Why I am permanently quitting as a largely F2P Player for 8 years.

Firstly I would like to preface by saying I love this game, I don't want to quit but a combination of life and questionable decisions by the game team have led me to this decision. I have played this game since I was 13 years old, I still remember when Blade and Stark Spidey were the most wanted champs and Labrinth of Legends was seen as this impossible piece of content. Fast forward 8 years, I am 21 years old, incredibly confused with my life and just trying to better myself everyday. I have spent lots of time on this game over the past 8 years (playing multiple hours almost everyday) and I am starting to realize the actual enjoyment element of the game is extremely limiting. Ignoring all the outdated rewards, bugs with the AI, this strange behavior of introducing a BS defender (Bullseye, Serpent, Enchantress etc.) just to release a counter a few months later AFTER everyone has invested the resources to max them out. I don't even have a problem with the games shift towards 7 stars being the focus of a roster, even though 2 years ago That was one of the reasons players were quitting. I am quitting now because I think this game for F2P players has shifted irreversibly in favor of grinding and spending for whales. Deathless Champs are worth literally thousands of dollars of Units, revive bundles have been missing for a while with no return in sight (srsly scummy move especially when you guys released more Everest content), AI is still buggy as hell and to top this all off even though there are a ton of game modes and content, I can't help but feel a large chunk of it is either roadblocked by rarity (6-Star/7-Star) or specific champion counters (A good example would be the 2nd Path in epoch of pain, there is literally only 3 7 star tech champs that can VIABLY do Adam Warlock and you NEED a counter for this fight in particular).

I love this game. Even after I told myself I would quit after I reached Valiant. I stuck around genuinely because I liked the mechanics of the game, I had a strong desire to grow my 6 Star Roster so I could collect and max rank/ascend all the "Beyond God Tier" characters and believe it or not I actually wanted to get better at battlegrounds. When I look at the state of the game now, I am convinced that the same love the creators had for this game back when I first started has been replaced by mediocre content and a culture of "Pay to yield better rewards." If you have played this game all I ask is that you consider what I have to say, and wonder if you have had similar complaints or a similar story.

As someone who has over 40 ascended 6 stars, 8 Rank 3 7 Stars, 4000 Units Saved Up and has completed everything in the game except Epoch of Pain, I believe this is the end of my journey. I am happy with how far I have come, I am extremely grateful for all the champions I have unlocked and had the privilege of using, extremely grateful for being able to learn every boss fight in the game and eventually overcome it, extremely grateful that for 8 years I was apart of a community that shared the same passion and sometimes even obsession with this mobile game. In my most isolating and dark moments I still had this game and the way it would make me feel. This incredible roster that I have amassed over the course of 8 years will always be a sweet reminder that a combination of dedication, passion and time will always yield fruitful results. I am completely satisfied with my progress, whatever content is released from this point onwards I wish the continuing players all the best. But two things this game demands from you is time and consistency. If you can't put in several hours a day almost everyday then I am sorry this game is not for you.

Lastly I want to end this thread with a personal message. As a son, a student and someone who has consistently struggled to prove my own value to myself, I have come to regret a decent portion of the time I spent grinding units or battlegrounds and whenever anyone asks about this game I always tell them the best way to play is "to never start." I have lost precious interactions and time trying to feed my passion and while I don't regret my journey as there were so many amazing highlights, I frequently contemplate on how much this game really means to me. This shiny roster I have built sits in silence collecting dust, only to be used in Battlegrounds and run into a whale with a deck made out of all rank 3's and 2's. Every game experiences a natural decline but if you are like me relatively young, naive but passionate you may be ignorant of exactly how much this game demands from you. Love for the game has let me continue playing even when that same love was not reciprocated by KABAM. Now life is telling me that the time I spent for this game is better spent elsewhere. I am not encouraging anyone to quit, I am not encouraging anyone to harass Kabam. I am simply saying that as a long time F2P player I think the game is now shifting towards a silly direction. Rich the Man made a video saying that this year you will need at least 25k Units to really whale out for this years Banquet. At first I thought "sick I will just be disciplined with how I spend and grind my units", and as I hit 4000 units by the end of Feb I asked myself "What about the year after that" or after that. You may not see this as a vicious cycle, but maybe for the first time in 8 years my love for the game has let me accurately realize where it is trending and eventually going to head towards.

