Board 8 > Mercenaries Draft Week 15 Results: Shine On You Crazy Diamond

(+) Yeah! (+)

Lopen accepts Tiro's forfeit (Forfeit)

Congratulations to Lopen for winning Draftmerx! A worthy victor indeed.

Now that the game is over, it's time for the post-mortem. If you have any comments about the game, now is the time to make them. Some questions to guide the discussion (though you can talk about anything you want):

-What do you think about the draft system? Would you play another game of Draft Mercenaries? What would you adjust for balance, if anything?
-What do you think about the admin team who ran this game? What could they have done better? What did they do well?
-Were there any rule changes (RR tier bid system, predefined attacker/defender start points, match conventions, etc.) to your liking? If not, why?
-Is there anything you'd like to see done with Mercenaries going forward?

I'll open the discussion:

-On the draft system: Good, but definitely needs to retain some of Vanilla Mercs' expansion factor. Starting with smaller teams that grow to endgame size seems cool and good, and would be a good alternative to redrafting. Would also want to implement the 'face the same-seed' matchup for another version of Draftmerx to get an even 8 matches per RR.
-On the admin team: There were three facets to admining, IMO - Rulings, PR, and Consistency. We did very well on the first one, poorly on the second, and were shaky on the last one. I think a bigger admin team is a blessing even for a small mercs game to minimize errors and sanity-check things. I take full blame for any mistakes that went down - Trdl did rulings work, so everything player-facing was on me. Being a rookie doesn't excuse poor performance, and I hope to take the lessons to heart and improve on my admining skills going forward.
-Rule Changes: Tier bidding was a slam dunk. Terrain clarification was good. Conventions were...fine, but kind of ignored a lot of the time which sucked. I think they had to be more obvious than a link that refused to work half the time for some arcane reason.
-What to do going forward: I'm working on an ability primer right now to standardize ability writing once and for all so players can know for sure what the hell the words on an ability mean. In general, I would also like to increase rules-literacy because a lot of questions could be avoided if the players tried to read the rules more. How to do that is difficult, though - players who asked lots of questions, what was it about the rules that confused you?
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- I liked that the draft system let me do a complete idea. I disliked that most of the playerbase used this to do overpowered and broken combos rather than cool stuff. In retrospect, Draftmercs was destined to be bad on some level from the moment the drafts went the way they did. The redraft cemented it and didn't work but I know youve gotten this note several times.

- you needed a third admin, especially with how 'engaged' trdl was. Just to take some of the load off and to help with rulings. The off-board nonwiki for rulings was bad and the game in general was really disorganized from a compilation of information perspective which made my time as a player a lot less efficient than it could have been since things were compiled in different, variously out of date, spots (including often wrong results). Another admin would have helped greatly on this front I feel.

- Again no redraft. EXP system needs completely overhauled which is gonna be a pain in the ass and several mercs need relegated to the trash bin if you do this again, including just about every week 41 merc. Overall, I think you have enough work to do here that you shouldn't be tying yourself to M4 if you do this in the future. Just redo the whole game at that point even if you don't feel like bringing back the campaign style. Attacker/Defender was good but also exposed that a lot of the terrains in this game are trash, again just one more piece of the "just start fresh" conclusion I came to

- I would play if the game were overhauled and enough time passed for the voterbase to change a bit. As it is, there is far too much that is utterly predictable and the strategies for winning all revolve around getting yourself some of the good bold text, removals or lolparameters boost. Without the mystery it becomes tedius and too much about the M4 setup is pretty hard defined.
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a couple thoughts off the top of my head

- the endgame was too long relative to the regular season. if it had been played out fully it actually would have been longer which, imo, is too much. things are a lot more stagnant and less interesting when it gets down to the final few teams, which also contributes to burnout. there are various possible solutions (have a double round robin and no endgame tourney? make the endgame tourney a sudden death tourney, instead of best of 3?) but they all boil down to "make endgame shorter"

- it sounds like you're planning to make a ton of changes for any future draftmercs (balance changes, mechanics changes, standardized ability writing, large banlist). in that case I think you need a new wiki. this ties in with what Eddv said about disorganization, except things are going to be even more disorganized with more changes

- this is kinda being covered in chat but the replacement policy was pretty ad hoc. "huh we need to find replacements. what should we do? let's give them redrafts I guess?" which also made replacing pretty op
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KanzarisKelshen posted...

