My oppinion of someone who has attempted merc’ing: the rewards are potentially higher, but you have to work more for them. It’s just not so easy to find alliances with low health titans (and enough time left on the titan). Since around the beginning of the year I’ve been merc’ing, and staying in clans, maybe 50/50 of the time. And if it didn’t work out that amazing for me, who I am being able to play many times during the day, I think it will be even less amazing for the average player. It seems great on paper, and like I said the rewards are probably higher in average than staying in one alliance, but staying in one alliance is so easy compared to finding alliances with low health titans. It just seems to me mercs should be allowed the extra rewards for the work they put into it.
But I think everyone should try it (for a few weeks, to get a better impression) instead of thinking “omg, they’re exploiting something, it’s so unfair”. Even if everyone were to try it, my guess is that the vast majority of players would go back to staying in one alliance.
While @Petri replied here, it would’ve been useful to know why they thought mercing is a problem that needed to be eliminated now with the wars making mercing even more unapealing.
I know elemental chest got nerfed. I’ve been playing since June of last year and get elemental chests more frequently since I use my gems to speed up chests.
When I started elemental chests always gave two unfarmable ascension items and three gold tokens whether hero or troops. That’s stopped for the last couple of months probably all the way back to December it’s been hit or miss on the unfarmable ascension items. And almost always now all three tokens are daily summons if you’re lucky one of them will be a gold one.
Three times I’ve received double chain mail or scabbards as loot which is annoying has heck.
Because TANSTAAFL for the second part: if you are getting something that the majority of F2P players aren’t, and others have to pay to keep up, that doesn’t strike you as an issue? If they can, Ascension Packs are laughably bad investments, spend $30 and get nothing at all in terms of rare ascension items 3* or 4* is the typical outcome. Crafting mats those can be gotten via purchasing WE which isn’t that expensive, and admittedly people can buy the training heroes or the items like alliance flasks… but really that’s a lot of investment that even if you are spending, should be spent elsewhere.
Ultimately SG almost certainly wants alliances to matter, so if people are incentivized by more loot to merc, then that has to be changed somehow and unfortunately they can’t just boost the rewards for everyone because then mercs would still be unbalanced.
First part regarding why 3* ascension items are an issue and I guess why now: Alliance Wars, and I suspect this isn’t just a SWAG on my part.
I’m basically done leveling 5* heroes unless I have the requisite ascension items and the desire to take them all the way to 80 except when it’s simply an incredibly useful special; instead, I’ve been working on a mass of 4*'s that I’ve been leveling for the past twoish months now… and that’s all a function of how many 3* rare ascension items I have banked.
AW is the first time we’ve really had overall hero development matter: before it was specific heroes developed and others nobody cared. As a result, mercs getting increased loot is an issue.
A few ideas as to why this might have occurred:
I’m nearly 100% confident they’ve looked at war results and done some analysis as to why they occur, and it’s not lost on me that Spicy’s performance appears to be higher than anyone else’s in the game currently and that includes Departed. Looking at the rate of ascension materials gained between Spicy and Departed, unquestionably Spicy’s is higher as a result of mercing… and the gap is even wider for alliances not named Departed or HHR.
It may have even come out from beta: I’d certainly be doing a quick analysis in the database on the accounts I was copying over and comparing that with some metrics, and it’s a short walk looking at your account or Denys’s vs. even mine in terms of ascension item rate acquisition and hey, what’s different between these accounts? Yup, mercing.
There are probably some other things it may have come out of, but I strongly suspect it’s about trying to create competitive balance for AW over the long term and for that an equivalent progression standard is likely mandatory.
I don’t agree with the rate of progress; however, I do think AW needs to have competitive balance to be compelling, even if some and perhaps many don’t agree with me on that point.
Hasn’t happened yet; might now with the new matchmaking, but I’ve seen a couple of Spicy records and Departed’s as well and they’re absolutely obliterating people including SW by larger margins than we are… so I’m not feeling warm and fuzzy in terms of actually winning the presumed eventual match against them haha.
When a Mercs helps…they save…and improve the game for that alliance.
Members in the helped alliance can see players helping them (mercs merc for whatever reason) and shows how the spirit of the game can be…and rthey can aspire to own two fully ascended panthers etc etc therefore improving the whole game.
Devs, stop being negative and trying to micro manage the hell out of the game.
Seriously.
Good onya Bahaha
That’s the key word. Micromanage; so they can force you to spend $ on getting what you need to progress in the game. Why are ascension items so rare and hard to get? $$. Why don’t they tell you up front what the odds are for pulls? $$. Nothing else matters to them. It’s a business with a bad model.
We love our mercs. We have a great alliance, but not all in it are able to play as much as they’d like. Having the ability to bring in support to finish up a Titan keeps our team intact, and does not create disappointment among more active players and helps to keep our friendly alliance together. Destroying this concept of merc support will likely kill the enjoyment of the game for many as stronger players will get bored with it all together and quit playing, or faithful alliance members will leave to seek stronger teams; breaking up what was great commaraderie.
I agree. And the most sad thing is. IF THET STOP HELPING US SMALLER ALLIANCES. we might give up on the game. And there for the game it’s self will be obsolete. Because the top players will quit. Which in turn. Will frustrate smaller alliances and they will quit as well
If smaller alliances are surviving only with the help of mercs then perhaps they should not survive. There is certainly an oversupply of alliances, particularly alliances that are some way from being full of players.