Lots of Yap on this post I know but I will leave you with a quote from the Lorax and let you interpret what it means and how its relevant here. "A tree falls the way it leans"

If you took the time to read all of this, thank you. I know it was not the most coherent post as I am writing this to destress after studying for an exam, but I hope I was able to paint some of my feelings out for you. I will miss nuking tf out of literally everything with CGR, I will miss pulling a good champ and having that rushing feeling in my heart, I will miss saving my catalysts for an extremely specific and niche champ. I will miss all of it, the good, the bad and the scummy but I make this decision knowing that the gains will outweigh the loss. Thank you to Kabam for this beautiful game, Special Thanks to Lagacy if he ever reads this forum post, as a Canadian myself I always loved watching your videos, you were always incredibly knowledgeable and the same passion I had was always present in the videos you made, you inspired me to keep playing this game especially when I wanted to quit over the years. Finally I want to say "Goodbye", my journey was filled with slow days and bad pulls but everything leading up to this was beyond worth it and if I had the chance I think I would do it all again and change nothing even the regret I feel.

Comments

TotemCorruption

The real quitters don’t make a scene—they just leave.
Give him couple years to comeback then.

Then a comeback post easily progress faster than ever before they quit.

Everything in couple years will be so different and exciting!!

You're trying to downplay someone else's enjoyment of the game because they got the same Valiant title with less struggle?
And this bothers you because it makes you question whether all the grinding and struggle you went through was worth it?
In my opinion, if you enjoyed the process then yes, but then again, if you're bitter about it, then you probably don't enjoy the grind, you just do it for who knows why, especially you personally, since you grind like 10,000+ units a month from arena. That's not a hobby, that's a job...

Friendly001

TLDR?

BuggyDClown

Been a while I saw such post but felt someone actually meant what was said.

Best of luck.
Farewell
This means alot especially coming from Chairman Buggy

My man 😂😂😂😂😂

Ironwarrior

The real quitters don’t make a scene—they just leave.

And the people who actually love the game, leave with a heavy heart. Whether it be due to the horrible state of the game- or personal reasons

EvilDavid666

Never back down never what. Never give up

TotemCorruption

The real quitters don’t make a scene—they just leave.
And the people who actually love the game, leave with a heavy heart. Whether it be due to the horrible state of the game- or personal reasons

Agree 100%.
This is how I left Facebook and then Twitter.
I was upset about the changes and the echo chamber toxicity.
I didn't make some big self-important post about why I was leaving, but it didn't mean that I wasn't upset about deleting all the connections and content I had cultivated.
But for me it was like, if I'm done with this platform, I'm done.
Why would I post on it or try to justify my decision to people who still enjoy it.
I mean, jesus christ, even Brian Grant with his tens of thousands of fans left with less drama and self-importance than the random nobodies on this forum....

unknown

This content has been removed.

Elux

Dont blame you I haven’t quit just gone into a dead alliance with r.i.p.180 day plus non active taking things slow everything done. The day 9.2 comes out ill chill and take it like a snail

ContestOfNoobs

The real quitters don’t make a scene—they just leave.
Give him couple years to comeback then.

Then a comeback post easily progress faster than ever before they quit.

Everything in couple years will be so different and exciting!!
You're trying to downplay someone else's enjoyment of the game because they got the same Valiant title with less struggle?
And this bothers you because it makes you question whether all the grinding and struggle you went through was worth it?
In my opinion, if you enjoyed the process then yes, but then again, if you're bitter about it, then you probably don't enjoy the grind, you just do it for who knows why, especially you personally, since you grind like 10,000+ units a month from arena. That's not a hobby, that's a job...

