Something just occurred to me, with all the talk about Fragger balance and whatnot. Adeto keeps pushing for merc limits, and while I haven’t been too keen on the idea so far, it’s starting to grow on me. I don’t think a merc limit is sufficient though, because as the merc pool grows, one day we might have four mercs which are similar to Fragger and we’d be back to square one. A limitation by class (e.g. one or two assault classes max) could work though. That got me thinking about how that could possibly be implemented in the UI. One big issue is that we can choose three mercs, so how exactly would a limit work? Whether you enforce the limit by the time of choosing your party, or during the game when selecting your merc, both methods have issues.
Then I wondered, what if we simply don’t have a party of three, but you have to choose one fixed merc in competitive play? Having a party of three makes sense in that you can adjust to changing situations on casual servers. For competitive matches it shouldn’t be necessary, because teams should be able to pick a sensible selection from the start.
The main advantage would be that a limit could be enforced with ease. You could have class-based limits and/or a one-player-per-team-and-merc rule as desired. The only thing to consider with the one-player-per-merc rule would be that you would require five free mercs at a given time to ensure that every player can pick a merc if they haven’t unlocked any.
It would also sidestep “exploits” like switching mercs to optimise ability cooldowns. I’m not saying this is cheating, but I expect that top teams would eventually be forced to do this do maximize their efficiency, and that just doesn’t sound like fun to me.
It could also potentially make competitive games more focused and strategically interesting, if each player is locked in to one merc for the duration of the match. For instance it would add the psychological war of attempting to predict what your opponents will field, to have the right answer to it. Which in turn could incentivise teams to change their set up frequently to become less predictable. Matches would become much more unique, providing shoutcasters much to talk about.
Another thing that could be addressed with such a special mode would be the loadout balance. When asked about loadouts and competitive play on a recent stream, Shoe mentioned the possibility of a pro mode, where you would choose from a pre-defined set of loadouts. So at the start of the game you choose your merc, then select from a number of preselected Bronze layouts. If you have the Silver or Gold versions of the same loadout, it could let you play with those custom skins instead, so there’d still be a point in collecting loadouts even for competitive play. Which loadouts are available for competitive play could change occasionally based on balance and player requests.
This mode could be forced for scrims and ranked matchmaking, or it could be optional, so players can graduate towards it as they become experienced enough to handle it (e.g. not screw themselves over with bad team composition).
I really like the thought of that, what do you think?
It has pros and cons. I didn’t like the idea at first, but it has grown on me. I just feel like the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. If it was tried and turned out to be awful, it could still be changed back. No drama.