-What do you think about the draft system? Would you play another game of Draft Mercenaries? What would you adjust for balance, if anything?
-What do you think about the admin team who ran this game? What could they have done better? What did they do well?
-Were there any rule changes (RR tier bid system, predefined attacker/defender start points, match conventions, etc.) to your liking? If not, why?
-Is there anything you'd like to see done with Mercenaries going forward?

Draft system was okay I guess. I almost think just making a giant draft pool shared between the two pools would've be better-- would've saw a lot more team ideas and mercs in play. Redraft is garbage though. Building drafts over time, slowly building your team up, would probably fix it depending on the implementation.

You did... basically adequate. Kept things going, and on the whole rulings were fair. However there were just a bit too many blunder rulings-- I would argue perhaps even more than M4 had for its entire run. I feel like you desperately needed some sort of sanity filter before issuing rulings and while in theory one person should be enough for this-- I doubt trdl was actually giving all that much thought to rulings with how "engaged" he was. Also needed to be a bit more liberal with bans as a few foul mercs spoiled the broth, but whatever.

I like start points, though "attacker/defender" should be replaced with "merc's team." Match conventions are stupid-- if you need an external link, this isn't working. Just edit the opening post a bit to include the more important conventions, remove some of the less important guidelines. RR Tier bid system wasn't optimal either cause it made you not need as balanced a team as you should have I feel. Part of why Mercs 4 was cool was you always had to cycle through all 3 tiers. This one I basically fought on mid/low the whole game and all these cool high tier dudes other teams had didn't matter.

I don't think I'll play again without a pretty significant overhaul to the system or a huge amount of new mercs. Like I could probably make another gimmick team or two with these rules and this merc pool, but I'm not interested in facing people in a draft format again because I know most of them are probably going to be using the same kinda effective stuff. Standardizing wording, stuff like that, it's good to make the game more fluid going forward, but it needs to be done in addition to new content.

Gimme some movie mercs I wanna make my Bloodsport team of Frank Dux, Ray Jackson, and Chong Li.
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So like, where to go from here. Things like cleaning up wording, refining the system, etc etc, these are good, but would bring a very similar feel, so it basically boils down to one of two things are a must.

System overhaul
What does this mean? I don't know. Different victory conditions, different play interactions. You talked about like territories or something. Maybe flesh that out a bit.

Merc overhaul
This is the SSF2: Turbo approach. Certain ability types need to be heavily nerfed or removed from the game. Every overpowered or underpowered merc needs to be totally reworked. A ton of new mercs need to be added, without delving too far into the obscure end.

Either one makes the game potentially playable, but overall I think there are just too many fundamental issues with the game as it is, so trying to change the system would overall be better. Some people don't like to go to topic, and some do-- I feel like there should be a way to play the game in both ways. Sorta like in Civilization you can go military or you can sorta hole off and try to build a buncha museums and space ships and crap. I think there's potential for it in the system. Why can't we put votehax in the game but make obtaining them something more advanced than "buy a merc and use an ability." A way to battle without strict declaration systems would make fight topics more malleable. Have like 4v4 with varying amounts of forces sent by each player, or a 3 way.

I dunno. It's something to think about.
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We take the piss out of the LoL event constantly, but that three way battle with DC and Boko might have been the most fun I had with mercs so there might be something to that
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The LoL Event was fun. Everyone just forgets that because Kha'zix.
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Also the ridiculous exp rewards, those were dumb too

But yes

And re: going to topic vs not, something I discussed a little jokingly with Skyridge, but might be interesting, is if you gave mercs and abilities a point value, and then made the voting topic give points too and whoever had the most won. It might have some potential, maybe - and it'd be an interesting way to implement votehax again without it just being 'if even one people votes for you, you win' - multiplying the final point tally is different from just tripling votes in a system where votes are the only path to victory besides bullying opponents into a forfeit.

