team just become free forfeits until they get shuffled out in elims

Cranky Kong attaches to Diddy Kong

thematic!

Dantezoid posted...

Oh man does 2Bs team just become free forfeits until they get shuffled out in elims

Would need to be decided once 2B is purchased but either they are immediately gone and we implement byes, or one of the matches in the pool becomes a triple threat until the next eliminations cycle, I think

That ability is a wonderful trainwreck, I approve

AriaOfBolo posted...

Cranky Kong attaches to Diddy Kong

thematic!

Is this supposed to be now or in peace

I was told either is fine

Sooner is better just cuz it lets us sort the paperwork out quick but either's good

I would just like to raise to the players that the current dec tiebreak system is backwards and recognizing bringing this up is self-serving in the sense that I would benefit the most from this being fixed now, I mostly want thoughts in the context of the real game and not the TR.

long story short is Aria has more infra than me and received more votes in her matches than me. Aka she has a better record. But she is higher than me in dec order because she got more votes in matches.

why does the tiebreak for dec order give priority to the person with more votes and the better stats if the intention of dec order is worst is first

The answer to that is 'we were dumb, our bad' -- it's up for changes if people want to change it to simply always favor the lossiest individual. Whatever people prefer is fine by us and now's a good time to change it if so.

KanzarisKelshen posted...

The answer to that is 'we were dumb, our bad' -- it's up for changes if people want to change it to simply always favor the lossiest individual. Whatever people prefer is fine by us and now's a good time to change it if so.

it just depends on how we want to do it. But if declaration is going to be worst declares first, then I fully agree with JC.

doesnt really make sense for someone to do better than you and subsequently declare before you as a reward. Assuming we are sticking

20 exp on Raiden pre attle

The initial thought was "reward people who fight hard, not people who forfeit or take a dive" -- but we severely overestimated those would do the latter compared to just having bad matches. People who fight hard already get the close match bonus, after all.

That's kind of why I'm surprised net infra isn't a tiebreaker before votes.

Let the curtain rise on a new age of carnage.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/80370917