Mercenaries Revamp: Adding Inclusivity

Multiplayer Discussion
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(TY;DR – This is my take on the Mercenaries game mode. If I’m wrong in any of what I had said, I am highly looking forward to feedback. My stance is simple, and I will explain below.)

For those that enjoy a variety of game modes this quest is perfect. It’s always pleasant as long as players enjoy this quest. I enjoyed the FF up until I was directed to BGs (which I completed) and Mercenaries. Once that appeared, I deleted the quest. I cannot in good conscience play this mode. There are a myriad of problems with Mercenaries that need to be looked at closely. I refuse to partake in it and thereby bolstering player engagement metrics. The more dissatisfied voices are heard, perhaps this will change, but don’t count on it anytime soon.

My biggest beefs are as follows:

  • The game mode is boring (in my preference (and in the preference I’m not alone)).
  • Mercenaries has been promised, shortly after its release, that excess coins with have a purpose down the road: they do not. This is a carrot stick with the intention to manipulate players into playing the mode in hopes that the most amount of players will partake, thus, increasing the likelihood of players paying for upgrades within the Mercenary base, and influencing purchases from the shop.
    Back to excess coins, do not think this wasn’t intended.
  • And don’t get me started on how ludicrous the pack system works, as mentioned above.

To implement the lack of priories and shady business practices.

Finally, to put this into perspective, the team had ample resources to solve the many problems in-game. This seems to suggest, again, that this is intentional.

  • The pack system is also outrageous in that, after you have enough fully stocked mercenaries, these coins are entirely useless.

As an example of the release of Mercenaries, quite quickly, the excess coin issue has been pointed out as being revamped “soon.” We’ve heard this from the get-go, and I very highly doubt it’s a change too technical for the team to resolve. They don’t want to resolve this issue, but will continue saying changes are coming “soon (intentionally vague).” Clearly, this is a bait and switch, and a way to give players false hope.

Lastly, to put this into perspective, Mysterious Stranger received nerfs immediately.
Obviously, the same can be done about these excess, and ultimately useless, coins.

In short, the resources to better this game mode are there, adding more suspicion as to why nothing is being done and we’re consistently told “maybe soon.”

As an aside, once the Fire Festival quest directed me to Mercenaries, I deleted the quest. In principle, I cannot play this game mode.

Finally, this is not a dig at any players. We play for fun, and many players enjoy Mercenaries. This QoL change could help to bring this mode back into the public eye. If excess coins is dealt with in a reasonable manner, this could certainly bolster the mode’s playerbase, increasing the desire to play it.

– Cheers! :crossed_fingers:

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I played through it and was incredibly boring I can see skipping them in future mercenaries was the worse it’s complete trash.

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I gave the mode a fair shake, but when I realized I had 1k excess coins on a merc I rarely played I was pretty much flat done with the mode.

The good side of that is I can absolutely slay the low level bounties when they are needed for quest chains like this.

If you have rags and have his skills up, he can one shot most of the lowest bounty with Die Insect, making completion of bounties trivial.

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The game sounded immensely fun at announcement. However, upon release, the money-grabbing has dissuaded players from partaking in Mercenaries.

It’s ever so clearly a nefarious cash grab, while also bolstering player engagement metrics.

This is all shameful for the team members, that designed this mode with most ridiculousness in mind. And I didn’t even bring up Mercenaries packs. These are so random, and moreover only add to the cash scheme (mostly). These (packs) need to take a page from the constructed game modes with duplicate protection.

My perspective is not that the mode isn’t trivial. My take is that this is a cash grab, with little fun involved, and a myriad of issues that are currently being ignored by the team for financial income.

They took what could have been an immensely fun mode, and sabotaged it ever so intentionally.

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I see it not as sabotaged, but that we are not the intended audience. I agree it was intentional, but it is aimed to capture a different market.

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I’ve never played gacha games. Now, after these experiences in Mecenaries, I don’t think I ever will.

Sabotage is probably the wrong word. Instead, it seems they evaluated risk (of losing players’ interest) versus reward. The philosophy seems to be to bleed Mercenaries players dry. As such, I don’t see any changes being made. The risk being losing players in droves, while on the other hand, whales adore the mode.

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Did it in less than a day, not much content that would be useful in there. We already gone a ton of reworked portraits of those guys, didn’t need another but I’ll take it cause free.

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If this was going on, they would have implemented changes already.

Again, I think this was to put HS in front of a totally different group of people than people who have played the other game modes.

It’s a completely different animal and I avoid these types of mobile games like the plague.

