On top of all this, updates have continually ignored many of the quality-of-life improvements most often requested by the player base. It's anecdotal at best, but my Alliance has had problems over the last two years filling vacancies left by players who got upset at the greed-driven design and quit the game. Scopely has a dedicated, built-in fan base that's willing to spend, but if the company keeps upsetting its player base, that revenue could dry up. I know I can't be alone in my disenchantment, as the Marvel Strike Force Reddit page is flooded daily with complaints from players along the same lines. When Scopely is touting how much money the product brings in for the company, the least players should be able to expect is a high-quality product.īut when players continue to spend money, what incentive does Scopely have to enact change? The age-old concept of voting with your wallet has never been more relevant than with a game like this my spending has certainly dropped off dramatically in the last year. In the last 24 hours alone, the game has displayed incorrect text telling players what the rewards will be for the next raid, plus the wrong art telling players basic Red Star orbs are granting 10x credits when they're not. At present, Marvel Strike Force regularly crashes when players perform certain actions in the menus. In addition to the game-breaking glitch that accidentally rewarded players with exponential gold, causing the game to be taken offline for an entire evening in May 2021, players have endured glitched microtransactions, character kits not performing the way they're described (often fixed by the team updating the text of the description instead of the kits themselves), and myriad other technical problems. Amid parent company Scopely reporting massive growth and profits from its Marvel hero collector (to the tune of 70 percent growth and more than $300 million in 2020 alone), the quality of the game has continued to decline. It's true that a goal of any video game is to bring in profits. But when the game is so demonstrably designed around making sure the player feels bad or left out unless they regularly spend money, it showcases precisely why so many immediately lose interest when they hear a game that is free-to-play.īut Marvel Strike Force's problems extend beyond its constant siphoning of players' wallets. Unfortunately, Marvel Strike Force isn't one of them. Every step of the way, Marvel Strike Force now feels designed to frustrate players until they finally cave and spend. There are plenty of free-to-play triple-A games that do it right, giving players a great experience, then offering up extra goodies if they feel like throwing some cash at the game. The current in-game e vent featuring the character Echo gives free-to-play players who put in a ton of time grinding barely enough character shards to unlock her, then rewards those who drop an exuberant amount of money with bonuses that will only further increase the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Today, massive event-based rewards are sometimes impossible to earn unless you spend upwards of hundreds of dollars. As I mentioned before, in the early days of Marvel Strike Force, spending money felt like a luxury purchase – nice-to-have bonuses that will either unlock new characters faster or power them up with less grinding. The easy fix is to ignore the premium offers and instead focus on the gameplay, right? Well, that works to an extent. Unfortunately, as the game's lifespan approaches the start of its fifth year, the transactions feel less "micro" as offers ranging from $50 to $100 a pop are more common in the game's marketplace, in addition to two simultaneous battle passes that set purchasing players back $20 each per month. However, once I did selectively begin spending money, the microtransactions I chose felt rewarding and valuable. Sure, dropping some cash accelerated your progress, but I was largely free-to-play for the first year of the game's life. When Marvel Strike Force arrived on iOS and Android in late March 2018, I was immediately hooked.Įarly on, the premium elements felt pricey yet largely unnecessary if you played the game a decent amount and completed all your daily objectives. I couldn't wait to get the launch version on my phone. The solid turn-based combat, an ever-growing roster of beloved Marvel heroes and villains, and compelling hero-collecting elements borrowed from games like Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes drew me in from the jump. When I played a pre-launch build of Marvel Strike Force at the 2018 Game Developers Conference, I was excited to dive into the multiversal battlefield the team at FoxNext created.
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