Scopely Leaves Fans Raging Over Marvel Strike Force

Update – 9th July 2022

Scopely has addressed the situation with the Summer of Thunder event. Due to a portion of players receiving all of the milestones, Scopely has given all of the players that never got the glitch 50,000 points needed to finish the milestones. They have also essentially duplicated the event so the players can still play on as normal, getting more rewards. This is a good response from Scopely and I’m always happy to give credit where credits are due. There’s still the issue with the Dazzler event but this is a solid direction. You can read the blog post from Marvel Strike Force here.

I have been playing Marvel Strike Force since the game first launched in the United Kingdom. I played for a few weeks and then I quit the game. Fast forward around 10 months after that, I picked up the game and I have been playing ever since.

Throughout my years of playing MSF, there have been times where Scopely has truly dropped the ball with its player base, more notably the Lunar New Year and “Thanosgiving” resulting in the community becoming irritated.

The latest blunder, literally, comes with the 2 latest events. For those who don’t play MSF, they have introduced a new method of collecting one of their new characters. This event is a month-long event, with mini-events scattered through them in order to collect the fragments for the month-long event. It’s confusing unless you play the game.

Anyway, the month-long event requires a normal free-2-play player to be on the ball every single day to get as many rewards as they can from the event, and it’s almost guaranteed they won’t hit the final milestones unless they pay with real money in order to do so.

There’s a section of players who bought a $5 (unknowing to them) offer that actually cleared all of the milestones, collecting $100’s worth of rewards, in both the latest event for Mighty Thor and last month for Dazzler. The Mighty Thor milestones may have been a result of another glitch or bug, but the fact still remains is that even with an offer, or whatever else – some players still got all of those rewards on the first day.

Scopely did acknowledge this in the most tone-deaf way I’ve ever seen a company handle an outcry from fans. Those that bought the offer were not rolled back but instead removed from the “leaderboard” meaning for that month-long event, they can’t compete on the leaderboard side.

To put it bluntly, the leaderboard rewards are trash as it is.

Instead of doing the right thing, in activating the offer for everyone to purchase again – they go silent on Reddit after a massive outpour of angry posts. Their response is to give the players who didn’t manage to purchase the offer a separate milestone with a measly 1m gold which does next to nothing when you’re a veteran player.

They also provided a compensation login calendar but the issue is that everybody gets them. So there are players who get to chill for a month and get a lot of rewards whilst the rest of us still have to grind the month.

I’m not a whale but I’m not a player that doesn’t spend. Since launch, I have probably spent around $3,000 on the game which is a lot of money considering it’s just a mobile game. That’s because even despite Scopely’s incompetence, I still actually enjoy the game. I enjoy the grind and I like the IP that is Marvel.

The issue is, when you have a company like Scopely at the forefront of these issues, they go under the radar. When the community is unhappy, the Community Managers disappear instead of addressing the issues with the developers head-on. They will do the exact same as they do with the other screw-ups, they’ll brush them under the carpet until the community forgets and moves on.

How much longer can they continue to do this?

I’ve been scouring through Reddit every day and reading many different posts which all point to the same thing, it’s unacceptable from Scopely.

It’s starting to feel like Scopely likes the outcries because recently, it’s becoming so obvious they’re beyond out of touch with the players that fund the game. We’ve had spending strikes before but they just don’t care. They’ve never cared. They only care about money.

From a player’s perspective and seeing yet another outburst of anger, does make me sit back and think, what’s the point in playing anymore? I’m spending money on a game where the company doesn’t even care about me as a player, at least that’s the consensus now. I’m seeing players drop by the dozens at the moment. I’m seeing posts of people who are over 20m TCP and have been playing since launch leave the game.

My main issue with this is that Scopely can just take the loss on the event and activate that offer again for everybody so it means all players are given the opportunity to be on a level playing field. It’s a win-win for Scopely. They’ll earn an abundance of purchases for that offer, the community is happy again, and big-spending players will likely spend again.

I just don’t even see how this isn’t an option. When most of us are fighting through Dark Dimension 5 or are building up the necessary characters to get into that, the gear on those milestones becomes a hell of a lot more valuable than just money. It’s time. There’s a lot of mystic teal gear in the milestones that would help a lot of players out.

I did comment on a Reddit post and I even said this;

Why should I and many other players suffer due to Scopely’s incompetence? Why should the player who unknowingly bought the offer suffer as well? Why should they receive a somewhat threatening message for purchasing the offer, telling the player they will watch the account closely? One of the Community Managers did state it was automatic and not to worry but it’s still not fair for those players to receive such an awful inbox for that.

I’ve played a few gacha-style games such as Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, DC Legends, even WWE Supercard, and now this. I can safely say out of all the games, MSF is the better deal. The graphics are better, the characters are decent and usually, the game is very fun to play. But out of all of those 4 games I’ve played, MSF is the only one that continuously angers their fans and does nothing to address the situation.

It needs to change. Scopely hired another Community Manager to work alongside Cerebro and that’s done nothing. Their title is Community Manager. Let’s look briefly at what their job entails;

“Community managers are responsible for building and maintaining a brand’s community — both online and offline — and public perception. The job requires engaging audiences on a variety of outlets including online forums, social media platforms, Slack, in-person groups, and more to reach all audiences where they are.”

Well, we know they’re definitely not doing that. Maybe they are communicating back to the necessary people about the outcry but they’re not even letting us know that they hear us. That’s where it’s poor.

I don’t know how much longer I’ve got in me to keep playing the game. This is the first time I’ve truly been close to being done altogether. Scopely has proved before they can do the right things and take the game in the right direction. Even the latest update was fantastic with the login streak and raid sim. Those 2 features saved me a lot of playing time per day which I’m thankful for, especially on days when I’m busy.

Listen to your fans, Scopely. They’re not your beta testers. They’re not your QA department. They’re your players, your FUNDERS. They play the game every single day, they’re the ones that know what can be done better.

It comes to something when your content creators are even unhappy. I don’t watch many content creators on the game except a small few, but judging by some of the videos these guys are putting out shows this in its entirety. This time, it feels different.

I run this website mainly for AAA games, movies, shows, and others. I have written a piece on MSF before but this time, the outcry warranted my time in writing this.

In the end, I hope Scopely does the right thing for the players, but I can’t say I’m going to hold my breath.

Edit: it seems as though the Mighty Thor milestones were not a result of the $5 offer but instead a different bug. This is still at the fault of Scopely and they’re not addressing this situation correctly. This somewhat makes the situation worse that there have been different bugs for 2 events, still allowing players to collect $100’s worth of rewards in minutes. Thank you to all of you who have commented and let me know about this. I was under the impression by the posts on Reddit that it had been a result of the $5 offer.