Marvel Avengers Academy

[raisinbman]

Marvel Avengers Academy

Shout outs to both David Nakayama the artist for this game, and the writer, Allen Warner. Both really made this game stand out despite TinyCo's flawed approach.

This is not the comic that often comes up in google, but the short-lived mobile game. It started out promisingly enough, as a big marvel fan I was pleased to jump into an idle game featuring college aged versions of characters I enjoy. The art style was very distinctive, and as cautious as I am about F2P games, their initial effort to onboard people by bringing in famous and influencer voice talent was apparent. Even in its nascent days, the ‘timefog’ of the game hinted at what was in the future and was visible to players. Unfortunately, this dream they were selling us was just that. TinyCo, a company infamous in the mobile game space to the point South Park had an entire episode dedicated to trashing them(though of course, south park has their own mobile game now, and from what I’ve seen, the fans of it defend it because ‘welp, they warned you, you know what you’re in for’).Despite it being very F2P friendly initially, early access characters and paywalls came into play. The game’s 2.0 was probably the epidemy of this, but we’ll get to that in a bit. The writing was great – courtesy of Allen Warner, but a marvel scribe was actually penning all of it. The overall setup was pretty ‘meh’ and stayed meh in the game’s abrupt ending: ‘There’s Timefog which causes amnesia and multiversal events, and Nick Fury knows what happened but he won’t tell anyone! Let’s have monthly events that say ‘timefog’ but nothing substantive otherwise!’. With this, if it were a proper marvel story, I’m sure they could’ve actually made a decent tale in video game form or some other media, but because it was a F2P game, things dragged out like filler in a show. Players ate up the content, as they’re known to do, and there were HUGE periods of nothing. Eventually, we made it to monthly events, which were exciting, but outside of the first, paying seemed like the only way to fully complete them. This left a bad taste in my mouth, as after the first Guardians of the galaxy event, fully completing the event required spending money. Whether it was costumes, characters, or the end result of a ‘caged villain’, all of that took money. And LOTS of it. There were people who fell for it, and there were people who didn’t mind it, but I ultimately budgeted my spending as I saw the game was worthy of my attention.



I should also mention I was streaming this game at the time, I wasn’t any sort of luminary but I did what I could. I even ended up getting asked by the voice actor for ChoHulk if I could provide him with the voice lines he had. I ended up declining because, even if this was even a legitimate request he should’ve been going to TinyCo for that #1, and #2, I’m not doing something like that for free.



They ended up adding, of all the things I saw people request like visiting other players campuses, or fun campus actions, a worldwide leader board. I’ll repeat that for emphasis – WORLD. WIDE. Even the most competitive games have regional or player-capped leaderboards, but not Avengers Academy! I actually saw more support in the fanbase for their NOT to be a competitive element prior to this being implemented. To be #1, you need to be the BIGGEST SPENDER IN THE WORLD. I tried to caution people out of this at the time, but of course, someone was going to do it.



There were lots of things hinted at and promised, and not just in game territories – x-men, character relationships. And much like the MCU, the game remained without them. The characters we got turned more and more niche, and I can only imagine as they scraped the bottom of the barrel for D-list characters, interest waned. Recycled characters, recycled events, it sort of ate itself in my opinion. But the crux of it all was the brand new 2.0 update. IIRC there was a huge content drought, and we were finally given this. All characters would be useful in events now! We can FINALLY access content that was promised to us! New gameplay systems! It was a breath of fresh air. Except it wasn’t. Sure, you can use characters in every event, but event characters are much more capable and IIRC normal character progress reset per event(or something). New gameplay systems were (wait for it…) heavily weighted towards whales. Getting these peeps leveled up was annoying. Event progress itself became a chore when previously, you could AT LEAST get to the end of the event with the F2P goals accomplished for free. And on top of that, RNG – getting your characters upgraded revolved are lootboxes for shards. I gave it a couple tries, but the last straw was the Infinity war event, where I found out I had to spend to get scarlet witch. I was unsuccessful, and I took that as a sign to uninstall.



The game survived for more time, but I think I had either quit streaming completely or just moved to Marvel Strike Force. I believe within a year it had died. I ended up going back and asking things they hadn’t done yet, a large number of them including not having opened the new timefog/zones that have been present on the map since day 1. This was a bit odd in no marvel mobile games really die, even Marvel Puzzle Quest(Throwback Cane & Rinse there) is still up and running. Marvel Heroes a sort-of-MMO and another game died, can’t remember the name of it but for the latter it was more due to facebook integration issues.

[Alex79]

I should also mention I was streaming this game at the time, I wasn’t any sort of luminary but I did what I could. I even ended up getting asked by the voice actor for ChoHulk if I could provide him with the voice lines he had. I ended up declining because, even if this was even a legitimate request he should’ve been going to TinyCo for that #1, and #2, I’m not doing something like that for free.

Say what now?

He asked you to provide you with voice lines? How do you mean? He asked you to isolate his voice lines from the game and send them to him or something?

[raisinbman]

I should also mention I was streaming this game at the time, I wasn’t any sort of luminary but I did what I could. I even ended up getting asked by the voice actor for ChoHulk if I could provide him with the voice lines he had. I ended up declining because, even if this was even a legitimate request he should’ve been going to TinyCo for that #1, and #2, I’m not doing something like that for free.

Say what now?

He asked you to provide you with voice lines? How do you mean? He asked you to isolate his voice lines from the game and send them to him or something?

Correct, he asked me to isolate his voice lines, or I guess with what I was doing, short video with all his barks. I assume for his portfolio or w/e. I was actually trying to chronicle the game and its characters, but as the saying goes, life happens. In some alternate universe, I actually would've done that eventually, but the game's dead now. Weird, but hey, it wasn't vulgar or hateful, so I'd prefer this to those lol.

[ColinAlonso]

I usually stay away from f2p games, so I had never heard of this.

Thanks for the story raisin.

Jeez what a mess...