Marvel Heroes Ranking: B
I found out about this game around the time I was looking for an alternative to Diablo III, which at launch, was plagued by both frustrating, unbalanced difficulty and (worse yet) a hostile and arrogant developer team that constantly found new and fresh ways to nerf players. When Marvel Heroes launched, it pretty much had the same issues, with numerous bugs on top of that, but eventually the lead developer, under the screen name Doomsaw, stepped into the forums and told us they were going to overhaul the game. And they were wildly successful. Comparing the game at launch to the game at the end of 2013 is like comparing a dying firefly to the sun.
I remember being a part of the community in Marvel Heroes. The forums began as a really friendly place and I really enjoyed talking with the other players. When Doomsaw started communicating with us, we were really excited. Characters were getting reworks and the developers were always working on new features and game modes. To be honest, I thought of both the game and the community as a bright spot in my life, which was dangerously abysmal at the time.
2014 came. And the game changed. Doomsaw, whose introduction included the statement “no nerfs is my favorite policy, unless something totally ruins the game, which is rare,” began…implementing nerfs. Lots of nerfs. People complained and he began silencing their forum posts. A silenced forum user would still be able to see his/her posts, but nobody else could. It was underhanded, arrogant, and rude. The sudden change in the forums hit me pretty hard, actually – it seems strange to react so much to an online forum, but like I said, I really felt like I was part of a community there.
The developers’ philosophy on the gameplay also changed. They focused on making heroes with high damage output but really terrible survivability. An example is when people pointed out that melee heroes couldn’t survive a boss affix that summoned high-damage area-of-effect around the boss, whereas ranged heroes could just run away and still attack. The developers’ response was to implement the Missile Reflect affix, a barrier around bosses that reflects ranged attacks from afar, because clearly, the problem wasn’t that melee survivability was in the toilet; the problem was that ranged heroes were surviving too much.
The playerbase dwindled. The forums became a less-friendly place. I left the game myself; ironically, at the time, Diablo III was undergoing drastic changes, so I returned to that game and ended up really enjoying the content/features that arrived with Reaper of Souls. Eventually I would hear that Gazillion, the company behind Marvel Heroes, was struggling more and more until, in late 2017, the company very suddenly went under. The game went offline permanently and, worse, former Gazillion employees found themselves very suddenly facing a financial crisis and they were now unemployed with no severance or benefits. It was a very sad state of affairs.
I’ll always remember Marvel Heroes at its pinnacle, a few months after the initial reworks. Heroes felt like heroes. Powers felt powerful. The art in the game was absolutely superb. We in the community really celebrated this very unique game together. There were flaws, but we were confident the game would keep getting better. Unfortunately…we were wrong.
I found out about this game around the time I was looking for an alternative to Diablo III, which at launch, was plagued by both frustrating, unbalanced difficulty and (worse yet) a hostile and arrogant developer team that constantly found new and fresh ways to nerf players. When Marvel Heroes launched, it pretty much had the same issues, with numerous bugs on top of that, but eventually the lead developer, under the screen name Doomsaw, stepped into the forums and told us they were going to overhaul the game. And they were wildly successful. Comparing the game at launch to the game at the end of 2013 is like comparing a dying firefly to the sun.
I remember being a part of the community in Marvel Heroes. The forums began as a really friendly place and I really enjoyed talking with the other players. When Doomsaw started communicating with us, we were really excited. Characters were getting reworks and the developers were always working on new features and game modes. To be honest, I thought of both the game and the community as a bright spot in my life, which was dangerously abysmal at the time.
2014 came. And the game changed. Doomsaw, whose introduction included the statement “no nerfs is my favorite policy, unless something totally ruins the game, which is rare,” began…implementing nerfs. Lots of nerfs. People complained and he began silencing their forum posts. A silenced forum user would still be able to see his/her posts, but nobody else could. It was underhanded, arrogant, and rude. The sudden change in the forums hit me pretty hard, actually – it seems strange to react so much to an online forum, but like I said, I really felt like I was part of a community there.
The developers’ philosophy on the gameplay also changed. They focused on making heroes with high damage output but really terrible survivability. An example is when people pointed out that melee heroes couldn’t survive a boss affix that summoned high-damage area-of-effect around the boss, whereas ranged heroes could just run away and still attack. The developers’ response was to implement the Missile Reflect affix, a barrier around bosses that reflects ranged attacks from afar, because clearly, the problem wasn’t that melee survivability was in the toilet; the problem was that ranged heroes were surviving too much.
The playerbase dwindled. The forums became a less-friendly place. I left the game myself; ironically, at the time, Diablo III was undergoing drastic changes, so I returned to that game and ended up really enjoying the content/features that arrived with Reaper of Souls. Eventually I would hear that Gazillion, the company behind Marvel Heroes, was struggling more and more until, in late 2017, the company very suddenly went under. The game went offline permanently and, worse, former Gazillion employees found themselves very suddenly facing a financial crisis and they were now unemployed with no severance or benefits. It was a very sad state of affairs.
I’ll always remember Marvel Heroes at its pinnacle, a few months after the initial reworks. Heroes felt like heroes. Powers felt powerful. The art in the game was absolutely superb. We in the community really celebrated this very unique game together. There were flaws, but we were confident the game would keep getting better. Unfortunately…we were wrong.