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‘Avengers’ Dips Below 1,000 Players On PC, Causing Matchmaking Problems

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Avengers is currently in limbo, with Crystal Dynamics seemingly pushing back a number of its roadmap objectives while simultaneously trying to fix what currently ails the game (loot, loot and more loot). Since players don’t know when fixes are coming, interest in the game appears to be tapering off at an increased pace, and that’s starting to come with a few noticeable issues for players that remain.

Does that above paragraph sound familiar? Well, you might remember it from an article I wrote back in 2019. Except replace “Crystal Dynamics” with “BioWare” and “Avengers” with “Anthem.”

Sigh, yes, we really do appear to be on that road.

Avengers is now starting to dip below 1,000 players on Steam, causing similar issues to what we saw with Anthem back in the day, in that it’s becoming hard for players to find each other for matchmade activities in a game that is fundamentally all matchmade activities. On PC especially where the playerbase is so low this problem gets more pronounced when you have something like 50 different War Table missions available in a given day, so finding a team is increasingly difficult. It also does not help that the game mandates that all four players be a different hero, extending matchmaking times further.

On PC, some players are reporting sitting around for 30 minutes or so waiting for matches, if they ever find them. On PS4, the largest platform, I’ve found that usually even with imminently important missions like daily resetting villain sectors, it’s rare to get a full team of four, and usually one or two players ends up being an AI fill-in. Avengers is unique in that it can function without other players (and in fact using your own AI teammates is sometimes preferable), but it does not indicate the game is in terribly good health at the moment.

Avengers players are sitting around waiting for news about a patch or game update, but hearing nothing of note from Crystal Dynamics, and the official game account is just tweeting things like this at the moment:

A lack of substantive communication or word on when pressing issues will be fixed is driving some players away. Today is weekly reset, and we have no word that anything is launching today, even though we are supposed to be getting Hawkeye-related “Tachyon” mission within “weeks” of launch. It’s now been over a month.

A hard deadline is that new character Kate Bishop is supposed to arrive at the end of October, but players need A) more content and fixes and B) more communication well before then. For now, many are drifting away between technical issues and endgame farming problems (I am not doing another buggy 48 floor Mega Hive to not get an exotic for the third week in a row).

We’ll see when the next update comes but until something big happens, I would expect these player numbers to continue to drop, and the long term plans for this game could be in flux if something doesn’t change for the better rather soon.

Update: Here is a statement given to Kotaku about the state of Avengers and coming content and communication. Really no new information other than we’re definitely getting some sort of blog next week about what’s coming. It’s notable to me they say “in the coming weeks” when Tachyon missions and Hawkeye plotlines were supposed to arrive in “weeks” after launch, over a month ago.

To our players: every day we fight to make the best game possible for our community. We have a great community management team at Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix who funnel all of your concerns, suggestions, and feedback to the development team daily. We are listening. We are making fixes, improvements, and additions as fast as we safely can to make Marvel’s Avengers the game we all aspire it to be.

As such, we have a number of new content pieces coming in the weeks ahead including: a totally new War Zone mission type called Tachyon Rifts, a new Outpost that’s a jumping off point for new story missions in the future, and AIM’s Cloning Lab, which requires a coordinated high-level group of four players to beat with new top-end loot rewards for finishing it. And in each of these updates we do tuning and bug fixing to enhance the overall experience.

In addition, we’ve announced two new Heroes coming in the near future: Kate Bishop in Operation: Taking AIM, and after that the double-feature Operation starring Clint Barton… this is the “two Hawkeyes” we mentioned in the last War Table. These new Operations pick up right from where the main Reassemble campaign ended in the core game and will propel the overall world story forward with new mysteries and villains, as well as new multi-player content.

Lastly, we will continue to add new content to the game in the coming months as we address issues and overall game balance, including loot distribution and quality of life features everyone is clamoring for to improve our day-to-day experience from accessibility to co-op communication tools to balancing the economy!

We are confident that we’ll see PC players (as well as those on Xbox One and PlayStation 4) return to the game as we add exciting new late-game content and demonstrate that we continue to be focused on improving the game.

We’ll have more information and details about the very near content drops in a blog scheduled for next week and we have new community communication initiatives coming soon to even more directly share fun and useful information with you.

Thank you for coming with us on this journey to truly realize the best of what Marvel’s Avengers can become.

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