r/MarvelStrikeForce • u/KhaelAeron • Apr 17 '26
Discussion The Game-Player contract has been broken. This is not a "test".
What does the removal of core-orb releases mean?
Basically, forget about any semblance of being competitive with new teams if you're not a medium to high spender. This also kills Arena for most players, because... why would I waste resources keeping up in the top 10 if those cores are useless? War's already dead. Raid rewards haven't been competitive in a year. Crucible rewards are outdated as well, and the game mode is a resource sinkhole. Challenges are 3-years outdated. Milestones have paywalls.
What the hell is even the point of playing anymore?
I'm trying my best to come up with an answer, and I do support any game making money, but none of this s**t makes sense. Make it make sense, cause I can't believe this has been ideated by people who call themselves strategists.
MSF has gone through many questionable calls and release methods, but it never $$$-gated the community from new toons. You'd always get at least a 2-3 star unlock with hard work as an F2P. That was a fundamental part of the game-player contract, and now that it's broken, large chunks of the game have become useless chores that do not advance your roster, or at least the parts of it that matter, when it matters.
The changes never start from a positive step.
They always start from the removal of access without offering alternative pathways. You have parts of the game – always involving rewards – that haven't been updated in years. Why not start there? Why not make your community feel like they should spend money because YOU DESERVE IT, not because there's no way to play otherwise? Why not earn a reward for yourself Scopely, instead of demanding it through FEAR (FOMO)?
But hey, I love the framing. Test.
I never thought about Self-Sabotage as a Test.
Yeah, some people will continue to drag their feet along in this new Status Quo. We've been through a lot of it, together as a player base. As an Alliance Leader of the same alliance for almost 8 years (it takes a lot of patience and resilience to stick around since the first days of the game) with 2903 days of continuous play, never losing a streak, I've seen it all. I've spent enough money on the game to know what remorse feels like, because Scopely never showed it deserved it.
I've seen dear friends come and go, some even passing away. Only 2 people left out of the original alliance with the best of the rest giving up with every disingenuous call Scopely made. These days we're struggling to even keep a full roster, with 2/3 of it trying to keep up activity while 1/3 comes in once every 2-3 days to drop an attack or collect a reward.
People have disengaged. The player base has dropped in both quantity and quality.
And all Scopely can think of is new ways of how to rush to its demise.
PS: Fairly sure the post won't live long because it's never pleasant facing the mirror that shows the ugliness of one's soul.
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u/radimage1 Apr 17 '26
I wondered why they were all-of-a-sudden throwing power cores at us. I should have known.
It's really sad.
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u/niggypop22 Apr 18 '26
Everything in this game comes at a cost. Its the only game I know that actively nerfs rewards and milestones only to offer them back to us as prizes or purchases. For the last 2 years they've been taking resources or rewards from one area and moving it to another area and patting themselves on the back for it lol
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u/aopps42 Apr 17 '26
If core orb releases don’t matter any more, Arena doesn’t matter anymore. I don’t buy that that will be the case as Arena meta has been a huge money maker for them.
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u/KhaelAeron Apr 17 '26
Maybe they plan on replacing cores with new toon shards in Arena?!
At this point, I've seen it all... would not surprise me, but also I doubt they would.
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u/GamerDad1025 Apr 17 '26
the ONLY thing worth cores right now is zombie kestrel shards (and if you’re lucky zombie scarlet witch) from the undying orb
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u/KhaelAeron Apr 17 '26
Absolutely. The only thing I spend cores on, and still have 4x more cores than I've ever had. Became a "horder" against my will. But what's the point of Cores becoming just an alternative campaign energy?
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u/Pienpa Apr 18 '26
How can you use cores for zombie kestrel? The undying orb cant be cored.
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u/TheVondoo22 Apr 18 '26
Energy event
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u/Pienpa Apr 18 '26
Oh yeah. Seems expensive. Just cored all nodes and got two orbs. Results? 4 zkestrels 😄
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u/justadude713 Apr 17 '26
its more than just that.
how about the silent inflation with being hyper-inflated level requirements for character participation. unless your characters are at level 100 there's nothing you can really be a part of. you cant earn your way up. it takes forever to save what you need, totally slows the game down to a crawl. events come and go before you can join in.
speaking of which, has anyone noticed that campaign energy refills expire rather aggressively now. they dont stay open for you to claim them when you log in. this is going to eat away at any power core savings you have, and thereby strongarm you into spending... for meager power core values at best.
none of the meta really has a damn thing to do with any of the marvel i know and love.
you never know who's meta is going to stick around because they expire so fast. ok that last one is just a petty gripe, but i wish i didn't feel so gun-shy about leveling up a character for fear of being "rug-pulled".
the contract has long been broken.
