Not really, since when you reach the point when merces become useless (when there’s nothing new to buy), it means you collected all the weapons, so you can just activate prestige again. There might be a slight downtime period when merces are actually useless to you depending on when you activate prestige (I like to do that just before a final showdown, so that I get a legendary weapon and 30k as a headstart), but there isn’t really any moment when you’re left with thousands of useless merces like it happened before prestige was added (unless you stop activating prestige altogether).
Prestiging is a good idea, but it is a band-aid which greatly helps but ultimately doesn’t fix the issue of Merces becoming useless eventually. Eventually every player will stop Prestiging. Maybe they don’t ever decide to Prestige, maybe they stop after Mastery Level 5 since there’s no new gameplay rewards, maybe they stop after Mastery Level 10 since there’s no more challenges to unlock, maybe they stop at some other point cause they just get tired of going through and collecting everything all over again, maybe they actually reach Mastery Level 100 and are physically prevented from Prestiging again. Whenever that happens, Merces become useless once more
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Personally I think the issue lies less within merces than within the vendors themselves. Not being able to buy anything at all after getting all the equipment makes them fundamentally flawed, and it would be pretty easy to fix by simply giving them a permanent supply of generic stuff - knives, explosives, coins, etc, that you couldn’t bring in the safehouse but would provide options for the current mission. As they currently are they’re pretty awful.
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Even without Prestige, you could still make it so you needed to buy the stuff again. It’d be a pain in the ass, but take your items into the mission, drop them, then exit without them. Bingo, a reason to spend your money again!
Imagine if we got another 50 levels added to Freelancer Mastery? 
I’d love it as we’d have some extra bonus cosmetics for the Safehouse.
^^^^ THIS ^^^^
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Most likely if IOI made extra cosmetics for the safehouse they’d release them as DLCs (like the concrete / street packs) or tie them to challenges instead of messing with the mastery :x
Which reminds me, did they ever comment on whether the two DLC packs sold well and if they were likely to make more in the future?
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No, no more Mastery! I’ve had enough of that. For more items and cosmetics, lock them behind a challenge. Lock them behind DLCs you have to pay to get for all I care, but no more level grinding!
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It’s a bad sign when we’re both agreeing with one another on two seperate posts Heisey
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Yeah, a bad sign for whatever idea it is we oppose. You know it sucks if the two of us are saying hell no.
Yeah you’re probably right to be fair. I for one would definitely be up for that, especially for those extra seasonal decorations for the Safehouse! There was an interview with IOI about a year ago when they did talk about bringing in more items for the Safehouse as well in the future 
Speaking of the safehouse, do you plan on adding more customizable features to the house or its exterior?
TVC: We have a lot of ideas for additional customizable cosmetics in the safehouse, so there’s a potential for more to come. But until we have evaluated the launch of Freelancer, we don’t know what the future will bring.
You’ll both be arguing again in no time, so I ain’t taking any notice of that! 
On a more positive note, extending mastery was mentioned elsewhere and people responded in favour. Can’t please everyone with everything I suppose. Either way, just hoping for some more content for Freelancer!
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I personally would welcome more mastery levels. XP is pretty much useless at this point otherwise. It doesn’t have to be a grind… XP requirements for the last few levels were too high, but it doesn’t have to stay that way with new mastery levels and some adjustments, if doable. I’d love to be able to unlock more stuff for my Hitmansion by playing Freelancer.
Challenges are great and all, and I’d also love to see more of them (including challenge packs), but Freelancer mastery levels and unlocking more and more gradually has its own charme.
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There were a couple month long breaks where I didn’t play Freelancer… had some fun, a lot of deaths… would drop out, wait for a while, drop back in… now I’m at Level 80, and yesterday for the first time, I used Colorado as the Showdown, and did the Wicker Man Easter egg.
Man it felt great after all these months, getting some sweet revenge on the suspects, assassins and lookouts. Really took my time and found each crate and enjoyed it. I may do it a couple more times.
Typically NY, Miami, and Mendoza are my Showdown preferences… but this won me over.
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Big massive response incoming because I don’t frequent the forum too much anymore.
Yes, this is very true and clear. Obvious things being promised communications and then nothing coming other than patch notes.
Yes, this has been clear for ages now. I’ve tried to have positive communications with them to work something out and have just been ignored when it came to anything official. If they’ve responded to me, whether it be positive or negative, and I’ve tried to continue that thread it has been ignored.
On that note, @Travis_IOI we never made up before you left, my email is always open for both official and unofficial business.
The sudden stop of IOI Insider streams (sure they changed their patch notes since it was no longer connected to 7DS, but it could have gone back to IOI Monthly). As much as I loved them, they would flat out ignore certain questions being asked in chat (whether that be from certain people or groups of people), eventually, it culminated in them just shutting it down with a blanket statement that answers and also provides nothing.
This shows even now! With the new community manager just sending me an email, where when anything official could come, I am now being ignored. @Combatglue I sent an email over, it came from my email, and the subject was sent to your Twitter DMs.
I’ll be honest, I ended this side rant here. When continuing my post, I realised, I’m not done! So pull down the spoiler to continue this part.
Side-Side-Rant
IO Interactive, we the modders only want positive communications. We want to know what you think is good and bad. We want to add to the game, so we’re adding content to the game for free just on one platform (PC). If you picked up modding projects and allowed communication it could allow modders to work on content that can be added in a proper patch. Colours are cool.
