Thoughts: Alpha 1 -> Alpha 2

It was awesome seeing the changes that came with the new event, and seeing the new ideas was a very invigorating and exciting process. After the 2 games I've played though, I would argue that I felt more empowered by the first Alpha event than I do in the second Alpha event (disregarding sieging critical mass strategies). I imagine this will be a more unpopular opinion, but hear me out! I'll start off by talking about some of the changes I really like, then go into the changes I didn't like as much. Afterwards, I'll get really ambitious and try to outline what I think would be pretty cool to see. ^.^

Part 1:

Resources: Really like the concept of scrap and the way it was executed had my attention. It looks like this was an attempt at dealing with snowballing and minimizing the damages of early snowballs, which was awesome and I'm curious to see how that pans out

Mercenaries: I really like the concept and some of the units were really cool. The buffs that mercenaries bring to the table as well as the way they can enhance and sabotage certain compositions is just awesome!

Towers: Making workers capable of doing more things was really cool to me and having flexibility in where I place these towers was awesome.

New UI: It looks really clean and it was much easier for me to follow the new UI after I got used to it.

Merc Changes: Hard to say before PvP, but Vela seemed stronger than before! I really liked her concept, so i'm excited to keep player her.

Part 2:

Resources: The addition of scrap has been a fantastic resource to me and I really enjoy it in the game. The current state of gold though makes me feel very disempowered, pulling me back to my youth when I was first discovering RTS. I remember that first moment when I discovered that producing more workers and building more barracks would allow me to produce an army even faster and more effectively than if I saved costs in production. It was a shocking and hugely empowering moment in my life where I felt like I could take anything on. Right now, it feels like gold production is very stagnant and slow. I struggle to produce units and upgrade those units, and even though I know that the enemy has the same situation, it just doesn't feel great to me.

Mercenaries: While the concept of mercenaries was really cool to me, it felt overwhelming (probably because it's new) to me. I think the part that stuck out the most to me was just how many mercenaries I could hire. I think there were some units I could train 12 of, which seems like a huge number to have considering caps on my own army compositions. Balancing these mercenaries in their current state also seems like a very tall task that would be nigh impossible to pull off.

Upgrades: I was really shocked when I found out that I couldn't upgrade my units' attack, armor, resistances, etc. It was a huge let down for me and felt like a mighty shame. That's all I have for this section.

Gems: It seems like it'll be harder for a team that's fallen behind to pick up gems now. I could be wrong, but it looks like they spawn in the center of the map with few to none spawning within one's own base.

Part 3:

I personally would love to see upgrades come back, whether it's simply the ability to upgrade armor and weapons or whether it's a system akin to the one we saw in Alpha 1. The importance of weapon and armor upgrades could be huge, and it could be a great throwback to Broodwar where getting weapons on zealots meant the difference between 3 shotting and 2 shotting a zergling.

I'd also be really interested in seeing if the ability to upgrade through scraps and hiring mercenaries through gold could enhance the game to a new level. In this way, a player may have to choose between a risky power spike through a mercenary (that you can lose) who enhances a composition, or if he should raise the power of his army without dealing with the risk of losing a unit permanently. If these mercenary camps were also objectives that can be controlled at different points on the map rather than from the spawn point, how could it also affect the meta and how players move on the map?

Also, if possible, the return of gold objectives would definitely be something I'd love to see. Seeing gold trickle in without the ability to affect the speed of that is one of the most painful experiences for me nowadays.

If anyone has any thoughts agreeing or disagreeing with me, would love to discuss!