Marvel: Avengers Alliance – My Strategy

Marvel (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In spite of my previous review of the Facebook game Marvel: Avengers Alliance, I have been pulled into the game.  I think that part of the reason is because I actually have a couple of other people who do play the game as well.  And I’m not talking about another account I run, but actual people.

Naturally, with any game like this, there is a certain degree of strategy involved.  Not a great amount, granted, because it is just a Facebook game, but I have been exercising some planning involved.

Marvel: Avengers Alliance Question

Logo of Marvel Comics (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Just a few quick questions for those people who play Marvel: Avengers Alliance on Facebook.

How do you deal with your team?  Do you focus on training one character?  Or, do you spread out the missions so that all the characters you have grow to roughly the same level?

Gift Limit

I have discovered that the gift redemption limit for Marvel: Avengers Alliance seems to be 50 gifts a day.

I can work with that.

Online Gaming Report

Image via CrunchBase

Marvel: Avengers Alliance

Marvel’s entry into the online/Facebook gaming app world is an interesting choice.  I say interesting not in the sense that it does not make much sense.  In fact, with the Avengers movie coming to theaters soon, it makes perfect sense.  When I say interesting, I mean that some of the decisions about how the game is played and structured are… interesting.

The game itself is pretty standard for a Facebook app game.  The game centers around story lines where you build your Avengers team.  You actually do not play a super hero, but a member of SHIELD, working with the Avengers on their various missions.  The missions are the standard app combat missions pitting three heroes against a series of villains.  There are also player versus player battles, where you face your group against another.  Again, this is pretty typical of a lot of these types of games.  Through these missions, you acquire SHIELD points, Command points, silver, and various items for use in missions.

The first thing that you notice is that the SHIELD points are extremely rare, which is unfortunate since you need them to level up your Avengers through training (you do not have this limitation), as well as for training and purchasing items.  You can purchase these points by paying for them, or you can have friends send you points.  At the moment, I’m running into a glitch in the game that is actually preventing me from receiving gifts from friends, which basically means I am up the creek in the game.

You also notice that the Command points, needed to add characters to your roster, are almost as rare as the SHIELD points.  Unfortunately, you cannot gift them (even when the gifts are working, which they were up until today).

The missions are, as I said, pretty straight forward.  It is a turn based system, with each character getting a chance to attack.  Like most of these games, there are multiple character types, each does better against another type.  This turn system can get a bit confusing when you are in PvP battles, since it is quite likely you will be bringing the same team to the mission as your adversary.

At the moment, there really is not much that sets this game apart from others like it, other than it is an official Marvel game.  It is interesting to check it out. But, I have found other games more exciting, especially the ones where you actually play a super hero instead of another nameless agent of SHIELD.  The rarity of the two primary means of advancing in the game (the SHIELD and Command points) is a bit of a turn off, especially when faced with a bug that does not register friend gifts.  It is also, like so many games on Facebook, heavily weighed towards the social side, with the game play working better the more friends you have playing the game as well.

If you are curious, or if you are a diehard Marvel fan, then you should check this game out.  But, if you are the casual gamer looking to just kill a little time, then there are better online games to play than this one.

Related articles

• ‘Avengers Alliance’ Is ‘Just The Tip Of The Iceberg,’ Marvel Games Exec Says (splashpage.mtv.com)
• Marvel: Avengers Alliance Lets You Assemble Your Own Oddball Avengers Team on Facebook [Avengers] (kotaku.com)
• Review: Marvel Avengers Alliance (comicbooked.com)

Socially Left Out

It’s that time again, the time when I start to wonder if it is really worth it for me to stay on all the various social networks that I am a member of.  At the moment, I am currently active on four.  That is, of course, assuming that both WordPress and Tumblr really are blogging sites and not social networks.  The four are: Facebook, Google+, Twitter and MyYearbook.  Honestly, I check in with MyYearbook every once in a while mostly because I keep getting messages that I have admirers there.  Most of these turn out to be porn bots.  So, MyYearbook is becoming a lot like MySpace, which I left years ago.

Friday Finds Special – Google+

Okay, this is more about Google+ than about any Friday Finds that I may have stumbled across.  We should be back to our usual Friday Finds format next week.

As many of you know, Google+ is the end all and be all of social networks.  It is supposed to put Facebook to shame, and hammer in the last nail of MySpace’s coffin.  It is supposed to revolutionize how we socialize on the internet.  And, from what I heard, is supposed to cure several major diseases while making unhip people that much cooler.

At least, that was what I kept hearing.  I really had no way of judging what it was really like because I was not allowed in.  Unlike seemingly the rest of the world (more on this later), I had not gotten an invite to join.  At least, I had not gotten an invite to join until this past week.  So not I’m in.  Take that, Google+ bouncer.  You can’t keep all the uncool people out forever.

But I digress.

Anyhow, I decided to take a casual glance around, at least until the Google+ bouncer realized I somehow slipped in and boots me out for not being cool enough.  The first thing I noticed it at it took my Gmail address book and treated it as the pull list for my friends and potential friends.  Since I don’t use my Gmail account for much, I was a bit shocked when it came up with two more names in addition to the person who invited me.  I soon figured out that these two people (myself being one of them) were people I had sent pictures to from my phone.  I also figured out that my phone was using my Gmail account to send my pictures.

