Update: It looks like the team is “planning to make it right” soon, but they didn’t want to rush a solution before US holidays. I’ll update this post again when we know more.
For Rattlegore, no exact solution to share yet–it’s right before the US holiday so the team didn’t want to rush something out and risk making things worse–but we understand the frustration and plan to make it right soon. Apologies again for the miscommunication.
— Nicholas “DeckTech” Weiss (@hsdecktech) November 23, 2022
While I understand that Mercenaries is not the most popular game mode, it looks like people who enjoy it got shafted today – not sure how else to put it. A limited-time Rattlegore event launched with Patch 24.6. Players could earn the new Mercenary, as well as Golden Portraits and Coins for it. According to the announcement blog post, it was meant to run until November 29, which means that players still had a lot of time to finish it. Just like with many similar events, some people postpone completing it until the very last minute – but this time it was a big mistake. The event just ended yesterday, out of the blue.
As it turns out, it ended right when it was supposed to – the event was meant to run until November 22, but Blizzard made a mistake in the blog post. Many people have only just realized that they can no longer complete the event and get all of the offered rewards. And so – blog posts were updated, and that’s all of the action Blizzard took so far.
Looks like 11/22 was intended, sorry. I’m updating the blogs shortly. Thanks for flagging.
— Nicholas “DeckTech” Weiss (@hsdecktech) November 22, 2022
That’s simply unacceptable. Whether you care about Mercenaries or not, you probably understand that it’s not fair for people who didn’t finish the event yet, thinking that they still have enough time. It’s not their fault at all, because the blog post stated clearly that the event ends on November 29 and it stayed like that for weeks! It’s not like it was a day 1 mistake, quickly rectified. The best course of action would be, of course, to bring back the event for another week, but apparently, that won’t happen:
Understand the frustration—I hadn’t finished the event on my personal account either. Unfortunately, that’s the only option this time.
— Nicholas “DeckTech” Weiss (@hsdecktech) November 22, 2022
Can we do something about it? Not sure, but I don’t think we can just accept that Mercenaries players got the short end of the stick (again). In my opinion, if they really can’t bring back the event, they should at the very least give out all of the rewards to people who started it already. Yes, it would still be unfair to a certain group of players (those who haven’t started it yet), but I can imagine that majority of players who were interested in it at least started working on the first tasks. Or even better – just give all of the event rewards to people who played Mercenaries in the last 30 days or something. This way any active Mercs player will get it – yes, most likely including people who wouldn’t finish the event otherwise, but that’s much better than not giving it to people who would.
I also really dislike the fact that the only official communication we have are Tweets. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy that DeckTech updates people and lets them know what happened from his private Twitter page (even though he doesn’t have to), but it’s something that should be communicated through official channels. But I’ll give them a benefit of the doubt here by saying that they still might be preparing an official answer.
If you want to learn more from the perspective of someone who actively plays Mercenaries, you should check out this Old Guardian’s video:
I Finish the event day by day with Old Guardian videos pretty easy.
Generally speaking the sooner you finish it, the sooner you get back the Toki daily quest (Yes, is not much but i don’t like waste coin).
I feel sorry for the players who got screwed by Blizzard once again :/
The ‘Battlegrounds Battle Bash’ event also ended about 4 to 5 hours ahead of schedule. I don’t know why they did that when there is a countdown timer right in the game? I only completed 80% of the event, with the other 4 to 5 hours I could do 100%. Blizz is a stupid company as people say so from now on I won’t put money into this mode anymore even though I used to spend a lot.
You mean Blizzard shafted its playbase, Again?! Color me flabbergasted… As always Blizzard only cares about your bank accounts, Period.
What’s new, Blizzard f*cking up and players getting the boot again with no compensation. That’s why I won’t ever spend a dime with this game.
Genuine question: how many people actually play Mercenaries? Because I really haven’t seen anyone talk about it for months. They put so much effort on this gamemode and it bombed so hard , it’s honestly unbelievable.
No idea about the total number of players but there’s a very active community on discord and plenty of youtube content pretty much everyday.
We don’t have official numbers, it’s probably the least popular game mode, but it’s not “dead” by any means, it has a pretty healthy and most importantly a very dedicated playerbase.
is it really worse than duels?
Good question! Last time I’ve seen some unofficial player numbers (based on data collected from deck trackers not official stats, but that was all we had), Duels was a bit more popular than Mercenaries. Not sure how it is now, though.
so both probably did not meet the expectations of blizzard in terms of success
They have actually made a lot of improvements to the mode. Shame they can’t get out of their own way
You can look at Reddit pache… here and there some people post something (usually “how Mercenaries screwed me today” kind of posts), you can try waiting 1-4 minutes in PvP que, etc. …
Not many, definitely the least favourite mode (aside from “Constructed PvE”, of course) But it’s something ¯\_(ツ)_/¯