BTW, based on @Revelate’s analysis above, mercs are certainly not nerfing their ascension rolls. It seems that they are increasing them by a factor of at least two, and perhaps by as much as a factor or four. If you’re open to arguing otherwise I’d like to see some numbers.
So mercs are doubling their ascension rolls (at least), keeping alive weaker alliances that might be better off dead, winning extra - undeserved - ascension rolls for those alliances, and messing up alliance war matching by boosting Titan scores.
Hello they are another system more impacted of the change wich based on alliance help each other they just bring extra help for titan when they have extra flag and not for reward most of the time they went out before the end it s a system of return help without gain …With scedule and alliance 's war the help could not be made any more for titan for war and it s may be this move more than mercery that they try to stop . I don t know in your community but in mine it was this system wich work more and even mercerie have their own alliance just not level up titan or not be 15 to be involve in war . they can play casualy and steel fight titan it s give freedom to player s borrow of titan schedule et pressure but they re not death alliance:)
BlockquoteI’m nearly 100% confident they’ve looked at war results and done some analysis as to why they occur, and it’s not lost on me that Spicy’s performance appears to be higher than anyone else’s in the game currently and that includes Departed. Looking at the rate of ascension materials gained between Spicy and Departed, unquestionably Spicy’s is higher as a result of mercing.
Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact Spicy has one of the highest numbers of Original beta players in the game. Extra 6 months of playing time can do wonders to persons bench. Mind you if you got 6 months extra under the current ascension format you’d be way further ahead. Except maybe in red hero’s 4* specifically.
To small giant here is some other numbers you might want to consider.
If 29 members of an alliance go and use their hit each to other alliances for a day, that means one alliance can reach out to help over 5000 people a day.
There is a lot of people who don’t use the forums, youtube, line or discord etc, for these people first hand teaching from mercs is the best they get.
So if you want to say we don’t want you helping others and if you do we will slap you when you leave and come home, then by all means go ahead and scrap mercing.
If you want to say, yes one alliance help 5000 a people a day then leave it as it is.
Good point; however, no surface detail analysis survives further data, and then simply a query looking at items gained in the last 3 months or whatever would show it.
I’m just spitballing on things that might have triggered this new round of nerfing: to be clear, I’m not calling out Spicy, you KNOW I like you guys, I’m just using you as the pre-eminent merc alliance for a comparison to Departed which is one of the pre-eminent non-merc alliances to illustrate a point.
It may even be simpler than what I proposed frankly thinking about it some more: at some points in time SG almost has to look at the rate of acquisition of ascension items at various different player tiers; then they could’ve noticed an outlier, and looked as to why that person was an outlier (mercing in this case), and then looked for that pattern of behavior and how it compared to a baseline.
If things are above or below that baseline, then tweak to restore balance to the force… which seems to be what they’re doing now.
Ultimately there are lots of alliances that do just fine without merc help; actually watching the Line chats it’s mostly the same alliances time after time which use mercs… there’s probably more diversity in the global chat channels but mercs are a tiny fraction of the user population, and alliances that use mercs are likewise a tiny fraction of the alliance population.
General comment to other things I read in the thread:
Some spending behavior might change (no more alliance flasks, again tied into the loot side of mercing) and some alliances might take a step back on titans, but the concept that people are going to be quitting in droves just doesn’t make sense because the vast majority of the 1m players in game are still playing, without mercs to begin with.
That was a lot to get through, I don’t mind being late to the party.
Anyone who does Mercing for selfless reasons will continue to have that same gratitude of helping others and you’re not impacted at all by this.
This all comes down to loot rolls and the amount of time that someone has the opportunity for loot to roll for ascension items. Yes Mercing allows you to exploit this and anyone that doesn’t see that is working from a strawman theory, because that is the heart of the issue. You have more opportunities to roll ascension items by Mercing. Whether that is a conservative double the opportunity or 3x the opportunity, it is still there and not how the game was intended to be.
I know for a fact being in Departed and staying consistently with the same alliance, getting the same titans I am missing out on an enormous amount of flags.
I get to use on average about 3-4 flags every 24 hours. And those 3 flags are the ones I start with, which means I am at a loss of about 3-4 EVERY SINGLE DAY that other alliances can use. Sure a fair amount of people have to stay and fight their titans. But I would say the top 25 have been streaking for months. It is a choice I made to play and run the top alliance in the game, but in terms of loot, anyone that Mercs marginally well gets more opportunities for ascension items than I do.
When the game first started, this wasn’t as much of an issue because SG was so stringent on 4* ascension items, we have seen a huge boost in opportunities for these (as much as everyone wants to try and complain about this, SG has done a tremendous job compared to the beginning), so now it has caught up. They have listened to us when we complain about loot, and have made it more readily available compared to 6 months ago. But by doing that it only makes those who have now made the choice to Merc gain a competitive advantage.
At the heart of the game, it wasn’t meant for Mercs. That was an issue that none of you brought up. It wasn’t intended on having someone come in and kill your Titan all the time. The game was designed to build an alliance with 30 other people and work together on a “difficult task” every day. While people talk about how Mercing brings alliances together and helps the community. It also helps a community that sticks together. The game wasn’t made for Mercs, that was made internally to gain an advantage, and I know that Mercing has been getting nerfed a fair amount lately. That’s because there’s been different things that have been exploited and SG has tried making compromises to the 10% that use an internal loophole to gain that advantage.