As for the other two things...well yes, I am gonna launch a topic to fix and rebalance mercs after this one has run its course. Independently from that, I will continue to tinker with Mercs Imperium. I've been playing a bunch of Dominions 4 and it's given me some interesting ideas about it - something in the HoMM style/Dominions style, but Mercenaries-fied, might be a way to go for it.
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- I loved the draft. Redraft kinda allowed for some abuse of the system.
- You did well, but this game needs 3 fairly dedicated people to run.
- You should have to fight in all 3 tiers. Getting to avoid a weak tier (I fought in mid tier once the entire game) changes team building significantly. Although this could be kind of self-policed: teams should be more aggressive in bidding on tier. If you have 7 high tier mercs (Corrik, red rocket) then try to fight in that tier!
- Change all OP and NU mercs. You can just delete the ones that have zero chance of being used. Forcing games to share a draft pool also forces more creative team building. There are a handful of good candidates to change immediately. I feel like people want to get rid of removals or nerf them. I think that's fine, or we can do this DotA style and just make even more removals. Maybe force some kind of tribal system for things to work (utilizing keywords more), but why not just give every team some good removals? I don't really know the best way to move forward with merc balance tho
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Drakeryn posted...

a couple thoughts off the top of my head

- the endgame was too long relative to the regular season. if it had been played out fully it actually would have been longer which, imo, is too much. things are a lot more stagnant and less interesting when it gets down to the final few teams, which also contributes to burnout. there are various possible solutions (have a double round robin and no endgame tourney? make the endgame tourney a sudden death tourney, instead of best of 3?) but they all boil down to "make endgame shorter"

Could do triple round robin, all teams fight in all tiers. Randomize tiers ala m4 (until the last round robin). Could even do it progressively with draft, RR in low, draft RR in mid, etc. Can give you the feel of team progression you get in normal mercs, kinda. No playoff. Not sure if this is too long tho
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- it sounds like you're planning to make a ton of changes for any future draftmercs (balance changes, mechanics changes, standardized ability writing, large banlist). in that case I think you need a new wiki. this ties in with what Eddv said about disorganization, except things are going to be even more disorganized with more changes

- this is kinda being covered in chat but the replacement policy was pretty ad hoc. "huh we need to find replacements. what should we do? let's give them redrafts I guess?" which also made replacing pretty op

To hit on this:

A) Yes, any future game will have its own wiki. I'm gonna make one once I get the 'rebalance and new rules' topic up so I can start putting things in there. Draftmerx was sort of an offshoot of M4 meant to test if a smaller game could work, now it's time to take that sort of 'live alpha' and turn it into a proper finished product.

B) Replacements will have to be standardized a bit more for sure. The problem with replacements in draftmerx is that the second redraft came in so late that you couldn't unfuck the team you stepped into if you got a dud like say, Corrik's team or God's and had to ride it out immediately. Not sure how to tackle this issue but my gut instinct is that we'd probably just follow the preexisting rules for redrafting/expansion.
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Oh, and dropping this here - Lopen and I had an interesting discussion about potential alternate win conditions in the draft, which I'd like to hear thoughts on. This is mostly for Mercs Imperium, not so much for a hypothetical Draftmerx 2: Draft Harder. These are the victory conditions that came up during the discussion:

-Conquest Victory: El clasico. Defeat all enemies and you win.
-Econ/Science Victory: Buy a set of mercenaries who do nothing or sink in tons of money into autowinning. In the case of the former, probably apply infra-loss as a way to force interactivity?
-Coalition/Political Victory: Defeat a set of raidboss events that no team could beat by themselves at a certain point in time by working with friends. Enemies might be able to send troops to assist the raidbosses too, or otherwise contest your attempts to achieve dominance through raid victories.
-Exploration Victory: Control a set of territories that add up providing more 'map control' than everyone else. Think of it like getting 51% of the votes in an election, with different territories giving more 'votes'.
-Ascension Victory: Certain (SPECIFIC) terrains can let you win if you manage to hold all of them for a long enough time (or maybe just seize all of them). Whoever grabs all the Ascension terrains wins.

