When I first unlocked the vault, I checked the stock market just to see how it worked and gained a thousand or so merces. I haven’t touched it since.
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I’m in the same boat as ZeroGravitas, I checked the stocks when I unlocked the vault, got about 2000 Merces, and never touched it again so I’ve made a net profit on it.
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IO will probably make it so switching over to Hardcore the first time automatically prevents the player from switching back to Normal until the campaign is successfully completed from start to finish. And temporarily reset Mastery to Level 0 and lock it there until the same.
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I’ve only checked the stock market 3 times, and gained money twice. Figured that was a good run.
It’s definitely got to be a random roll of the dice. Just like in real life. I kind of love that it’s in the game.
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Hello darkness, my old goddamn friend…
I thought today was gonna be the one.
Mmm I’m at level 50 mastery and I still haven’t finished a single campaign with this thing…
I swear I’ve died more in this than I have in Returnal oof.
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Yah man. Took me till mastery 29 to get my first. And maybe still my only? lel
Keep on cluckin’, as they say.
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Don’t feel bad, I’ve only finished 2 campaigns. And I alt+f4 on one because of some absolute BS bug of a guard one floor down seeing me change disguises through the floor on Sgail and alerting the whole damned map.
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As burned as I was by losing the hardcore campaign on the final showdown, I actually still wouldn’t really complain about the difficulty of it. The level of challenge for normal and hardcore is fine IMO. The only thing I would want is the ability to pay merces to reroll prestige objectives.
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It’s weird, after you pass a certain point (the point where money doesn’t seem to matter anymore) the stock market seems surprisingly more consistent in gaining money and when you do lose money it doesn’t seem to be as much or more than what you can gain.
I feel like there’s a bit of social commentary there, but its low hanging fruit so I’ll abstain from a forced joke for now
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Okay so you can gain money. I’ll give it a go again then. I’m currently 0-6 or 0-7 
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Highest I gained was about 9K and lost about 11K once. I check it regularly because I am at a point where money doesn’t matter anymore.
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I still can’t string together more than 2 full campaigns without a fail so I’m still poor.
One of these days I need to start being less reckless on showdowns, but for now I’m still having a blast taking risks.
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Except their reasoning doesn’t hold up the more Merces you have; CE tools functionally become useless, to the point of being interchangeable with regular counterparts, and a bunch of the Freelancer Tools anyway have dubious merit or are clones of each other. It comes off as a really odd design choice.
Just because IOI clarified why they made a decision, does not automatically mean it’s an okay decision to make. Their solution; CE tools, doesn’t really solve the issue of softening the blow of failure, as the campaign is too punishing in other ways anyway, said tools are really easy to re-acquire (CE tools moreso as only 1/5 can spawn, and they always spawn if you don’t own one), and just add busywork, more than gameplay fulfilment.
Even if the Merces economy wasn’t the overarching problem, i’d still say that the amount of punishments the player already has for failing (losing half of your merces and whatever you were carrying, plus losing however many hours you spent in the game) is enough already; you don’t need to break immersion like this, IO.
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haha must be nice having more than 7k-15k Merces at a time
couldn’t be me
I do think that given how many clones and variants of specific Tools there are, allows for many uses of them and incentivizes people to use all the explosives or tasers they may have, instead of desperately holding onto the one taser or one explosive, in the hopes of using it in some hypothetical future contract.
With the gear cap in place too, it would take a lot longer for someone to completely go through their stockpile of Tools, given how economical someone might be with taking them on a mission (and you wouldn’t really need more than 2-3 per mission, depending on amount of targets…
So having it forcibly be removed kind of makes sense from a “now start it again without these special kill crutches” (accident kills, poison kills, that retain SA etc.)
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Read the last part, I answered that as you were responding.
The issue is that these crutches are actively asked by the game for the player to complete certain objectives; so they’re less crutches and more “oh wait, I actually need a good chunk of these” items. Even the dart gun has its own objective, a pretty common one too from my experience.
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You can always select syndicates that don’t necessarily need those objectives. If you lose all your stuff, you can always just do a number of the syndicates like Arms or Organs and find melee/big guns on site to complete the payouts and rebuild your bank/tools. Espionage and Assassination also have a number of objectives that are stealth or weapon wall-oriented. This is part of the dynamic decision-making IOI is intending for players.
I agree with you and others on the late-game Mercer economy, I have full walls and at this point absolutely nothing to spend my massive bank on except for the occasional need to replenish a weapon or tool I lost. But the complaint about losing tools is silly to me–some of my most memorable moments from the mode have come from improvising an objective or mission by finding a tool on site or finding a creative way to accomplish the objective. I think it’s pretty fair, even if the immersion break is a tad silly.
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I’m not even at late-game; i’m at level 39, and I noticed this issue at the start of Level 28. That should give you idea of how screwed up the economy is.
And some of my most memorable moments have been able to do what I need to complete the mission, while also improvising on the fly when certain weapons can’t be used for environmental reasons; you don’t know your targets’ placement ahead of time, getting frisked forces you to drop/ hide certain weapons and tools, and some weapons simply do not work even if you bring them in due to the proximity of others, not without causing a massive firefight, which even on this mode isn’t a great idea (especially problematic on showdowns). To quote 47; “Improvisation is a part of the craft”; You’re going to be doing this anyway.
I very rarely take melee weapons in with me unless an objective calls for it because I can find one in the field pretty easily (same with coins), and they take up space better used for weapons. So I wholeheartedly disagree with that notion.
You’re not immediately discouraged from improvising because you can bring in what you need to complete the mission, but that can only take you so far; oftentimes the games’ RNG screws you over a bit and you need to find things in the level anyway to complete the tasks at hand.
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Yeah, I don’t disagree, it’s just yet another complication. I don’t mind losing tools at all–with the exception of when my death/failure is a result of some of the bugs and glitches that came with Freelancer. Hopefully, IO left enough support on Hitman to have some of those fixed.
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Yeah, I dunno where this sentiment comes from; IOI have several studio’s working on multiple projects. They’re not dropping Hitman support, or have moved anyone to anywhere else. 007 has it’s own team from what I understand, and they’ve mentioned repeatedly that their staff on all their projects are growing. These WILL be fixed, it’s just a matter of time.
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