I enjoy grinding it

DNA3000

..... I have come to regret a decent portion of the time I spent grinding units or battlegrounds and whenever anyone asks about this game I always tell them the best way to play is "to never start." I have lost precious interactions and time trying to feed my passion and while I don't regret my journey as there were so many amazing highlights, I frequently contemplate on how much this game really means to me....but if you are like me relatively young, naive but passionate you may be ignorant of exactly how much this game demands from you.
That's a good thing to learn when you're only 21.

Just don't replace MCOC with some other video game: try and find a real-life passion instead of a virtual one.

Preferably something involving friends and family.

Best of luck!

They are all real life passions. We play MCOC in the real world, just like we do everything else.

The important thing is to have the right expectations with anything you do. You could spend all your waking moments on learning the violin only to wonder one day why you're surrounded by stacks of sheet music you hardly ever play, or traveling the world only to wonder one day why you have nothing to show for it but an Instagram feed you never look at yourself.

If you're playing MCOC because you expect some sort of reward at the end of it, you're bound to be terribly disappointed. You should be playing the game to play the game. I fully expect all of this to be gone one day. Hopefully not too soon, but some day. My roster will just be bits in a file in a cloud that gets deleted, and that will be that. But I won't regret any of my time here. I won't think it was all for nothing, because I can't continue to use my roster for some purpose.

The things you invest your time in should be things you appreciate yourself, with no need for external validation or subsequent payoff. You work a job to get a salary. You put money in your 401k to get a return on investment. You should spend your time on things you want to spend your time on. You can always get another job. You can always make more money. But there is no way to bank time.

Video games are fundamentally no different than anything else in your life. You have to decide what your priorities are, and what you want to spend your time on. I spend a lot of time on MCOC, but it is not my highest priority. My family and my friends come first, and honestly there's a couple of other things that come next. It does take up the bulk of my idle time, but it does not ever push out anything else. Everyone needs to find their own version of that healthy balance, because MCOC is not the only challenge here. It just might be one of the first younger people run into, but it will not be the last.

Toyota_2015

There are some differences between your situation and mine, but there are also a decent number of similarities too. In all honesty, I see myself making the same choice you have now somewhere down the line. I can only spend so much time on this game before I start asking myself what I could be doing with my time instead.

However, I do want to say that regretting spending your time doing something you enjoy isn’t the best idea. It’s unrealistic to expect yourself to be productive 24/7, and you need to be able to allow yourself to “waste time” every now and then or you’ll start losing it. If I were you, I wouldn’t regret my time spent playing this game and I would instead acknowledge it as a fun pastime that is no longer worth pursuing. Don’t beat yourself up over the time you’ve lost and instead look forward at the many opportunities ahead.

You still have plenty of time left to do what you want. I hope that wherever you’re headed, it all works out for you in the end.

TotemCorruption

The real quitters don’t make a scene—they just leave.
Give him couple years to comeback then.

Then a comeback post easily progress faster than ever before they quit.

Everything in couple years will be so different and exciting!!
You're trying to downplay someone else's enjoyment of the game because they got the same Valiant title with less struggle?
And this bothers you because it makes you question whether all the grinding and struggle you went through was worth it?
In my opinion, if you enjoyed the process then yes, but then again, if you're bitter about it, then you probably don't enjoy the grind, you just do it for who knows why, especially you personally, since you grind like 10,000+ units a month from arena. That's not a hobby, that's a job...
I enjoy grinding it

Me too, and I agree, it's a great game.
You can achieve just as much as the whales without spending hardly any money. MCOC is really generous with their rewards if you know what you're doing and have some patience and willingness to learn and adapt.

That's why that dude was able to make it to Valiant in a few days after being gone for 2 years. He used his brain to solve problems and progress instead of getting sunk in a loser's mentality and complaining on the forum about the unfair AI or the monetization aspects of the game.

PantherusNZ

There are several important lessons in life:
- Never pee into the wind
- Companies are always going to prioritise profits, and so market their goods and services according to what they think will get them the most money overall
- Always ask for the late checkout, unless you absolutely don't need it
- FOMO is a marketting tool and you have control over it; accept that you won't partake in something because it's not for you and you'll be much happier

I've never been happier in this game than when I realised that high-tier war and AQ wasn't the right fit for me, and that I was OK with that meaning that I progressed slower compared to many others. If end-game content like Necropolis and Epoch isn't doable for you, for whatever reason (skill, roster, time, resources, etc) then don't do it. Do something else - whether grinding other parts of the game to help you eventually progress to where you CAN do it, or just do something else entirely.

