Does anyone know how many active users mercenary mode typically has? I’m just curious as to how many people play it.
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Firestone has some numbers on it, but overall very little players. PvP would probably be non-existent
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I’ve heard pvp mercenaries is mostly blizzard bots at this point because there are so few players
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please stop your crusade against wild carnivore. we get it, you don’t like wild. wild is not inherently worse than standard it just allows people to use older cards.
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OK, but in my defense, I didn’t say to discontinue it (this time).
You probably will never know. Even Blizzard probably doesn’t know as they abandoned the mode. They only left in because players spent really money collecting for the mode. Otherwise they would have shut it down. I’m honestly surprised after MS bought Blizzard that they didn’t just shut it down.
Somehow the existence of, say, free adventures is a counterexample that disproves your logic.
They most likely do, but I don’t think they’ve ever published player numbers in general, at least not that I know of such occasions.
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There was no logic to disprove. I don’t think you understand what I was trying to say. Mercenaries is a mode that players paid money to get cards and whatever with. All the other modes that they have shut down nobody had to buy anything to play them. It’s the same reason why they can’t shut down Wild, Standard or BG.
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Yes, but for PvP only (see below), which isn’t very representative.
Which doesn’t really say much, to be honest. Who needs some stupid ‘tracker’ to do PvE, which Mercs are mostly about?
With that said, even I, probably one of the most avid fans of it out here, haven’t been doing it a lot recently. In fact, I was on a complete break from the game.
Unlike the previous point, there are some actual numbers, for example:
https://hearthstone.blizzard.com/en-us/community/leaderboards/?region=US&leaderboardId=mercenaries
https://hearthstone.blizzard.com/en-us/community/leaderboards/?region=EU&leaderboardId=mercenaries
I’m quite confident that the ranking at the top of the latter is indicative of a bot, and so are probably the next few.
Hadn’t played any PvP at all for a long time, did a season some time (don’t remember how many months… Actually, nevermind, found it: https://hearthstone.blizzard.com/en-us/community/leaderboards/?region=EU&leaderboardId=mercenaries&seasonId=27, also ‘Season 26’, so 9-10 months ago — hmm, must have been longer than I thought) ago, and it was hard to find a game.
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What’s the point of posting something is there’s no logic intended in it?
Although it very much reads like ‘$$$ => no shutdown’, or, equivalently, ‘shutdown => no money spent’, which sounds like clear logic to me.
Here you are saying the same thing.
You’ve got a point here that my counterexample was for a different statement, namely ‘no money spent => shutdown’, i.e. the opposite, which you didn’t explicitly make, but I erroneously assumed or attributed it to you, — I’ll admit it.
Still, I can’t agree even with what you’re saying here: Classic or Duels weren’t exactly that free, and the ‘cards [you obtained to play the mode] can be used in Wild’ mantra is more of an excuse, really (reminds me of old discussions like this one, for example; I’ll also leave this link here for some context), hence all the controversy.
I don’t even think their reasoning for keeping or deleting modes primarily has something to do with this aspect. As discussed earlier on these forums, Duels were hard or costly to maintain, unlike static content such as Mercs, thus they’ve deleted the former and kept the latter, at least according to what they’ve said — that might be their main motivation (although it’s less clear with Classic). Arguably, deleting something that doesn’t cost them that much wouldn’t be worth the controversy and bad (or, well… bad-der ) image it’d yield them.
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This probably has less to do with courts of law, and more to do with the court of public opinion.
Legally speaking, none of us own a single goddang thing in this game. We own nothing. No packs. No skins. LITERALLY we don’t own a single pixel or sound byte. We own NOTHING and the terms and conditions we agreed to prior to even installing bnet, let alone the game, make this abundantly clear. And we continue to agree to these terms every single time we start bnet and AGAIN every time we start HS proper.
We. Own. NOTHING. And that’s just how it goes for games sold as “licenses to access” as opposed to “copies to own.”
Now, with that said. Even though it’s within Blizz’s legal rights to literally shut this “service” as they’d call it down, in whole or in part, without any warning whatsoever, for any reason or no reason, for as long as they want or even indefinitely, it would be a MASSIVELY unpopular move. Like, you’d probably see it mentioned on actual worldwide news stations. THAT big. You don’t just shutter a game like this out of the blue, especially if you’re a subsidiary of Microsoft.
Now, granted we’re not talking about shutting HS down entirely in this thread. We’re just talking about certain modes. However, if said modes have charged RL money in the past for items within, even though the end user doesn’t own anything and agrees they never will, it still “feels bad man” when your investment sinks like that. For example, remember Duelyst? I’m not surprised if you don’t - indie company game that I won’t even bother describing in detail. Suffice it to say I thought it was awesome, dropped a benjamin to support them - and then they shut down and dispersed the company like 6 months later.
It felt bad, but them’s the breaks. And that’s why I don’t invest money into games that I cannot afford to lose. It’s luxury, not necessity with me.
But anyway. I rather think it’s less about “you can’t shut down things people paid RL money for” because in this case, they literally legally can. I think it’s more that IF they did, people would tear them a new one.
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That is exactly where i was going with my comment. The end EULA lets them do whatever they want since they own your account. It would just be a bad look to close down modes players paid money to acquire resources with. Nothing more.
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Its also very risky for them. The announcement of the wild/standard split was enough to cause a mass charge-back protest in South Korea, and thats while keeping the cards playable. Outright removing stuff people paid for could see that on a global scale.
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Precisely.
Gotta say, it’s getting repetitive yet again, though, for example:
Except that it’s already happened — imagine that, and not in just any backwater market, but in China (!), no less.
You overestimate the significance of this game.
Oh, you do — especially nowadays, when even bigger things considered completely outside the scope of any reason and common sense have happened as if it were something completely ordinary. You don’t literally let some housewife rule a country, even Lenin didn’t mean it like that, they said. You don’t just blow up gas pipelines on the seafloor, especially those of your supposed allies, because you think it’s funny, they said. You don’t just shut down all your nuclear power plants for the heck of it and wait for greenwash and ‘gender equality’ in dirty white socks to magically produce all the electricity for you instead, they said. You don’t… I could go on, but it is not for this forum, perhaps. Well, what do you know!
Why ever not? It’s a completely realistic possibility, and, if you’d like to think in typical Anglo-Saxon terms, there has been a precedent for that.
Ha…
You’re saying it as if they cared about it, or as if they haven’t done that, or the bulk of the players wouldn’t just swallow it, like they’ve swallowed everything else, moreover, as if resident ‘white knights’ wouldn’t defend the company ardently on these forums as usual.
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And yet you posted anyway. Genuine question, what exactly were you trying to accomplish? I rather think you’re smart enough to realize this is NOT going to go into nice and friendly places. So, again, genuine question: why even bother?
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Mentally unstable trolls are mentally unstable. Best to not make eye contact and wait for them to leave.
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Is this the first time you’ve seen this little rhetoric trick? Oh, wait:
And what have we just done?
Have you truly not got the intended message?
The real question is why it was that little bit in my post that resonated with you most.
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I’m not biting. Good day sir or madam.
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Sure about that? It’s about UTC 40 minutes past midnight as of this writing or, say, UTC+1 for CET, so good night to you. 
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Bold of you to assume I’m using earth units to measure time. For all you know I might not even subscribe to the Gregorian calendar.
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