Monday, October 6, 2014

Star Wars: Assault Team removed from App Store, Google Play Store and Microsoft's app store

Source: Touch Arcade and Android Authority

I played it some time back and quite like the game. It was an interesting mix of card game with RPG turn-base battles. The graphics were nice and I only had an issue with the inconsistent energy recharge timings and pricing of the IAP between different accounts.

I check out the App Invasion forum and found this thread. It turns out there were bugs and the game was not being updated for a while. The game will also be retired on October 29, 2014 based on a message in-game. By retire, I assume the servers will be shut down? On further searching around, I found the GameFAQs forum and some more topics on the state of the game:

Luke and Leia cards (Luke, Leia and some heroes no longer drop from their respective missions but will still be added as temporary helper if a mission requires them, according to the developer's reply to the players. I remember realising I could get Luke from a mission and didn't find much of a need for going for crates as you can just complete missions for the rest of the heroes. It probably wasn't profitable to the developers so they made a "U-turn" on that and it caused some unhappy players in that thread)

Looks like everyone gave up (On top of the above reasons, the arena (PvP) became too difficult)

I guess the game probably should have stayed in Beta longer to iron out all the design issues: standardising a time for Energy Recharge, hero card rewards, etc. It definitely feels rush now that you looked back at it. I think the game was probably not making enough money to sustain the cost of keeping it up, hence leading to it being "killed" but it definitely is bad for players who invested money in the game, especially the newer players  joining after the hero drop changes. This serves as a stark reminder to all players and online-only games; it is only playable as long as their back-end servers continue running.