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I should clarify. While I believe they aren’t aiming to attract the normal players (some of which are even F2P). That is because their aim isn’t exactly to attract your normal players to the mode, but rather, to attract whales allowing them to be the backbone income of the mode. To bolster their egos and rewards. I don’t think the average players fits into this Mercenaries demographic.

I’d like to also add that the benefits outweigh the risks of losing non-spending players.

The more players attracted to this game mode, the less likelihood of any QoL changes be made. As they say, “don’t fix what’s working.” We are not likely to see any such QoL changes anytime “soon,” nor a total rework.

Lastly, I want to point out that when Myserious Stranger was easily reached, this interaction was nerfed, in what, a single day? And yet months later, excess coins have absolutely zero use (as of right now, anyway).

I despise P2W (to a reasonable degree.)

0, and this game feels like that’s all that it is. If you’re a free player, feel free to play. Do not partake in PvP and stick to PvE, and you should be fine. Manage your expectations should you want to play.

I, also, highly caution purchasing any Mercenaries packs. They are truly ridiculous in the rewards given (typically).

I’ll end by making it even more clear that this mode is destined to die – unless, that is, some significant revamps are implemented.

Edit: I’m kind of getting Diablo: Immortal vibes here.

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I think even though they drove people away through tightfistedness the main problem is they designed a game with little fun or depth and most people would have left anyway because of that.

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After about two weeks after its release, I gave it a shot, I genuinely enjoyed PvE. However, once I realized the entirely ridiculous pack issues, P2W elements, and so forth, I can no longer play the mode in good consciece. I’m not trying to virtue signal, as though I’m above anyone that enjoys the mode. However, for me, in principle, I cannot partake in it.

Edit: And how can I forget the horrible situation regarding excess coins.

Rest assured! Maybe the more times they tell Mercenaries playing that it’s coming SOON, the probability of these fixes being implemented will surely happen… “soon.” This is sarcasm, of course, and I suspect either a use for excess coins will never be changed to compensate for fasting grinding of your Mercenaries. Do. Not. Hold. Your. Breathe. Another likely change that would probably be abysmal and that is that spending these coins will have will very likely be at a disproportional reduction to these excess coins, further causing complication.

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Alright, so here’s my take as a, primarily, mercenaries player.

First off, the complaint that mercenaries is boring. It’s a relatively simple game mode and the complexity will always be low enough that there will always be many who simply take no interest. That’s a given. However, there’s much that could at least be done to improve it. Here are my top complaints with mercenaries and what I think could improve them.

.1)
PvE team diversity is crippled by a combination of the fact that bounties are too easy, and simultaneously on the opposite end they have to be easy since characters don’t respawn. There are plenty of characters who are amazing in PvP but borderline useless in PvE because they have poor survivability and are just there to take down multiple enemies with them, or because they rely on setup from previous mercs in that fight. Sylvanas is the most extreme example, with her power coming from a spell that buffs her for every ally that died, and her deathrattle.

On the flip side, it’s just too easy. I took the same one team as a proof of concept and broke every heroic bounty, even one’s which should have had boss mechanics deliberately designed to counter me. It was a team built for PvP, not PvE.

This is probably one of the hardest things to fix. We’d need more access to resurrection, and sweeping difficulty buffs, but also to not cripple people who are nowhere near max out, ultimately this will likely never be solved in a healthy way without the addition of a mythic difficulty. And that would take a lot of effort. But I think unfortunately Mythic and Mythic+ are a requirement if mercenaries PvE is ever going to thrive.

.2)
PvP is impossible to enter. You need a maxed out team, and it can’t just be any maxed out team either, functioning PvP teams rarely have fewer than 2 legendaries in them. If you aren’t maxed out, you will sit in queue until you’re matched against AI.

It’s quite simple really. Non-maxed charcters can’t fight maxed characters. The balance in mercenaries is too tight. Making people unlock mercenaries before using them and unlock items before using them, okay. That’s a more fair barrier to entry. But for PvP, all characters should be maxed. Otherwise, the Mercenaries PvP player base will only continue to shrink.