Any other types of victory you'd like to see represented? Providing ways to win without always having to go to topic is something I'm giving serious consideration too, since I know several leaders just don't enjoy having to fight (hi FFD, boko). Mercs is a game that is 'something for everybody', why not embrace that when the concept of fighting on a map changes so much already?
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More round robins is always the answer
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I freely admit (and have done so with Kanz in private too) that I really shouldn't be admining this kind of game until I am in a secure place with my time.

FYI, I was involved with pretty much every ruling, and I'm helping with ability standardization, but keeping track of all the player-facing logistics stuff is just as if not more important, and I did squat with that.
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I honestly think that's the biggest obstacle with Mercs at the moment - it's a huge time investment to play/admin this game (although definitely more so to admin) and that leads to a lot of fatigue, I think. I think a more comprehensive rules page would help out admins a ton, but that's (again) a huge time investment up front for time saving later on. It would help out with drama things though, since doing rulings on the fly often leaves people unhappy.
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fuck why did lopen win

im just a middling rage quitter
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quitters are the real winners in mercs, gravy

always remember
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Draft was fun but redraft is unnecessary.

Asking questions should be expected if things are going to be as strict as they are. It doesn't necessarily matter what you do about the rules themselves, if the standard is "acting out of a misunderstanding of something can in no way ever be reversed" then of course I'm gonna want to ask a lot of questions, because even if something seems obvious, if there's even a 1% chance I might misunderstand how something works, it's not worth acting without getting direct confirmation from an admin.
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Redraft is entirely unnecessary, you shouldn't be poisoned the entire game for an initial mistake.

It's like Fantasy Football if one of your guys gets injured or is constantly underperforming, you absolutely have to pick up someone off waivers or your season is effectively over.
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Other things:

-While the draft is fun, draft mercs kind of makes 1-2/week mercs mostly useless unless they have a REALLY incredible ability, since limited positions means battle worth is essential

-I'm a little salty that my division just doesn't get a winner because of the gravy/boko situation. Still say me and Scare should go at it for the title if they're both ragequittting.

-I really want to somehow someday make film/TV mercs happen! We have 139 mercs so far, gotta put them to some use!
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FFDragon posted...

Redraft is entirely unnecessary, you shouldn't be poisoned the entire game for an initial mistake.

It's like Fantasy Football if one of your guys gets injured or is constantly underperforming, you absolutely have to pick up someone off waivers or your season is effectively over.

Which is exactly why the redraft was implemented, you realize that right

Because the alternative was 'don't fuck up on initial picks or you are fucked'

Johnbobb posted...

Draft was fun but redraft is unnecessary.

Asking questions should be expected if things are going to be as strict as they are. It doesn't necessarily matter what you do about the rules themselves, if the standard is "acting out of a misunderstanding of something can in no way ever be reversed" then of course I'm gonna want to ask a lot of questions, because even if something seems obvious, if there's even a 1% chance I might misunderstand how something works, it's not worth acting without getting direct confirmation from an admin.

The key is that the admins aren't there to nanny you. If you fuck up because you don't read the rules it's not their fault. Admins can and will implement rollbacks every single time a player plays incorrectly due to something they said. So like...the key is you shouldn't even HAVE to ask questions if you get the rules, mostly, because it isn't going to help you. This is how boko fucked himself, he asked so many questions instead of actually taking time to learn that he screwed up an ability phase that couldn't be screwed.
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i was responding to john, you realize that right
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ok but there are a LOT of rules and many of them are easy to misinterpret
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lets abolish all rules
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or institute a mercs purge week: once every 52 weeks, no rules apply
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FFDragon posted...

i was responding to john, you realize that right

No because you said 'un'necessary, implying you should be stuck with what you got early, and the rest of the post had no sarcasm that I could see. I assume that was a typo then?

Johnbobb posted...

ok but there are a LOT of rules and many of them are easy to misinterpret

No, there actually aren't. That's what's kinda funny about how people think about the rules. Let me list them for you:

Abilities have:

-A Type (Peacetime, Prebattle, SoB, Trigger, Results).
-A Recharge (Multiuse Daily, Single Use Daily, Every X weeks)
-An Effect (which will generally fall into various Keywords - Removal, Manipulation, Intimidation, Damage, etc., and can have more than one)
-A Targeting Parameter (Implemented in Draftmerx - Single Target, Multi Target, Teamwide, War Global, Peace Global in ascending order of AoE)
-A Selection Parameter (Preselected and Randomized, with Pool of X being a subtype of Randomized)
-Timings on ability use (These being Declaration, Targeting, Hitting, Usage and Resolution).

