A couple of days ago, Blizzard has rolled out a very controversial hotfix to prevent “win-trading”, which was rampant on the Mercenaries ladder. People set up certain rules as to which players concedes, tanked their MMR down to only match against other similar people and then conceded without even playing (or waited for their opponent to do that) in order to farm Coins very quickly.
In order to prevent that, Blizzard added a condition for the wins – they didn’t count for the Daily Rewards unless you defeated at least three of the opponent’s Mercernaries. As you can probably imagine, this was a disaster, because people often concede after they lose 1 or 2 Mercs and know that they can no longer win. Some people were even doing it on purpose to not give their opponent any rewards.
They are currently rolling another hotfix to change that. Instead of three Mercs, you will need to kill at least one Merc before you get your rewards. It will prevent win-trading, but it will count matches that you actually won fairly, but your opponent conceded quickly. That’s a very necessary change, because PvP over the last 2 days has been horrible.
10/28 Update: After watching the data since our October 26 update, we are currently rolling out an update to the Fighting Pit rewards system. Going forward, wins will count towards Fighting Pit daily rewards if you defeat one or more enemy Mercenaries, instead of three. We believe this will continue to curb the unacceptable wintrading behavior while also allowing players to be awarded for legitimate games that are decided early. We will continue to monitor the data to see if any further changes will be needed going forward.
Sensible change but god knows how they didn’t figure this out before the initial hotfix.
Between this and the horrible value of packs, INSANE grind, instability and mysterious Challenger nerfmercs has been a bit of a disaster. I hope they can get things sorted because the mode has a lot of potential.