The skull merchant situation.

Honestly, not the most insane idea ever. Just rip the bandaid off and get it over with. Send out compensation, open yourself up to the backlash, criticism, and all that comes with, put your PR team to work, and make a statement telling the community you are deeply sorry and that you will do better next time.

P100 Skull merchant here. The haste being removed is a good change. The only other thing I would have changed about her is adding a timer that allows scans to fall off after about 30 seconds.

i think your over-thinking it. they're nerfing skull merchant because survivor disconnect too frequently vs the killer. by nerfing the killer, the killer will be more easily 4 man out and grant free wins for survivor. this will make survivor play more games vs skull merchant.

i think very obvious problem will be that skull merchant will be very low play-rate due to being weak so even survivor does d/c less, they'll play vs merchant very little.

this precedent has been there for many killers. freddy is pretty much F-tier because survivor complaining about his gameplay.

The changes made to her were undeniably harsh, and it seems the devs deliberately went overboard to discourage people from playing her. That being said, I don’t agree with those who believe she didn’t need changes at all. When a large majority of players agree on something, it doesn’t make sense to ignore them in favor of a small minority. Ultimately, both sides want the same thing—to have fun. Those who loved the character were already having fun and didn’t care that others weren’t. Those who hated her couldn’t enjoy the game and didn’t care that some players liked her. But those who disliked her far outnumbered those who didn’t, and I don’t understand how anyone could argue that this majority opinion should be ignored.

At the end of the day it’s a live service game and everyone should understand that everything is subject to change. You don’t buy the game and own it, you buy it to play what someone else owns and they’re completely within their right to make changes on any part of the game.

I’m so sorry if anyone here finds out this way, but it was confirmed by the community manager that these nerfs aren’t accidental or done out of balance.

The community manager made a statement saying the point of these changes are to kill the character until they can push out a rework, which is so abysmally stupid that skull merchant is gonna get Freddied for atleast a year or 2

If the nerfs go through, that is. Maybe there is a chance.

Conforming as a Employer that they nerfing Killer for Example now Skull Merchant to the ground until her full rework its not the right way. Maybe some overreacting. Sure. But for me i saw and read that and was saying wow BHVR thats is a BIG-F to your community.

I think the consequences of BHVR doing nothing about Skull Merchant or not doing enough to reduce the negativity she brings to the game until her proper rework outweigh the consequences of upsetting her dedicated mains. I also don't think one CM's interpretation of balance/design intentions (especially since they were stated in a lighthearted environment) are wholly indicative of the live team's thought processes, and in fact I think matching the tone of the platform is a sign of a great CM. Though if BHVR feels the need to clarify or make some changes based on the reactions here, I'd understand.

I mean sure, talking about the ideal scenario of "what ifs" is fine and all. Unfortunately ######### happens in development. But clearly the SM rework isn't happening as soon as we might want and in that scenario toning her down significantly in the meantime is as good of a call as they can make. Again, they can tweak things before it goes live if they feel the need to, which they probably are planning already. But she is getting nerfed regardless.

Hey, I understand. I miss playing my PS2 every morning (big spyro fan, i played all the games but riptos rage was my absolute fav) But live service games is not an excuse it's just the reality. An excuse implies shifting responsibility/blame, and an online service game making changes is kind of the entire point, it's meant to constantly evolve. Luckily there are still plently of games that aren't live service, but different types of games require different expectations. But that's also while many games like this are either free or they are significantly cheaper than typical full $60 - $80 games that aren't live service. Cause you're either paying for a full story or an evolving one.

You are welcome to look up what Double Standards means. You are complaining that Skull Merchant is finally nerfed, yet justifying the obliteration of Distortion as fine and dandy. In reality, nerfing distortion is incredibly more impactful as now a huge percentage of killer perks and add-ons have zero counterplay.

I'd say don't go through with the changes and instead killswitch her until 2025 so they can actually have some time to work on her without any complaints from people who have to verse her, give all players who own Skull Merchant 5 million bloodpoints and 1,000 auric cells.

If you truly don't think removing a scan line, forcing drones to always be active, AND cutting down both hindered and haste at the same time isn't nerfed to the ground, you're not paying attention. This isn't an argument about if SM is boring, too easy or whatnot. It's about BHVR's approach to how they're handling the situation.

And yes, distortion when used to stall the game for 20 minutes because survivors refuse to touch gens and hide all game is an abuse of the perk. And I'm getting tired of the whataboutisms and you trying to derail the conversation, because you're acting like everyone who isn't happy about the SM nerf WANTS all the other stuff in the game too and it's getting tiring.

But why did they need to remove the stealth mode and a scan line?

Here is an example of how a good company handled essentially the same situation, with competent communication and without mocking the community (scroll to the bottom, read the section about Smiter's Boon):

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/ArenaNet%3ADeveloper_updates/20080821#Monk

Smiter's Boon was a problem in PvP and it had to be removed. The developers acknowledged that, said they are looking into finding a way to make it viable without it being overpowered (in other words: reworking it).

They don't want anyone to play Skull Merchant until the rework. They are just doing a terrible job at communicating it (or they are intentionally not flat out saying it, for whatever bizzare reason).

Except not only is the communication terrible, the implementation is too. Players who like playing Skull Merchant will keep playing her. They will then drop in MMR, until they settle into a new, lower MMR where the Survivor players will still not have fun playing against her. The only way this could work is if every single Skull Merchant player was unable to get any kills at the absolute bottom of the MMR rating and then stopped playing her completely, but that seems extremely unlikely.

Did I say tiny crack? In my analogy I ref her to a decent size crack…also the dev had a WHOLE year to balance her but instead of doing that they have chosen to take a sledgehammer to her and just tell us to rwait for them to fix them. Didnt give us a timeline or anything so it could easily be like twins or Freddy where ppl have to wait 2+ years for a rework. My issue here is we need to call out the devs for their lack of foresight and planning. Don't just accept whatever they give us…

While I don't think nerfing the killer into the ground was the right way to handle this… I do think the Skull Merchant presents an interesting problem that I can understand them not knowing how to tackle. Her stats indicated she was wildly overperforming, but everyone knew those stats weren't accurate because so many people were giving up against her. But I'd argue the stats are also inflated because between her changes and her second tl;dr power, many players didn't actually know what her power did, and would use the wrong counterplay (a big one being people thinking drones would detect you if you were sitting on a gen. It was very rare for me to play against SM without at least one teammate being afraid of gen drones, when loop drones were the actual threat.)

And she wasn't fun to play against, she was the most brainless type of antiloop killer with irritating stealth, but the droves of people hook suiciding on sight was a holdover from her Chess Merchant days. You don't see this kind of immediate and widespread refusal against other unpopular killers, like Pinhead or Plague or Legion, even though they are arguably more annoying to verse than current (pre-nerf) Skull Merchant. The extreme hate was a reaction to something that didn't really exist anymore… and I'm fairly sure that hate will continue as long as her identity persists.

I think reinventing her is the only way to go at this point, with entirely new mechanics that work in an entirely different way, maybe even a different visual for the power, so that nobody can mistake her for how she was before… and ideally it has to be with a power that's simpler than her second incarnation (because it was so complex and riddled with conditions that most people didn't understand it beyond Drones Bad.)