You get more content for the game with a lot less work on IOI’s side (this costs money remember!). The game can still be properly supported with new content 3 years after its release. Hitman WoA Modding has come so far since the start, but so has IOI. With dynamic reloading of RPKGs in memory, you could have a proper mod store on PC (would be a bit harder on consoles, but incremental).
This would benefit future games such as 007 and Project Fantasy (maybe less so because of “MMO”, but we’ll see).
Christ, I wrote the italic below thinking I’d say all that on Discord or something.
With this side rant over for now. Back to Freelancer.
Feel free to continue this in a separate thread or shoot me a message.
A whole load of replies regarding prestige, so no specific quote here!
Prestige is a bit meh, I was experimenting at one point where your prestige conditions change every so often. Wouldn’t be all weapons but you’d have to satisfy certain objectives (i.e. complete 15x eliminations with an Epic Silent Melee). This idea got a bit far but I had less time to work on modding and put it on the back burner.
With the one or two (slightly accelerated) prestige levels of playing with it. It was fun. It added replayability.
This all would work on official too, not just Peacock although you’d have a better experience of course! On the Peacock note, we’ve just released a new alpha for the next major version of Peacock, if you kind of know what that means and want to try it out please do!
It does need to be more replayable, and believe it or not, more randomness is key! I never thought I’d say that about Freelancer, to be honest. (Don’t worry, selectable prestige conditions were tried!).
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Well shit, did I fuck up stupidly this morning.
I didn’t sleep well last night, so I’d been up since a little after midnight and decided to play since I hadn’t for nearly two days (long time for me). I’d been repeating the showdown on my last organ harvest syndicate I needed to beat to get its trophy, and I’d been repeating it over and over because it was a perfect setup to knock out most of the remaining assassination challenges in Freelancer without having to wait long for the Leader to be in the right spot for any of them. I’d been sniping the Leader, tossing her over ledges, poisoning her, killing her and other suspects with fire, and using the fiber wire. Rinse lather repeat about thirty times and I was getting close to completion for the ones I knew I could do now, and I’d then finish it for good and get the trophy for the syndicate.
The only one that was gonna be more involved was the natural or created poisons challenge, because it was in Santa Fortuna and based on my starting location, by the time I got to any of the natural poisons found on the level and to the place where the Leader drank, she’d be on another circuit of her route that I’d have to wait for her to finish, rather than rapid-fire finishing the other challenges. However, there was an item drop box in the area I’d been dealing with her, and i used the poison flowers I’d find occasionally in that box to whittle it down little by little as I did the other challenges.
And I don’t know if it was because I was tired or what, but as I only had about 4 fiber wires left to finish, the 10 proximity explosions to do, and 6 natural poisons, I was getting close to done when I opened the item box and there was a nitroglycerin vial. Curious on how I could use that in Freelancer, as I never have before, I picked it up, and while I meant to examine it in the inventory, I mistakenly dropped it and ended my campaign.
Now, this wasn’t a total loss, as the only things I had with me aside from the loss of all my tools was my fiber wire and Chromeballer, I’ll get them back soon enough, plus it put another mark toward the Sometimes Maybe Good, Sometimes Maybe Shit challenge, but it was just so damned frustrating to happen at all, and for the stupidest, clumsiest of reasons. Now I have to start the campaign over to get my last 3 syndicate trophies and replenish all my lost tools that I had just gotten back after prestiging, and continue to whittle down the remaining challenges when I had a near-perfect setup already going. Ugh.
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I decided to do a repeat of my Colorado Showdown… this time as the final Syndicate, in an Alerted state no less.
Talk about Groundhogs Day. Took a while by I eventually found a path where I wasn’t spotted immediately.
I probably won’t do that again.
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Why not simply grab the lethal flower near the construction site? It’s conveniently located near the free cartel guard disguise :x
The nitro’s pretty convenient to blow up safes. Throw it at them if there’s no one around, or place it and shoot it if you can do it from cover. It’s also very convenient to blow yourself up when you try to set it up as a trap for someone 
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I already explained that:
So it was easier to use that time knocking out the other challenges, checking the item box each time, and change plans to using the poison flower found in the box whenever it showed up, rather than replaying the long process of using the natural poisons found there and waiting for her to do her entire route again before I could spike her drink. My starting location and the place where she drank were both key to this being a viable process. This method allowed me to diminish the numbers needed for the challenges side by side, switching from one to the other depending on the flower’s availability during any given run. This required only about three minutes per run, so it was a time saver, until I fucked it up, that is.
Since you probably did check that box quite a lot of times I’d be interested in some stats about what you found inside if it’s possible. I never purposefully restart missions unless the game crashed so it’s interesting to know that the same contents could spawn twice in the same location (as I don’t think it’s ever happened to me whenever I had to restart a mission). Like how often did you find the flower in there? Was it always the same setup (IIRC it’s wrench / propane / flower)? What was inside the box when there was no flower? Did one of the items inside the box get replaced by a Freelancer tool at some point?
I wasn’t at it long enough to really gauge the occurrence of some items, but it did seem like the items found within were mostly following a set pattern, with an occasional random occurrence being thrown in to make it seem like that wasn’t happening. For example, I’d get extra Mercers on one round, then the next rat poison and scissors and such, and the next the flashy robot, etc., and on one occasion, the set of items that included the flashy robot appeared twice in a row, but did not seem to otherwise offset the pattern that seemed to be taking place. Not enough to confirm but it’s something to watch for. Mind you, I also only checked that one box during these fast runs; no idea how checking other boxes might affect that perception of a possible pattern.
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