That's it. That's all that needs to be learned. Effects comprise the majority of the rules, but they are also the least important bit because you don't have to memorize them. In total you need to memorize the 21 definitions that comprise the rest of an ability's parts. Once you do that, you can tell with certainty what will happen every time an ability is used unless it requires an actual ruling due to shitty writing of an effect (in which case, by all means ask an admin). Surely 'memorize these 21 things' isn't such a commitment to understand how to work the ability phase?
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Also I still want more unique weeks

Saving Christmas was still one of the most fun fights to argue, and I'd love the integration of things like that once in a while (and not just as BYE weeks during the playoffs)
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oh whoops

even so, everything else was pretty clear
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KanzarisKelshen posted...

-A Type (Peacetime, Prebattle, SoB, Trigger, Results).
-A Recharge (Multiuse Daily, Single Use Daily, Every X weeks)
-An Effect (which will generally fall into various Keywords - Removal, Manipulation, Intimidation, Damage, etc., and can have more than one)
-A Targeting Parameter (Implemented in Draftmerx - Single Target, Multi Target, Teamwide, War Global, Peace Global in ascending order of AoE)
-Timings on resolution (These being Declaration, Targeting, Hitting, and Resolution).

That's it. That's all that needs to be learned. Effects comprise the majority of the rules, but they are also the least important bit because you don't have to memorize them. In total you need to memorize the 18 definitions that comprise the rest of an ability's parts. Once you do that, you can tell with certainty what will happen every time an ability is used unless it requires an actual ruling (in which case, by all means ask an admin). Surely 'memorize these 18 things' isn't such a commitment to understand how to work the ability phase?

Maybe just make sure the effect/targeting parameter/timing/etc. are all completely clear in the abilities. Plus, things get more complicated when abilities are combined, and with those the answer definitely isn't usually as simple as "know definitions"
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ex. I know what each of those means individually but when three different abilities are interacting, each with different (and sometimes contradicting) aspects, it gets a lot harder to follow
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Maybe just make sure the effect/targeting parameter/timing/etc. are all completely clear in the abilities. Plus, things get more complicated when abilities are combined, and with those the answer definitely isn't usually as simple as "know definitions"

Like so?

Title Bout (Pre-Battle, Recharge 3, KO/Side Topic, Single Target, Random)
Once every four weeks, Little Mac can challenge one random enemy merc to a boxing match before the battle. The conditions of the fight are simple: It takes place within the standard WVBA boxing ring, no armor or weaponry allowed, and all attacks are limited to punches. Whoever wins the boxing match (decided by first to 7 votes or leader after 2 hours, whichever is later) will be able to attend the main fight, with the added benefit of greatly increased morale for their successful boxing title bout. The loser, however, will remain fittingly KO'd for the week's match.

This can certainly be done if it'd help people understand where they should be looking. I want to make sure rules are easier to parse (BASE rules - ie, the boldtex stuff there for example, not necessarily the ability details), because players really shouldn't need to ask admins stuff like 'hey does an interception effect work like an interception effect???'.
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i feel like my pool deserves no winner considering how little effort anyone put into the game besides boko

johnbobb literally idled half the game -- so yeah like i can't feel bad that you're upset the game ended in a draw when you didn't tier bid half the time, and you certainly didn't even like...try to beat me when you solo rostered kirby (week 2 was moderately winnable...or you could have put stuff on cd for me!)
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Johnbobb posted...

ex. I know what each of those means individually but when three different abilities are interacting, each with different (and sometimes contradicting) aspects, it gets a lot harder to follow

The trick is that the base rules always win unless an ability explictly and clearly says otherwise. To give you an example, the base rules say 'KO'd mercs cannot be interacted with'. If a Revival ability says 'this ability can be used on a KO'd merc', then it works, otherwise it doesn't. Does that make sense? Like yeah, the abilities themselves will frequently contradict each other, but they don't matter. When there is a conflict you always go to the core rules that don't belong to any ability and work it out from there. It's how the admin team hands out rulings 99% of the time.
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greengravy294 posted...

i feel like my pool deserves no winner considering how little effort anyone put into the game besides boko

johnbobb literally idled half the game -- so yeah like i can't feel bad that you're upset the game ended in a draw when you didn't tier bid half the time, and you certainly didn't even like...try to beat me when you solo rostered kirby (week 2 was moderately winnable...or you could have put stuff on cd for me!)