If the game is no longer fit for your purpose, then stop playing. Life will go on, for you, for Kabam, for everyone else. Do what makes YOU happy.

Rudolph_Raindeer

TL;DR: The author, a longtime free-to-play player of *Marvel Contest of Champions*, is quitting after eight years due to the game's increasing grind, monetization focus, and lack of meaningful rewards for non-spenders. While they cherish the memories, community, and personal growth they experienced through the game, they feel the love and passion that once fueled it has been replaced by profit-driven decisions. They express gratitude for the journey but acknowledge that their time is better spent elsewhere. Despite some regrets, they wouldn't change their experience and bid farewell with appreciation and reflection.

AhnafTheGiraffe

TL;DR: The author, a longtime free-to-play player of *Marvel Contest of Champions*, is quitting after eight years due to the game's increasing grind, monetization focus, and lack of meaningful rewards for non-spenders. While they cherish the memories, community, and personal growth they experienced through the game, they feel the love and passion that once fueled it has been replaced by profit-driven decisions. They express gratitude for the journey but acknowledge that their time is better spent elsewhere. Despite some regrets, they wouldn't change their experience and bid farewell with appreciation and reflection.

This about nails it

captain_rogers

..... I have come to regret a decent portion of the time I spent grinding units or battlegrounds and whenever anyone asks about this game I always tell them the best way to play is "to never start." I have lost precious interactions and time trying to feed my passion and while I don't regret my journey as there were so many amazing highlights, I frequently contemplate on how much this game really means to me....but if you are like me relatively young, naive but passionate you may be ignorant of exactly how much this game demands from you.
That's a good thing to learn when you're only 21.

Just don't replace MCOC with some other video game: try and find a real-life passion instead of a virtual one.

Preferably something involving friends and family.

Best of luck!
They are all real life passions. We play MCOC in the real world, just like we do everything else.

The important thing is to have the right expectations with anything you do. You could spend all your waking moments on learning the violin only to wonder one day why you're surrounded by stacks of sheet music you hardly ever play, or traveling the world only to wonder one day why you have nothing to show for it but an Instagram feed you never look at yourself.

If you're playing MCOC because you expect some sort of reward at the end of it, you're bound to be terribly disappointed. You should be playing the game to play the game. I fully expect all of this to be gone one day. Hopefully not too soon, but some day. My roster will just be bits in a file in a cloud that gets deleted, and that will be that. But I won't regret any of my time here. I won't think it was all for nothing, because I can't continue to use my roster for some purpose.

The things you invest your time in should be things you appreciate yourself, with no need for external validation or subsequent payoff. You work a job to get a salary. You put money in your 401k to get a return on investment. You should spend your time on things you want to spend your time on. You can always get another job. You can always make more money. But there is no way to bank time.

Video games are fundamentally no different than anything else in your life. You have to decide what your priorities are, and what you want to spend your time on. I spend a lot of time on MCOC, but it is not my highest priority. My family and my friends come first, and honestly there's a couple of other things that come next. It does take up the bulk of my idle time, but it does not ever push out anything else. Everyone needs to find their own version of that healthy balance, because MCOC is not the only challenge here. It just might be one of the first younger people run into, but it will not be the last.

So basically enjoy the process?

But how can I play the game without making myself guilty, when everything else is going South in my life and I feel disappointed for playing the game (as a escape mechanicsm) instead of fixing my life (I'm trying to progress, but it's slow).

Basically how can I save myself from getting sucked into toxic hustle culture while also not becoming a procrastinator?

Smoky4ii20

Never thought the game would get to this point , and is actually scary cause I don't think we'll ever have the game working normally again they can't figure out AI , they don't give any insight about the problem nothing was said so far about how the game is unplayable the game is right now, and it doesn't seen to change anything on their schedule, every update is just about hoping the game might be fine or it might not, just deal with until next month so you hope it might work again then repeat , crazy to think this is what's happening after getting such a great income from the banquet , looking really bad right now .

