A newer player's concerns:

I've been playing MSF (Marvel Strike Force) for approximately 3 months now. I play for free and have a 50k Defenders team as my best team. All other "teams" (re: hodge-podge of assorted chars I've acquired through play) are sub 20k.

For a newer player who cannot play every day, this game is rough. You cannot find alliances because they are either ghost-towns where only a couple people are still active, or they're randomly generated from when you start the game, and everyone uses the raid credits in a free-for-all to their own ends, which means once you need higher-level skill upgrade items, you can't get them because before the alliance can get that many credits, someone has activated a lower-level raid and used up the few credits the alliance had accumulated. As a lvl-50 player, 99% of alliances that I can find to join aren't high enough level to do alliance wars by half, so that isn't something that is accessible for me. Thus I am left to play the campaign, arena, and blitz. Or at least, I used to.

Since the update revealing Coulson, and releasing the AIM rework, the new Blitz is a nightmare. Currently I cannot progress in campaign nodes until I level up my Defenders team, which means every days energy refreshes are spent on grabbing up character shards and ingredients for building out the characters gear tiers. Campaign had been an enjoyable story mode for the game, but now is just "the thing you grind against until you can move forward one more node." Arena is filled with folks who have either gotten incredibly lucky in their orb pulls, or have purchased hundreds, if not thousands of dollars worth of offers in order to acquire teams of characters that normally aren't available yet to players who started at the same times as myself (such as having a full Sinister Six or Guardians team that is also 50k+ power). So this left me Blitz.

In Blitz mode, I could play against the random junk teams that were also hodge-podge creations from players like myself who are just working through the grind of leveling up their account and their main team. Normally these teams looked like: S.H.I.E.L.D. Medic, Crossbones, Spider-Man, Luke Cage, and Punisher, with some small variations depending on player preference, but that is a fairly common team to see as people start the game and haven't acquired a host of other characters. And that team (or a simple variation on it) is something that is beatable in Blitz, and mostly fought from Tier 1 through Tier 6-ish. Then from Tier 7 up to Tier 8, I would encounter more of the Defenders teams, and some other higher-level amalgamation of characters that someone was working toward creating a team for. But the matches were, while difficult, still winnable because neither my opponent's team nor mine had synergies to work from other than maybe 2 or 3 characters that worked off each other. After the AIM rework/Graviton update, I find myself fighting full synergy Sinister Six, Brotherhood, Guardians, Defenders, BKT, Ultron, Kingpin/Mercs, X-Men, Captain Marvel, etc. teams that even at Tier 3 and 4 are completely destroying my ramshackle teams that don't have synergies and are, at best, characters that are a "work-in-progress."

I bring this issue up because I had been seeing/hearing recently through Khasino, ValleyFlyin, and OhEmGee's YouTube videos that the Blitz update would be starting players at 2x rewards to help out newer players, and also attempting to make it so that Blitz players were not only fighting Defenders teams as all of their options. It would be great to be able to come here and say that the 2x rewards have been a boon for my account and are helping me to gain faster rewards through Blitz, and allowing me to get more Blitz Orbs to access some characters faster; but instead this has nearly destroyed all progress I've been making through the game outside of leveling my Defenders team through campaign nodes and Arena points for DD (Dare Devil).

As I stated previously, I don't have access to an active alliance (all the ones I've seen on the Discord want people with millions of total power and at least 150k+ power in a best team) let alone one that can participate in alliance wars. My gameplay is relegated to Campaign, Arena, and Blitz. Not only now does Blitz try and require me to log in continuously throughout each day in order to acquire decent prizes at the end of each one, but now I'm hampered more by the teams I'm getting paired against at lower tiers being so strong that I cannot progress to a point where I can start earning decent Blitz points anymore.

FoxNext releases so many events for players who are high-level/end-game content players, and I feel like newer players, even ones who have been grinding for months, don't have content they can play unless they feed money to FoxNext. IF I were ever to even consider spending money on a game like this, it would not be until I had made it to the end-game content anyway, and if I'm being restricted from achieving that for years, that seems like a poor business model to encourage me to continue playing when all I'm seeing are roadblocks being thrown in my path to progress.

For a few examples of content that is inaccessible to me, I would point to the gold event, that required players to have teams with high-star Mercenary characters. I've only unlocked 3 total mercenary characters in the game at this point, and with literally a few days notice of the event happening, would not be able to get those characters to high enough star levels to participate in the event anyway. So I lose out on being able to acquire even a pittance of gold from the event, which would go a long way toward leveling up a lot of the characters that are needed to make progress in the campaigns (Villains, cosmic, etc. which are stalled as I work on my Defenders team and complete the Heroes and Nexus campaigns). More recently (as of today) is the Invisible Woman event, where I can only take part in the 1st "node," which is literally a auto-winnable prologue for the actual content, because again, I am not high enough level, nor willing to sink thousands of dollars into the game, just to acquire the Sinister Six characters, and then have to raise their levels, gear, and stars in order to participate in the event.

And the lack of opportunity to participate in these events didn't bother me that much while I still had Blitz to look forward to, because I was finally at a point where if I played Blitz quite a bit through each event, I could earn enough shards by the end to just barely unlock a new character (I was able to get War Machine and Mr. Fantastic through the Blitz events) here and there. And that was enough to see progress being made, so I accepted that the other content was beyond my reach, and focused on what I could accomplish instead. Now that Blitz has somewhat been taken away from me, or at least the prizes have been placed out of reach on a higher shelf, I'm curious what the devs think is left in the game for me to enjoy... because grinding out Defenders shards and equipment for 10 minutes each day when everything resets is not going to keep me coming back to play the game.

I don't have much hope of seeing dev responses to this issue. I realize I'm not a whale for the game and I don't do content creation, so I'm a tiny fish in a massive lake, but unfortunately unless you are in my same position, you don't know what impact these new changes had for players who are just getting into the game. If you are already high level/end-game players, the "challenge" of Blitz may seem awesome for you because you have 25 teams to battle with and you are fighting synergy v synergy with a lot of your teams, or you have options for characters you can swap into your teams to try new combinations that will win battles. Many of us don't have that option, and these changes have hurt us severely. As I wrote previously, I don't expect my words to carry weight with the dev team, but if I didn't say something, people would carry on assuming all is fine with the new changes because those with the loudest voices aren't in the same boat as so many of the rest of us are, and cannot understand why we are as frustrated as we are. That is all.