Netmarble’s Kabam said today that it would update its Marvel Contest of Champions game after players complained that the previous update ruined the game.
Netmarble walked into buzzsaw when it acquired Kabam Vancouver and the Marvel Contest of Champions mobile game last week. The Vancouver studio, which made Marvel Contest of Champions, created its version 12.0 update that changed the game — and broke it, according to many fans.
“We have heard you,” the game developers said in a blog post today. “We’re making it right.”
The post wasn’t an outright apology, but it is clearly intended to help fans calm down. That’s important, as those once loyal fans who generated more than $450 million in revenue for the game are quite mad. Marvel Contest of Champions is No. 22 in the top-grossing list on the U.S. app store, according to App Annie.
Here’s the details of the post:
In this update we tried to do a lot, and we didn’t work with you, our community, on how these changes would impact you. We missed the mark by effectively making the game harder in a number of areas – this was not our intention. And while we weren’t shy about the fact that we intended to “nerf” some long entrenched strategies, the changes were too deep, and we didn’t give you enough new strategies in their place. You have told us this loud and clear, and we’ve heard you.
We are currently working on a new update. The dev team has been working through the weekend, around the clock, to get this update ready. It will take us several more days of testing, polishing, QA and approvals before we can have this update live, but we are working to get it ready as soon as possible.
Some of the specific areas we are improving are (but not limited to):
- Your ability to survive and your effectiveness while blocking and parrying
- The relative difficulty of harder content, like Act 4, Realm of Legends and Labyrinth of Legends
- The impact of Challenge Rating
- The effectiveness of:
- Captain America
- Captain America WWII
- Doctor Strange
- Scarlet Witch
- Storm
- Thor
- Ghost Rider
- Masteries such as Cruelty and Precision
- This is not a complete list, but everything you see above will be part of the update to come.
It should not have taken this response for us to create an update you’d enjoy. We should have worked with you sooner to identify these problems, and made these changes before the update was live to the world. In the meantime, we’ve shown some of the new update to a small group of Summoners and will be expanding that program as quickly as we can. Some of you may be contacted to join this small scale “beta program”. Thank you in advance to those that are participating. We are discussing how to introduce a broader Summoner beta program in the future. This can’t be built overnight, but we’re committed to working towards it going forward. We will let you know when we are able to add more Summoners to this program.
Though we can’t guarantee an exact date for this update, we are working as fast as we can to have it available in the coming days. We need to ensure that we allow enough time for:
Analyzing beta results and Summoner feedback
Building solutions to address beta results and Summoner feedback
QA & Bug Fixing
Processing time required by the app stores
We know that it’s frustrating to wait further. We will be giving you daily status updates along the way right here on our blog.We are doing our best to be ready as soon as possible. When this update arrives, expect to find some exciting things waiting for you in The Contest that we think you’ll really like.
Thank you for working with us, for talking to us, and for pushing us to make Marvel Contest of Champions the best it can be.
— The Marvel Contest of Champions Development Team
“The issue is the announcement is light on substance. They’re not telling us anything we don’t already know,” said Michael Hunt, a player who was upset by the changes, in response to the update news. “They already said they’re working on making changes a few days ago but they haven’t told us specifically what changes. I’m cautiously optimistic but until the update is actually out, or they give us specifics, we’re in the same place we were a few days ago. The only improvement I see from that announcement is that they are releasing a beta to select testers which as far as I know they haven’t done in the past.”
