Playdom says goodbye to Marvel Avengers Alliance Tatics

Update: 24/09/2014.

To my surprise, I got this announcement yesterday (23/8/2014):

Run Forrest, run!

Well, of course that made me upset. I didn't put just gold in this game, but also a lot of my time and energy.

If I had any hint about that (well, the tons of bugs in the game might be something to consider), I wouldn't even bother using a defensive strategy to try to get my hard earned silver and Iso-8 inside my own vault. I would just pick some characters (not all of them), so farming for SHIELD Points would be much less required. After all, you can play with only four characters at time, and if you get 8 in total (to get different skills) that would be enough to finish the game.

This is so true that attacking (and destroying) another player building will result in an error: you will loose the energy spent and will got nothing back to you. That's a very unprofessional way to disable PVP. Here is some more details about:

https://www.playdomforums.com/showthread.php?138224-Error-905-Has-PvP-been-Disabled&p=2313708#post2313708

In fact, I don't bother that much with it: PVP sucks, always did. But I wouldn't had bother trying to protect my base so that's made me angry.


PVP is now working. Don't ask me why.

Besides, there is a known issue due PVP disablement: that made task 1 of Assignment 9 impossible to complete, since it expects you to attack other players base. The only way to complete it is expend 10 gold pieces as you would for any task you want to skip. If you're trapped in this situation, do not despair: keep reading to the next part of this post.

New "Christmas" assignment

Now looks like everybody needs now to rush and try to finish second Chapter. Playdom helped a bit, because they added a new assignment that gives tons of bonus in SHIELD Points, items that cannot be bought and even gold. Energy recovery is much faster too after this new assignment was released.

To finish any task of this new assignment I suggest using characters below level 8. I experimented this a bit, and for all tasks you will get a villain helping you always with level 8. The opponents level will be your highest character level plus two, so a level 7 character will get opponents at level 9. A character at level 9 against an enemy with level 12 will have a hard time even to hit the opponent and the damage will be ridiculous.

Another tip is to use Miss Marvel with Absorb Energy and Ronan with the Defender skills against the krees and Cyclops. Using characters that can apply bleeding for any circumstance will help a lot too.

The new assignment: easy stuff to get compared to other assignments

So, to help you rush and get the game finish until the real end of it, I'll give some additional tips besides those from my previous post about this game:

1. Don't bother defending your base anymore. Put your highest level characters in the planes to get Silver and experience. PVP is on again. Think twice about leaving your base undefended.
2. Don't bother upgrading the lackeys, I mean, the SHIELD agents too. But do expend some SHIELD Points to get more of them if already got all heroes and villains you can.
3. Repeat the Endgame assignment as many times as you can, to get gold and SHIELD Points.
4.  If you want to farm experience for characters, although, repeat any task from chapter 1. The amount is almost the same of chapter 2 and it will be much easier.
5. And, the best tip of this post, get yourself large amounts of Silver and Iso-8 doing absolutely nothing.

Excited by tip number four? Let's see it in details.

Getting Silver and Iso-8 without breaking a sweat

Requirements for this tip:

• Download and install AutoHotkey. Don't worry, it's GNU GPL licensed software.
• Got yourself three jets in the Flight Deck at the first level. Don't upgrade them!
• Make your highest level characters available to fly.
• This tip will restart the Chapter 1, assignment 3 many times over and over. Be careful since this will reset any other assignment in progress.
• Get yourself a decent browser to do this tip. Forget about Internet Explorer, install Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. I suggest Mozilla Firefox to be able to use the sample script without having to modify it too much.
• Wait the Iso-8 Refinery to accumulate some of it's stuff until the icon shows up. Don't collect it.
• Close all windows, boxes in the screen. I suggest even disabling the Facebook chat.
• Get yourself inside your base.

After getting these ones, create a new text file, adding the following content to it:

IfWinExist, Marvel Avengers Alliance Tactics no Facebook - Mozilla Firefox
{

    loop
    {

        WinActivate
       
        ; activate the bonus
        Click 64,444
        Sleep 3000
        Click 1083,690
        Sleep 3000
        Click 901,779
        Sleep 3000
        ; confirm new task
        Click 178,497
        Sleep 3000
        Click 1089,811
        Sleep 3000
        Click 1108,953
  
        ; gather Iso-8
        MouseMove, 834,466
        Sleep 3000
        Click 834,466
        Sleep 3000
        ; close Iso-8 fucking window
        Click 1599,489

        ; minimum of 3 minutes waiting airplanes to return
        Sleep 150000
        ;186000
        WinActivate

        ; gather Silver
        MouseMove,1592,670
        Click 1592,670
        Sleep 3000
        Click 815,980
        Sleep 3000
        Click 1167,429
        Sleep 3000

        ; gather the bonus
        MouseMove, 178,496
        Sleep 3000
        Click 178,496
        Sleep 3000
        MouseMove,1085,811
        Click 1085,811
        Sleep 3000

    }

}
else
{
    MsgBox, Cannot find window
    ExitApp
}

Now save it and run this script to see it working! Be sure to leave the monitor turned on.

How does this thing work?

Assignment 3 of the Chapter 1, first mission, will give you 900 in Silver after flying three planes and collecting from them. You will have it complete in 3 minutes by using three level 1 jets at the same time.

Now repeat these steps over and over, collecting the Iso-8 between collecting from planes, and you got 900 in Silver plus what your planes give to you.

The script part automates that for you. It will wait more than 3 minutes to do that, to be sure windows were closed and buttons were available to click, but not much more than that.

The coordinates used in the AutoHotKeys script were based on my PC. If you have a different screen resolution configuration (mine is 1920 x 1080) you will need to double check the coordinates yourself. It is a bit boring fixing those (you will need to turn the AutoIt3 Window Spy program that comes together with AutoHotKeys), but after some hours running alone, you will get your vault full of Silver and Iso-8 doing absolutely nothing.

It is possible to use jets with higher levels, but your will need to make a good scheme to have them flying so you can get 900 from 3 in 3 minutes. To make it easier, I upgraded as much jets I have, leaving just three at level one.

As is, the script is good enough for me. If you find any way to improve it, please let me know!

This is computer programming, I'm a newbie!

Nowadays doing some programming is quite easier than in the past. Don't be scared by it, the algorithm I used is simple too (and it has a lot of space to improvements).

Be sure to check the tutorial of AutoHotKeys to understand better what the script does.

And last, but not least, pay attention to the text I used in the script to identify the browser Window ("Marvel Avengers Alliance Tactics no Facebook - Mozilla Firefox"). Unless you're using Microsoft Windows in Brazilian Portuguese, most probably you will need to change that to match your window title.

From time to time, your script might stop working. For my experience, Playdom is updating the game from time to time just to disable such schemes, which is "funny" since the game have lots of bugs that they don't mind fixing.

They change coordinates a bit to make those scripts stop working, so you'll have to update the coordinates. I think it is still worth your time to update the script.

Conclusion

Nowadays it's common to not buy a game anymore, just the opportunity to play with it. Besides the need to play it on-line, this situation with Playdom really shows one of the drawbacks in buying something that will never be truly yours.

In the old times (and still with console video games), when you buy some game, that means you owned it and can continue playing it a much as you want. It's a shame to see a company leaving us like that.

I can only hope that Disney/Marvel get a better partner to make new games with their characters. Playdom's work is a complete deception.