.3)
Quests are slow and monotonous and almost always mean grinding the first bounty. Especially “complete 6 bounties”. That’s not to mention obviously absurd numbers like Cookie’s “kill 200 beasts”. These quests are boring and disrespectful towards player’s time. And they need to change. This is simply a new form of whaling where instead of looking for money whales, you’re looking for time whales. And it’s not okay. Of course, many people get around this problem with the 4th main issue:

.4)
Holy smokes the hot infestation is real! There are so many bots in PvP, and I can only imagine the same applies to PvE, where most people are just smashing into the first bounty which basically cannot possibly be lost. The bots are easily recognizable. They never concede, they always play the same build in the same way, they have low win ratios yet insanely high rankings because in mercenaries you gain more than double the ranking from winning as what you lose from losing for some reason. If you come across one on ladder you can grind them with a counter team and they’ll just feed you free wins. It’s quite sad really. But it’s possible the only reason mercenaries is still running is because of a bot infestation and time consuming grinding allowing blizzard to put out stupidly high playtime metrics.

In summary, mercenaries is probably the most time consuming game mode blizzard has ever released, and yet pretty quickly it reaches a point of being easy to the point of boring outside of PvP, and remains unplayable in PvP unless you grind for untold hours, with the number of hours only going up every patch.

One last thing, in the last patch the patch notes mentioned plans to allow excess coins to be spend on character customization and power. Please, whatever you do, don’t make the grind longer. The only reason I can even play this game mode in the first place is because I have several multi-hour commutes a week on mass transit. And even I struggle to keep up with the amount of hours required to play mercenaries and have been slowly dropping off. It’s not okay.

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I remember early in the year, january/feb, they said that there are plans for excess coins that will be implemented later in the year 2022. No reason not to expect that to happen, they would have just stayed quiet about it if there wasn’t something in the works

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As a primarily mercenaries player, I can say ultimately the problem with mercenaries is the grind time. It’s excessively long, and it’s boring.

I actually wrote a multi paragraph explanation of what I think are the main problems with mercenaries and it got eaten by the forums, and that’s ironically enough a perfect allegory for mercenaries. You spend hours grinding and it all gets eaten by bad pack rolls or the next patch deciding your character shouldn’t be relevant.

Quests like “complete 6 bounties” and “kill 200 beasts” (???) are a horrible abuse of player time and are unacceptable. PvP is unplayable without a maxed out team likely including many legendaries, and several of those characters won’t even be that useful in PvE making them extra boring to grind. And all those characters can become obsolete instantly next patch. Mercenaries is literally just a Skinner box whaling machine but instead of whaling people’s money you’re whaling people’s time. I only play it because I have several multi-hour commutes on mass transit per week and I’m still dropping off because the time requirement is excessive.

Oh also there’s a horrible bot infestation, mercenaries probably primarily still functions because of bots, not human players. At least on the PvP side.

Yes, I am annoyed about the forum eating my post and I am letting it bleed through in my tone here. I don’t care. This game mode deserves it. It’s not okay. And it needs to be fixed.

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I really feel like they should just get rid of it. It’s a pretty boring mode. I finally played it since I had packs I couldn’t open forever, and had to sit through some bs HR presentation at work so I figured might as well do it so I can clear those packs that I can’t open. Didn’t even finish the tutorial before I was bored of it. Still can’t open my packs. Still wish I didn’t bother so I still had the blue glow around mercenaries lol.

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The reason I am skeptical is that we know that the team is capable of making necessary changes quickly. Meanwhile, from go, we were told not to worry about excess coins, because they’d be dealing with it “soon.” This has been the mantra from the very beginning, and yet, nothing has been done.

This constant promise to fix these symptoms makes me think it’s low on the list of priorities regarding Mercenaries specifically. Soon. Soon. Soon. And…? Nothing.

Edit: I want to make clear, I have absolutely no problem with players enjoying Mercenaries. Don’t take my negative view of the mode as an insult to its players. I understand for many this mode is fun, and for that reason I cannot fault any player for playing it.

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It’s not a constant promise though… they said nothing until the first major patch of this year, when they said that sometime late 2022 they would implement a method for using excess coins. They haven’t failed that promise because we’re barely halfway through the year.

Anyway, I’ll bet you a screenshot of my favorite golden leggo DE’d they’ll have something in place by the end of the year lol

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I’d certainly hope so! I believe the mode needs a good revamping – nothing overboard. If some significant changes are made, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a significant surge in Mercenaries activity. I’ll cross my fingers. :crossed_fingers:

No, don’t do that. I wouldn’t want to see you DE’ing a golden legendary. May I ask, what legendary do you have in mind?

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The reason it’s long and boring is so you buy all your Mercs the first time.

That’s because no one with a sufficiently large social media following has made a video about it.

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I don’t frequent players’ streams and Twitter, and so am in the dark on that. I have to say, I am surprised no popular streaming players have called this out (or on their YouTube).

Bingo!