I didn't skip tier bidding because of idling (most of the time), I just felt my team was balanced in all three tiers and didn't think it was necessary wasting GP on tier bids.

And week 2 was far from "moderately winnable." I knew you had beaten me so I had fun with it. Which is the whole point imo and something way too many players seem to forget
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iirc there were some things i was worried about week 2

like if i brought in arthas and you bid on a terrain you'd eject most of my team for instance

but im not saying dont play for fun, i get it, and if you actually idled bids intentionally then i apologize
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greengravy294 posted...

but im not saying dont play for fun, i get it, and if you actually idled bids intentionally then i apologize

I forgot to bid like the first two times.

But then I realized I enjoyed the random aspect of not knowing what tier I'd be playing on and did it intentionally from then out (except the one or two times I actually bid)
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greengravy294 posted...

iirc there were some things i was worried about week 2

like if i brought in arthas and you bid on a terrain you'd eject most of my team for instance

I went into week 2 thinking I had a good chance of winning, but by the end of ability phase it was pretty clear I was screwed

And I was surprised you didn't bring arthas; you had way more GP than me so I assumed you winning tier bid was a sure thing
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KanzarisKelshen posted...

Surely 'memorize these 21 things' isn't such a commitment to understand how to work the ability phase?

it is when you add stuff to them for fun! :D

Other than that, eh. It was a neat concept, but it needs a break and/or an overhaul and/or fresh mercs before a hypothetical draftmerx 2. My only real gripe with format stuff was I feel the bye was too powerful. I still say just run an 8 (or 4) team playoffs instead of making the first two rounds a formality.
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Johnbobb posted...

greengravy294 posted...

iirc there were some things i was worried about week 2

like if i brought in arthas and you bid on a terrain you'd eject most of my team for instance

I went into week 2 thinking I had a good chance of winning, but by the end of ability phase it was pretty clear I was screwed

And I was surprised you didn't bring arthas; you had way more GP than me so I assumed you winning tier bid was a sure thing

thing with arthas there are plenty of mind games with his passive. if i dont bid much but you go all out, a 'stomp' turns into a possible loss if he doesn't SOLO in mid. so yeah. thats what i had in mind, so i was surprised you didn't try for it.
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Tom Bombadil posted...

KanzarisKelshen posted...

Surely 'memorize these 21 things' isn't such a commitment to understand how to work the ability phase?

it is when you add stuff to them for fun! :D

Other than that, eh. It was a neat concept, but it needs a break and/or an overhaul and/or fresh mercs before a hypothetical draftmerx 2. My only real gripe with format stuff was I feel the bye was too powerful. I still say just run an 8 (or 4) team playoffs instead of making the first two rounds a formality.

IMO a 1 round bye for top two seeds and the first round being Best of 1 would fix a lot of problems with the format. Would cut 2 weeks off the duration and would make the bye a bit less powerful, but I think it's a better solution than top 4.
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That could be acceptable, yeah. Make the Top 4 run 4-6 weeks, but the play-ins for the last two spots just one week.
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Something important to bring up: Sonic Mania confirms that Oil Ocean IS flammable.
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jojo mercs

MasaomiHouzuki posted...

jojo mercs

Don't tempt me
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I still have mixed feelings about buydowns in general. I almost think they could be eliminated entirely in draft mercs. It definitely needs to stay in some form for standard mercs, but I'd like to see it restricted a bit more. Maybe something like a 50% increase in buydown costs.

Completely standardized wording on all mercs would be a godsend and would be the single biggest improvement to the game.
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Started a new job. Will try to have the 'how to parse/write abilities' manual done by the weekend. Keep this topic alive until then guys, please!
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bump
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Up
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b
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boko did you win
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