Mercenary Battles: your mercenary, your rules, a wager, and the Hall of Records

This patch is a big one. Update dwmerc, dwpolitics and dwscan through the launcher; everything on the server side is live now.

Mercenary Battles

The mercenary board has a new tab: Battle. A mercenary you have listed for hire can now be entered into a one-on-one fight against another player's mercenary, in public, for a wager. Neither owner controls the fight. Your mercenary fights by the gambit rules you wrote for it, and the better rule set wins.

How a battle works

1. You need a listed mercenary. Open /merc, or type !merc list <character> <rate> <hours> <set>, to put one of your own characters up for hire. The character must be level 99 with a level 99 sub job, and the rule set must be one you wrote yourself in /squad (a stock preset is refused, and so is a copy of one with a new name). If you listed a mercenary before this patch, list it again once so the board takes a fresh photograph of it: the new snapshot carries its weapon skills and learned abilities, and an old one does not. 2. Post a dare. On the Battle tab pick the mercenary, the rule set and a wager between 10,000 and 1,000,000 gil, or type !merc battle register <mercenary> <loadout> <wager>. The board quotes it; !merc battle confirm pays the wager and puts the dare on the board. The whole server hears it. 3. Answer one. Anyone can answer an open dare with their own listed mercenary by matching the wager: !merc battle accept <number> <mercenary> <loadout>, then !merc battle confirm. The moment a dare is answered, the server announces the match and a five-minute clock starts. 4. Be in Ru'Lude Gardens when the bell rings. Both owners must be standing in Ru'Lude Gardens at the bell. An owner who is not there forfeits, and the wager goes to the other side. If neither is there, the battle is void and both wagers come back. 5. Watch. The two mercenaries appear at the marks and fight. You cannot heal, buff, hit or command either of them, and neither can anyone else; your macros and squad commands do not reach a contestant. Damage and healing on the contestants are scaled down hard so a fight lasts long enough to watch. A fight that is still going after ten minutes is a draw. 6. Collect. The winner's owner takes both wagers minus the house cut, waiting in your merc purse; !merc claim collects it, the same as contract earnings. A draw refunds both sides in full.

Your mercenary stays on the board for hire the whole time, and a character can be in one live battle at a time. !merc battle withdraw <number> takes back a dare nobody has answered yet, with a full refund. !merc battle help lists every verb.

The Hall of Records

Every registered contestant gets a line in the Hall of Records from the moment it registers, at 0 wins, 0 losses, 0 draws. A win is 3 points, a draw is 1, a loss is 0, and the Hall is public: it is on the Battle tab, and !merc battle records prints it.

The house cut is the Treasurer's

The arena takes 10 percent of the pot when there is a winner, and that number is now a lever on the Royal Treasurer's desk beside the mercenary cut: !politics battle <pct>, anywhere from 5 to 20, once every 20 hours, with the Crown's veto over it. Everything the arena takes above the stock 10 percent is split the way the mercenary cut's excess is: half to the Treasurer personally, half burned, every gil of it on the public Revenue tab in /politics.

Seals drop faster

A party used to have to wait five minutes after a Beastmen's Seal dropped before the next one could. It is now two minutes. Kindred's Seals and Kindred's Crests follow the same clock; geodes and avatarites keep their five.

Hired mercenaries got stronger

• A hired mercenary now runs its sub job at the main job's level, one to one, the same as your own alt-trusts. Paying for a 99 SAM/WAR and getting a 99/49 made no sense.
• A hired mercenary now uses the weapon skills and abilities its character has: merit, mythic, empyrean, relic and quest weapon skills, and learned abilities such as a Corsair's rolls. Re-list the mercenary once (!merc list again) so the board photographs them.

Alt-trusts

• Lucid Wings and the party-wide temporary items (the healing and mana mists and powders, Cleric's Drink, Fanatic's and Fool's Powder, Altana's Repast) now reach your alt-trusts.
• Jump, Spirit Jump and Soul Jump pay TP to an alt-trust Dragoon, and the wyvern bonus with them.

The Outfitter's Costume page

The Drift Board Outfitter has a Costume page: 24 level-1 glamour pieces for every job at 50 Drift Coins each. The chocobo suits and masques in both colours, the racial swimwear, the moogle, mandragora and behemoth costumes, the lord's and lady's yukatas. !drift shelf costume lists them.

Fixes

• Five lottery camps could never pop. The four Fei'Yin Shadows were running Capricious Cassie's setup script by mistake, which gave them a day-long timer that blocked their lottery entirely (and had them dropping her gil). Delicieuse Delphine, Eyegouger, Eurytos and the second Swashstox Beadblinker had no placeholder rolling for them at all. All five camps roll now. For the Shadows: the placeholders are the Specters, not the mobs called "Shadow".
• `/scan` no longer shows a lottery pop as a five-minute respawn. That number was the placeholder's clock. The scan now says the mob is a lottery pop, names the placeholder you have to kill, and gives that placeholder's window.
• DWRaid chain trials on a fuse fight now announce each bomb's own fuse. The deadlines shrink as the chain climbs (300, 240, 180, 120, 90 seconds), and a fast chain was only ever told the first number.

Report anything odd with /report as always. Have fun in the arena.