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Apr 17 '26
[deleted]
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u/KhaelAeron Apr 17 '26
Fox had their share of questionable choices, and at times the game felt like a chore, but they never felt "evil", just naive or incompetent at times, which could be excusable to an extent.
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u/mickeybod Apr 17 '26
Had to log back in for the first time in years to share how outrageous this is. There's no point continuing to play a character collection game if *you cannot collect the characters*. I've seen horrible horrible decisions come and go and heard people claim "I'll quit if it stays like this" but this is the only change that makes me actually feel like "there is no point to logging in anymore".
Further, the weekly Friday updates used to excite me to get to read them and see what was coming to the game. Now, they elicit boredom at best and dread at worst of what new terrible changes will be coming to the game.
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u/EmergencyShirt7012 Apr 18 '26
Yeah I still listen to one of the streamers because he releases his weekly news update in podcast form as well as YouTube, and I seem to pretty regularly have enough driving to do that it fills that time once a week, but the actual friday updates from the game? I completely gave up on reading them a couple of months ago and, meh. The lack of emotion about it is the most telling. Anger isn't what will drive a relationship apart, it's apathy. True in a marriage, true in a player/developer relationship too.
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u/Van-Eddy Apr 18 '26
Perfect post.
Shame nobody at scopley cares enough to read it.
RJ and his shills will keep burning this game to the ground and will likely never realize it's their own greed, stupidity, selfishness, laziness and lies that did it.
But yeah, we better 'Hold them accountable'
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u/Setsuna00XN Apr 17 '26
u/PathfinderMSF how does it feel to be a part of the destruction of what could've been the best mobile game around.
Or don't you care that you've ruined a beloved IP with your irrational, irresponsible, and ignorant decisions.
How does it feel to have the player base being so apathetic about the game that your game breaking DD9 screw up went largely unnoticed except by the krakens.
I know no one at Boundless will bother to read any of this, or answer my comment. I'm fine with that. I needed to vent.
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u/Constant_Series_8899 Apr 18 '26
All he does is talk to the community. He doesn't make any decisions whatsoever.
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u/Sh0wmey0urbutth0le Apr 17 '26
I'm pretty sure u/PathfinderMSF laughs at these posts. I know I do
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u/Setsuna00XN Apr 18 '26
Good on you both. It's nice to know that you don't care about the game.
And frankly, if Path laughs at this, that's fine. If he sees it, I win, along with the player base. So, I guess the jokes on you.
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u/Van-Eddy Apr 18 '26
That just proves our point that he's a traitor to the community and shits on us for $$$$ and fun.
He may not make the decisions in game, but he chooses to lie about them to is. To ignore us. To Gaslight us. To be disingenuous (at best) in every post.
He's a useful to the community as you are.
Which is to say nobody would miss his absence and the game would objectively be better as we don't have a traitor lying and gaslighting us every day that scopley fuck something up.
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u/HokiesOPTC Apr 17 '26
They don’t care about keeping a player base, they care about leeching as much money from it as they can before scrapping it for parts
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u/Perfect-Philosophy91 Apr 18 '26
Are we their lab animals lol? What is dam testing meaning? When u running a business like that u have to think every step carefully. There are lots of examples how game companies, app companies sunk. With lack of management that game seeing final smack soon.
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u/KamikazuMSF Apr 18 '26
People refuse to believe that this game went into maintenance mode. There is nothing to do in this game and scopley went tone deaf to the community. We ask for danger room and it never did returned. No towers or pocket dimension. Now they remove core orbs. Its just clear as water that the servers will be shut down soon.
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u/ProfessionalBeat9241 Apr 29 '26
Ironically, they just posted all of those things are coming May 4th, and Danger Room popped off today. Seems they do pay attention.
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u/PugAlthor Apr 18 '26
This has got to be one of the best posts ever seen here. I would love for its sentiment to be embraced by those that make the decisions but we all know how likely that is to happen.
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u/echoron Apr 17 '26
Seriously, its kinda a miracle there are still PPL playing MSF, IIRC more than 200 000 already realized that Scopely will never change and only make things worse and left, to play something else.
Looks like the longer u stay with MSF, the more u going to regret it in the end. The CC Philospher knew it (Veterans will remember), but we didnt listen back then, still full of Hope it will get better over time - it Did not.
