Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: Kabam, marvel, Marvel Contest of Champions, marvel games, MCOC
Despite Promises To The Contrary, Kabam Is Still Pushing Updates To Marvel Contest Of Champions
It's been a little while since we last checked in with Marvel Contest of Champions, but Kabam's mobile title is back in the spotlight for a series of major issues.
After the 12.0 patch went down infamously poorly, which they had made the mistake of trying to push too many changes too quickly, Kabam has continued to roll out more and more content updates as part of their promised Seasons changes for Alliance Quests and Alliance War — and they appear to have had some horribly unintended consequences.
While they included a team of beta testers for these updates, it looks like quite a lot of trouble has slipped through the cracks. There have been a lot of players logging freezing and logout issues in the game, which often lead to players losing matches due to the way the game's recovery system works. Basically, if you DC during a match, the game defaults to a loss for you. Or maybe you do win, but the system just doesn't log that win at all. Naturally, this is frustrating the hell out of players. Here's just a small sample of those complaints.
Things started off rocky in March once the Alliance Quests and Alliance War went back into action, and once Kabam started rolling out more events and Act V content.
It's only gotten worse in the months since.
I've been talking with one of the game's top alliance leaders, The Living Tribunal, who argues that the game now might be even more broken than it was before the 12.0.1 fix. It's pretty obvious that the constant content pushes are running on too short of a timeline — two weeks between events, even temporary film promo ones, is a bit too short of a timeframe to do proper quality assurance testing. And it is about two weeks between updates. If you check Kabam's updates page, well, there's been an update about every two weeks or less to the game, and that's not taking into account the number of bug reports and fixes that you can find details about on the forum. Even with a beta team of top players, that's an insane amount of content to push quickly.
And sure, players hate when their game changes. No one enjoys logging in to their favorite game to find things changed without their notice, and when you keep running into login issues, getting kicked out of events, and losing fights because of freezes, well, no one would be happy with that. And for dev teams, it's frustrating to have constant pushback to the changes you make. But this isn't Kabam's normal update schedule — this is a bit much by pretty much all standards.
And considering they vowed not to change things too quickly after the whole snafu that was 12.0, well, it stands to reason that something is going on behind the scenes here. Sure, the Guardians of the Galaxy tie-in is obviously a mandate from Marvel's top brass. They've made similar events in most of their games properties to promote the film, but all that Act V content and Alliance Quest/Alliance War content? That's not something we can pin on a Marvel initiative.
So you have to wonder, who is it that wants all of this content put up, and why? Just what is it that they're trying to do?