Having these three names, I went to the circles to organize them.  I was actually surprised at how easily it was to drag and drop them into various circles for organization, and to create new circles.  I know Facebook has group options or friends, but the circles were much easier to navigate and organize.  Of course, looking at my circles, I realized something about Google+.

No one is on it.  At least, no one that I know on Facebook is on it.  Granted, I only have a small circle of Facebook friends (76, and some of those are duplicates), but I have not found any of them on Google+.  All this time I thought I was just uncool enough to be a part of Google+ and now I realize that I was not the only one.

Anyway, like Facebook, Google+ will suggest friends for you.  Unlike Facebook, I can’t see any logic as to who is suggested.  I’m looking at a gigantic list of people, and I don’t recognize any of them.  Well, that’s not true, “MySpace” Tom is in that list, which makes me wonder what is happening with MySpace.  The rest of the list is just a whole bunch of “Who the Hell are you?”  At least with Facebook’s suggestions, there is a certain degree of logic as to who is put on your suggested friends list (same friends, similar interests, etc.).  I cannot figure out what Google+ stream of logic is.

Moving on, I decided to check out the stream option.  As near as I can tell, this is supposed to be quite similar to the Facebook feed.  It is a bit tough to tell because, well, I have no friends on Google+.  No friends equals no streams from friends.  So, my stream is more like a tiny brook during a drought.

Google+ also offers sparks, which are your interests.  Unlike the groups of  Facebook, the sparks are more of less saved searches.  Once you click on a site that comes up, you are pretty much out of Google+.

I passed on the pictures section since I don’t really have a lot of pics to actually submit to the site and moved onto the Profile section.  Looking over the profile section, It looks a bit anemic to me.  Facebook’s profile section allows for so much more than Google+ profile section, like interests, favorite tv shows, and the like.  As near as I can tell, nothing on the profile page actually is used to determine who might be possible friends on Google+.  More can be done to improve this part of the site.

The most recent addition to Google+ are games.  There are not a lot of games on there, and they are pretty much the same ones that Facebook has.  It does have Bejeweled Blitz, so it does have that going for it.

As for whether or not Google+ is going to put Facebook out to pasture, I am not so sure about that.  The biggest draw or Google+, the circles, is something that Facebook could easily integrate into a new version if they chose to.  And, Google+’s exclusivity is keeping out a lot of people who might actually look to try it out.  I can see continued exclusivity working against Google+ as people who can’t get an invite grow more uninterested in trying it out.  I don’t even think that dropping the exclusivity in the near future will really hurt Facebook since the features in Google+ are not all that spectacular.

Facebook Friends

Image via Wikipedia

Unlike a lot of people on Facebook, I run a lean friends list.  How lean?  It’s only 78 people.  It isn’t a grand number.  In terms of Facebook friends, it’s actually quite small.  This is mostly due to the fact that I do not actively go out and search for friends, either by searching my past for people I knew, or by combing through the vast list of people who Facebook recommends that I could possibly be friends with.  There are a number of reasons for that.

The biggest reason why I don’t search for friends comes from my current friends list.  I have a lot of friends on that list who have befriended a lot of people… A LOT of people.  In all fairness, they are more popular than me, and some of that is work related (both the popularity and the number of friends).  But the end result of that my suggested friends list tends to have a gigantic number of people on it, most of who I do not even know.  Because of the number, and the fact that Facebook doesn’t seem to want to allow me to say, “I don’t know this person, don’t show me them again,” it makes wading through the gigantic list a lot more arduous.

Facebook also has made it a bit more difficult to filter friends.  It used to be that you could filter a list not only by school, but graduation year as well.  As near as I can tell now, that option is not available.  So, now I see not only people from my graduating class, but everyone who ever went to that school.  It’s all well and good for my high school, which tended to have smaller classes, but I went to Syracuse University for college.  Syracuse tended to not have small classes… ever.  It’s difficult enough to search for just my graduating class, now I have to try to filter out every other graduating class too.

The last reason is probably the most personal.  I never really had a lot of friends growing up.  I still don’t.  A lot of the people I was friends with I do have as contacts on Facebook.  But there are a lot more people out there that I knew growing up that I wouldn’t say I was great friends with.  Fringe classmates, people I know in passing, but not all that well, and a few crushes here and there.  Often when I look at the list of people Facebook suggests I might be friends with, I run across someone I knew in this capacity.  And, for that brief moment, I wonder if they would actually want to be Facebook friends with me, then usually move on.  I usually feel like if I were to Facebook friend them, it would almost be like stalking them, especially with the nature of Facebook’s posting system.

Don’t get me wrong.  If anyone actually wanted to Facebook friend me, and was someone I knew, I would most likely befriend them (there may be one or two people I wouldn’t… everyone has those people in their past).  Unless that happens, my Facebook friends list will stay its lean 78.