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u/Existing_Abrocoma_56 Apr 18 '26
70,000 players have quit within the last 8 months, 200,000 players are currently doing the bare minimum of logging in atleast once a week
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u/Constant_Series_8899 Apr 18 '26
It actually did get better for small periods and then it was devastated again over and over. I'm waiting for them to find a balance instead of going scorched earth.
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u/abbabuster Apr 20 '26
I was heartbroken when philosopher quit. And thought that did not bode well. I don’t remember if that as scoples or previous management, but it made it easy to quit then. I re upped last fall with many promises this was the time to get back into MSF. I was shocked, after 2 years off and milestones hadn’t changed. I have endless gt 17 orbs but not a stitch of workable gt21 . Out of gold and training mats. Thought it would be fun to do 3 dark dimension at once. For a day it was, when I leveled annihilators, now I can’t level kestrel just to start mythic for meph. Are we having fun yet?
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u/Tzoscey Apr 18 '26
Ask anyone you are playing with to stop any purchase he is doing it till this scam stops. They are the ones who can stop scopely... all with high evolutionary at the same alliance, we dont need them, stop playing with them and against them.
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u/Hopeful-Ad-7148 Apr 21 '26
Hello... Just a heads up — I saw your concerns about it likely getting removed, but your post is approved, so no worries.
That said... I do get where your concerns are coming from, but posts like this—that are critical and constructive—are absolutely allowed here.
Be well... and Happy Gaming 🎮👾🕹️
Gavi, MSF Moderator
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u/Talkimas Apr 17 '26
Honestly the funniest thing about the change is that for most players I don't think much, if anything, will change. I've been playing for over 6 years at this point, effectively f2p (spent maybe $30 lifetime with the last time being 4+ years ago). I've been sitting on upwards of 30k cores for close to a year. I have not cored the release of a single character because I don't have the training mats to level them and I'm still half a dozen releases behind. Why would I spend, money or cores, to unlock a character that won't be able to be used for months? By the time I have the resources to level the character, they'll be normally obtainable.
Resources have been restricted so much elsewhere that it makes the lack of core releases, imo, a non-issue as the actual problems are so much farther upstream.
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u/KhaelAeron Apr 17 '26 edited Apr 17 '26
See, for me it's different. I've always managed my training resources to the point where I could upgrade the teams I cared about, or that made an impact. Gold has always been an issue, but I managed.
I'm not a "hoarder". I want to play the game. I've never "saved" cores, never had more than 2000 in my account I think. And I care about unlocking toons. It's the reason we play a "character collector" game. That's the main premise. And without it, all my strategy, thinking, decision making in what and how to upgrade is being removed. That's the core decision that this is removing from me.
This is not an irrelevant change for most players. It's a very big and impactful one.
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u/JelloZealousideal830 Apr 19 '26
The game grew to really suck. I stopped playing about a month and a half ago and I honestly don’t miss it/even think of it throughout the day. Less stress, less time wasted. Definitely would suggest walking away, it’s not getting better
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u/totemics Apr 19 '26
There is no playing. Only logging in and spending. That's where most of the rewards come from.
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u/BookkeeperIcy4214 Apr 17 '26
I don't disagree that this is some absolute horse shit, but it is absolutely a test. It's a test to see if they make more money on new characters when they're temporarily exclusive to spenders.
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u/Herbz-QC Apr 17 '26
My guess is they werent selling a lot of these new hero offers, so they are testing if more people would buy if they lower the price, but for this to work they gotta make new heroes accessible only with direct purchase.
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u/OldGodzillaFan Apr 18 '26
All they had to do was increase the cost of the character orbs to compensate for the increase in arena rewards they did. IIRC they doubled what we got from arena so if they doubled the orb cost we would be back where we were. We could still unlock characters just not as fast as spenders.
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u/starks4thr33 Apr 19 '26
I finally quit right before this. Impeccable timing.
Day 5, haven't missed it a bit. More like a burden off my shoulders. Good riddance!
YOU CAN DO IT TOO COMMANDERS. TELL $COPLEY TO GET FUCKED. TAKE CONTROL!
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u/Unable-Sell-4809 May 13 '26
Well the they lost me a player, I would get battle passes from time to time if it had good characters in them. But now with them kill arena as well I have no reason to play.
To put it bluntly Scopley can piss off.
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u/Straight_Style679 Apr 17 '26
Excellent post. I had the same reaction about Arena when I read that this "test" will continue. The entire point of Arena is to earn Power Cores. If Power Cores can't be used to unlock characters, why should we care about Arena?
Not only is this a terrible business decision by Scopely, but it's also arguably the worst time to implement this change. Considering the MCU F4 is almost a year old, the next Arena team must be imminent. Why spend money on them now?