‘Boring’: NICKMERCS’s future between Apex, CoD decided ahead of Warzone 2 release

The love affair between Nicholas “NICKMERCS” Kolcheff and Apex Legends took a while to ignite. The Twitch star had his heart set on Warzone for a long time, and it was hard to shake off. But after experiencing one issue after another, he realized his entanglement with Warzone had lost its charm.

So, he looked for greener pastures and found them on Apex Legends.

Warzone fans are still bitter. They loved seeing him farm lobbies on their favorite battle royale. But, NICKMERCS is happy with how things panned out, and he has no regrets.

“Do I miss CoD at all? Nah,” he said during his stream on Nov. 13. “I think, for a long time playing Call of Duty, I was in a weird place where I really wanted to continue competing, but I felt like I couldn’t because the game was just so bad,” he continued.

As for what made it bad, NICKMERCS said all the hackers he encountered in tournaments tarnished the experience—and it worsened once his streams started becoming as big as they did.

“The stream was so big, and I was just getting hacked on every tournament. It literally just pushed me away from the game to the point where I could only play casually.” He found that fun for a while, but as a competitive gamer at heart, the novelty wore off quickly. The casual games weren’t enough to keep him interested. So, he looked elsewhere.

“It just got boring, man,” the Twitch star explained.

With seemingly nowhere else to turn to quench his competitive battle royale thirst, he decided to give Apex a whirl after seeing all the hype around its ranked mode, and it won him over. “For battle royales, man, it has the best competitive [mode],” he said. “I got hooked.”

And it paid off big time for the Twitch streamer.

He went on to work his way into playing Apex at the highest level— in the ALGS Pro League, and he’s happier than ever. Not only did it scratch the itch, but it was better than he dreamed.

For that reason, he said he’s “right where he wants to be,”—competing at the pinnacle of battle royales, a pathway the multitude of Warzone hackers denied him.

NICKMERCS has talked about the two titles often. He’s made predictions about their future, declared he has no plans to play the latest iteration of Warzone, and even compared their difficulty. But at this point, he wants fans to stop pestering him about it so he can close the chapter and move on.

“I had so much fun. But there’s a reason that I’m on this game now, and a big reason for that is that I wasn’t having fun anymore,” he said.

“I left CoD to play Apex because I wasn’t having as much fun. Now I am again.”