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Scopely’s Marvel Strike Force Receives Huge Backlash From Players

This is a game I have been playing for almost 2 years, and admittedly I’ve spent my fair share. Including December where I spent easily over £300 in a month. However, the game’s state isn’t seen in a positive light by players.

The criticism from the players have been brewing for a few weeks now over the apparent state of the game, and as a player, it’s not surprising in the slightest.

Strike Force was previously owned by FoxNext who sold the property on to Scopely, and since then myself and a lot of others feel like the game has been falling downwards ever since.

The game often celebrates events happening in the world, and often give players some fun stuff to do during these events with fantastic rewards – keeping the players engaged and having fun. After all, this is a game, the end game should be fun above all else.

Today, they launched an event celebrating the Lunar Festival which is an amazing touch in its own right, however, what follows isn’t so amazing.

Power Core is a resource in the store that’s scarce, you always make enough to get by but most players don’t have an overabundance of this lying around. Most games will have a resource very similar, which you can buy for real money.

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Moving onto my point. 8,630 of these cores costs £99.99. Keep that in mind. This event requires a player to spend 5,000 of these cores per day, every day for 10 days to receive the top rewards. All in all that’s almost £600, for 10 days. Let that sink in. We’re still unsure if at this point there’s been a major mistake with a decimal point (which has happened in the past) but it’s definitely not a positive outlook in regards to being a player.

I completely understand Scopely is a business, and they need to make money but I do feel this is not a move that could ever be seen lightly, including those that do spend a lot of money.

Over 21 million American’s have lost their jobs due to COVID, in a pandemic that has shook us all, and people’s financial situation is more delicate than ever. Nothing positive can come from a game where spending that much money is needed to finish an event, even worse considering younger kids play the game too. The worst thing is, usually when these events happen there’s often a free-2-play way around, usually in a grindy way but it’s always been possible. Not this time, unfortunately.

Reddit and Facebook’s player’s group saw a monumental amount of posts subsequently across both platforms, to the point the moderators on Reddit removed almost all posts except 2 in order to create a mega-thread. That is also receiving backlash.

The company are in every stage to make things right for their players but are playing this weird act of staying silent and not communicating with players, which is what I see a lot of them are asking for. Just let us know what the plans are moving forward.

Whilst the above issue is obviously a major concern. There’s issues with the new Real-Time Arena which involved a battle pass at the cost of £20 (one of the most expensive, surpassing both Call of Duty and Fortnite by over double).

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They released a raid, which is where your alliance comes together to fight multiple nodes and advance. The raid called Doom Raid was almost impossible except for maybe the top 5-10 alliances in the game when there are thousands around, with very little reward if you managed to hit the first category of 30%.

The game is rife with bugs, their weekly blog posts are contradictive and change in an instant, they release multiple characters per month not giving the before new one’s time to settle down, and many other issues.

I’m not releasing this article to directly attack Scopely or any other members of their staff. After all, they have a game that brings a lot of people together and for the most part, make the game an enjoyable experience.

I spend my money because it allows me to focus on moving forward with a bunch of strangers all around the world in a Discord server becoming friends. Scopely has the potential to turn this around within a day or two, and I honestly believe they could and should.

When Scopely does try to please their fans, and it receives backlash I’m often there to step in to try to explain this to heated players, but I’m struggling to do that lately.

But, it does come to something when their content creators are calling out the game as well. ValleyFlyin, Khasino and OhEmGee are ones I watch often, and it comes to something when envoys of their own programme are calling everything out, with the exception of Khasino who isn’t part of their programme from my understanding.

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They created this game and it’s created a lot outside, including the 3 above talented individuals and other talented content creators, they have to see this in order to realise that their players care. That’s it really, we care as a player base and want the game to thrive.

Marvel is a franchise loved by so many millions around the world, they really want to see the game with the Marvel IP attached do well. I can’t say that any more clear. This isn’t some random game with randomly generated characters, this is a game that’s spawned a player base of 100’s of thousands of players.

I also write this because I care.


Update

Scopely posted on their Facebook page apologising for “missing the mark” when it came down to the Lunar Festival event and decided to lower the daily cores needed from 5,000, to 3,000 and also directly mentioning that the top rewards are for a “select few players”.

Looking at this from an outside perspective, this post was the exact thing they should have avoided. 3,000 cores is still a vast amount and would still cost around £300 to complete, or under that amount slightly. To then say it’s only for a select few players is damaging.

As mentioned, people’s financial situation is delicate and to expect players to easily drop that amount of money is unfathomable without a free-2-play method of gaining the rewards, even with a grind.

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People are rightfully still unhappy with this. I’ll keep updating this article if any other news drops from Scopely.

Scopely — Marvel Strike Force

Daniel Lewandowski

Founder, Director and co-owner of Only Comic Universe. Journalist specializing in the Arrowverse shows, and the MCU. Creator of the Only Comic Universe website.

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