JediJones77

I think that was a well-written and understandable post. Obviously, a game should not take precedence over your personal relationships or finding a career that you love and can make you money. I'm much older than you, and feel like I've been able to run a successful f2p account without going quite as hardcore as you did. A lot of the top tier difficulty content, I simply don't do. I decided to commit to getting 7-star Deathless Thanos, and focused on doing every fight necessary to get him. However, I screwed one quest up, ran out of time, and therefore am still short one King Groot piece. I wish Kabam would start letting us acquire "catch-up" pieces at this point, so I could complete him without spending the units, but I digress. Other than getting those pieces, and exploring through Act 9, I skipped the harder content. So I only did one-and-a-half Necro paths, only did the Carina's Challenges needed for pieces, and skipped the last "Winter of Woe" group of quests, except to dupe Deathless She-Hulk. I haven't attempted Epoch, however I do run the Apothecary every day to collect revives. Once they're about to expire, I may try a hard quest I hadn't planned on doing before.

I still have 32 ascended 6-stars and 12 rank 3 7-stars (this includes "pending" ones that I have the cats for but haven't decided who to rank up yet). I'm actually not sure how you have over 40 ascended 6-stars, because I didn't think I missed that much ascension dust. I also have over 19,000 units on hand, after having spent another 19,000 on the Banquet. And I have over 3 million Battle Chips unopened.

As for where I get the units, I don't think I grind the arenas like crazy. Maybe 8-10 hours a month. My guide post is that I grind to earn and dupe the 3 and 4-star copy of each new champ. As soon as I get those, I stop, without finishing the arena to the end. And, I've also started doing some of the little 5-star side arenas to collect t3b cats and units. I don't go to the end of them, I stop after they stop giving out t3b and units as rewards. I also try to remember to do my 5 free duels per day.

I also fully explore the 1st, 2nd and 3rd lowest difficulties of monthly event quest, all using autoplay. So this could be simple clicking while I'm watching TV or doing other things. Then I fully explore Uncollected (partially on autoplay), Thronebreaker and the Paragon Gauntlet. I do a single completion run of Cavalier, but that would be the first one I'd drop if I needed to save time, since it doesn't award units. I also do the side quests, which are actually the single most fun part of the game for me. The difficulty tuning on those is exactly the way I like it. The rewards are getting less impressive on them, but they're still very enjoyable for me.

Maybe another big difference is how often we unload our units. I only did two big spends in recent memory, the Summer 2023 offer and the Banquet 2024. I can't quite recall how much I spent on Summer 2023, but I think it was in the vicinity of my Banquet 2024 19,000 net unit spend. I know I spent some on Banquet 2023, but I think it was a more modest amount. I completely skipped spending on Cyber Week 2023 and 2024, and Summer 2024. My basic strategy is to pick one of the big three offers of the year to spend on, and skip the other two. This just seems to fit with the pace of my unit collection. And I also skip every other little unit offer that comes up throughout the year.

I've been playing over 7 years. There was a time when I needed to slow down. At that time, I left any alliance, and mostly stuck to doing monthly event quest. I even stopped Story Act exploration. So I didn't complete Act 6 until most of Act 8 already became available, I think. I'm in an alliance, but that's my least favorite aspect of the game right now. I recently backed out of participating in war any longer. At the same time, I'm getting more interested in Battlegrounds, and trying to at least just get into the Gladiator Circuit each month.

So, anyway, all of that is just to say that it is possible to play the game less intensely than you are now, rather than quit whole hog. You can shed away multiple aspects of the game and just stick to the ones you enjoy the most. You can cut down on both earning and spending units. Maybe you only spend on one event every two years. It's possible to restructure the way you play instead of trying to continue doing everything you're doing now.

Feeney234

Bro wrote us a whole essay cause he's 21 and needs to figure out life so he's quitting the game.

Good luck little dude ✌️

Toproller89

Maybe it's all about the friends we made along the way. See ya mate 👍