Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: Netmarble, star wars, Star Wars Force Arena, Update 1.5

Star Wars Force Arena: Developer NetMarble Seems To Be Pushing Another Sweeping Update

NetMarble are the developers and publishers of Star Wars Force Arena, but you might also know them as the people who recently bought Kabam, the people who brought you Marvel: Contest of Champions. While Contest of Champions' controversial update 12.0 was started before the NetMarble takeover, the fact that NetMarble seem to be pushing another sweeping update to another of their games just after the MCOC update was heavily patched after an overwhelmingly negative player response seems just a bit strange.

While update 1.5 for Star Wars Force Arena isn't quite as massive as the MCOC update, it does make a few of the same mistakes that caused a lot of player complains in Contest of Champions. The ratings changes are confusing, but liveable, faction-based leveling is even more baffling, and the rewards changes are understandable but the big sin comes later in the patch notes. Update 1.5 renders a whole game mode completely worthless – players will no longer be able to play ranked 2v2 matches. Players love to get up on leaderboards, so getting rid of ranked matches in one of your game modes is probably not a great move. Players have already gotten upset about it, since some only play 2v2 matches.

https://twitter.com/epic91x/status/847783111618420739

Some took to Twitter, like user epic91x here, while others kept things to the Force Arena forums: user Mickie C responded to the news by exclaiming, "No more competitive 2vs2???? Congratulations on alienating those that mainly play 2vs2!" meanwhile a few others like TamatiNZ were a bit more willing to ask nicely, at least sort of. TamatiNZ asked, "why exactly is 2v2 being removed from ranked gameplay completely? 2v2 rating point climbing (or falling if we lose a lot) is easily the most fun thing in this game (and I'm sure many players would agree), and you decided to remove it?!?! That is literally all the games I play on this game these days, I haven't touched 1v1 since beating the last 1v1 basic mission, because I prefer the teamwork and skill requirement that comes with 2v2s as opposed to fighting unbalanced matches and whales in 1v1s."

And then there was the community Let's Players and Youtube commentators. For Force Arena, Youtuber Glutenslayer took to his channel to talk about the update in an unscripted video. If you're looking for pull quotes, well, here you are, "[2v2] is the whole reason I started playing this game and I'm just super bummed out. Because if you take the meat out of 2v2, I feel like people are just not going to want to play it."

While there is something to be said for players hating change all around, changing so many things at once was the major failing for Kabam's update to MCOC. Well, that and not listening to player feedback the first time around.

Let's hope NetMarble takes all the feedback they're getting about 1.5 and put the lessons from MCOC12.0 into practice.

For reference, you can find my coverage of Marvel: Contest of Champions' latest update here, and the preview patch notes for Star Wars Force Arena can be found here on the game's official forums.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!