Stealth Nerf to Mercenaries PvP Pit for F2P players

Community Discussion
1

After queueing today for PVP match I’ve learned that blizzard disabled bots in this mode.
I’ve following setup:
1 Mercenary Level 30, 3 level 3 abilities and tier 1 equipment
4 Mercenaries level 30, all level 1 abilities and no equipment
1 Mercenary Level 8, two level 1 abilities and no equipment
I’m at rating 6500 and usually it took 90 seconds to find game against bots (since noone has exact same setup), but today it took 5 minutes search against a guy with:
Xyrella (30) with Level 5 blinding light and equipment level 1 equpment
Cariel (30) with level 4 abilities and equipment level 3
Samuro (30) with level 5 abilities and equipment level 2
Tyrande (30) with level 2 abilities and no equipment.
I didn’t see another two mercs, but I’m sure that this matchup wasn’t fair, how you can match Level 5 abilities with equipment level 3 against a player with no equipment and all abilities level 1 (except 1 merc with level 3 abilities and equipment level 1 equipment)

I’m pretty sure that at a 5 minute search queue time game just gives anyone regardless of fairness in this match.
I’m not sure if disabling bots was the right move, queue time increased, matchups become unfair.

EDIT: second queue with this setup gave me a bot, so I’m not sure if it was a bug first time. So I recommend everyone to cancel their queue if it takes more than 90 seconds.
EDIT2: Third match again searches more than 2 minutes, and doesn’t want to give me a bot oponnent. I think that there is some stealth algorithm that refuses to give bot oponents after certain rating? Is it so? There is no fairness in this matches, and it seems like P2W, player with most abilities and equipment will win.

Game should warn before queuing that it will not give a bot and will search for unfair matchup (I’m pretty sure that server has statistics about number of players playing with specified mercenary stats rating).

2

Your suspicions are correct, around 6500 and higher you stop facing bots (or are highly unlikely to).

At this point the matches can seem pretty unfair in that there’s a limited amount of “correct” moves, and one bad mistake will cost the match as it snowballs against you. If you are at an equipment/ability disadvantage then the margin to overcome this advantage is quite slim. What you do need to do then is level up your main PvP comp to compete on a more even footing.

3

According to blizzard blog post https://playhearthstone.com/en-us/news/23730851 AI matches have threshold of 7000 external rating (the number you see in UI), but for me it’s like 6500.

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