Monday, August 20, 2012

Frustrations with Avengers Alliance

Blasted Facebook has me hooked on the awful Avengers Alliance game. It's quite entertaining, if not perfect. Here are a few frustrating details of the game I've observed so far, that I'm going to vent about to myself:

The lousy gift-giving
Why can you only give one gift at a time per person? This used to be considerably higher, and now you can only give one gift at a time? Bah, me no like.

Freebie gold earning that doesn't work
Most of the things I try to sign up for, like surveys or email distributions, that supposedly offer free gold, either don't work, or they tell me I'm ineligible in my area. Bah!

The ridiculously-overpriced characters
I suppose this is part of the "sales and marketing" department, but making Captain America and Spiderman the most ridiculously overpriced characters is frustrating, when if you play as a freeloader like me and you don't waste the money buying gold, then you're left with cheapie characters are "Sue Storm." Bah.

Pointless prizes when visiting other friend's maps
You can add friends in the game and visit their cities, but when you click on various buildings for prizes, many of them are completely lame like "30 silver coins", which, when you're near level 30 in the game, is mostly worthless when most of your expenses are in the tens of thousands of silver coins. Suggestion: upgrade the prizes when visiting friend's screens when your character has leveled up.

Language and Innuendo
Come on Marvel, you're owned by Disney now. Keep the language clean in the between-battle dialog. Nick Fury is a grizzled old vet, I know, but you can mind his language a little.

It's also telling to me that Marvel has to capitalize on the more virtuous of the heroes for a game like this. For instance, where are the 'X-Statix' characters? Oh yeah, that book was awful, and all of the characters morally debase, so they get left out in place of more lovably characters like "Nightcrawler" who, although he sounds like an earth worm, at least was a character with more virtue than the Punisher (another Marvel character left out of this game.)
If you are looking for a good time-wasting avenue that requires wasting time that should be used for more productive endeavors, then check out Avengers Alliance. Yeah, it can be played well as a free-loader, but you will only be able to play for limited windows of time at once (limited energy) which is probably better, or I'd waste the whole day playing...

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