What about mercs and competitive?

(evuze) #1

So there’s been the discussion of one team having loadouts that the other team doesn’t and whether that’s fair in a competitive scene, but what about mercs?

We’ve not got many right now, but when we get a few more in, what if a team has mercs that the other team doesn’t have access to?

There may be those that say they’ll have to buy them but if you just take it out of that context, one team could have turrets, or the ability to nade health stations that the other team doesn’t have.

I’ve not played any of the hidden mercs from the other closed betas but still I imagine some will have strengths the other team just can’t counter effectively.

Imagine if one team had aura(I know she’s free, but for example) and fragger at their disposal and the other didn’t. That would not seem like an even, balanced fight for sure.

And if they introduce drafting, the whole point of that is to give the other team chance to pick a merc that counters whatever was picked.

Thoughts?

(son!) #2

Just ban the mercs that the other team have unlocked, easy ff win :wink:

Seriously though, the current game is pretty anti-competitive. Ideally you put two teams with access to the same set of abilities and the team with better strategy and execution ought to win. That simple requirement isn’t guaranteed in this game because of the RNG on loadout cards and merc unlocking. So you could easily end up with a situation where one team doesn’t have an engineer (which is practically an auto loss) or a team doesn’t have potent packs which makes their sawbones less effective than the other teams’ (by more than the 30% difference in regen rate), etc. It results in a considerable commitment (time/$$) before you can even think about competing when you consider there’s going to be 20some mercs in the game. Unless there’s some injected hype into the competitive scene (see $1mil tournaments pushed by SD/Nexon) I don’t really see it growing considering that other games with established competitive scenes ask less of their players to successfully compete.

(Szakalot) #3

Many possibilities exist. One I particularly like is pooling in the resources of both teams, for both teams to use at will for the duration of their game. So if you brought this badass loadout to help out your team, you also provide the opponent with the option to use it.

The beauty of this system is that nobody can complain about uneven footing: you have all the same options. But if one person fine-tuned their skills with this rare loadout combination, they might overpower your attempt at mirroring them.

It also poses the question of whether you want to follow your own&known strengths or are you going to abuse some rare loadout from the opponent.

edit: this would have to extend to merc accessibility as well. If someone payed to have all the mercs they are more likely to be better at using them. But by virtue of them selecting these 3 rare mercs, they also provide fun for the opponent by letting them try it out.

(evuze) #4

@son! " Ideally you put two teams with access to the same set of abilities and the team with better strategy and execution ought to win."

This. What say you SD? @MissMurder any insight onto this predicament?

@Szakalot While that takes care of one thing, it doesn’t solve the other. One team has been practising with the said mercs, the other hasn’t. I could also see that as being a bit of a problem in other areas.

(BK201) #5

I think that there should be some way to build your augments maybe when you trade up to gold you get to build your loadout.