When Star Wars Force Arena was first released I jumped on board immediately. Star Wars titles always have my attention and as a Galaxy of Heroes player too, I looked at it like this – you can’t get too much Star Wars, can you? So I played the game for a few months, completely FTP (Free To Play). After a while the matchmaking and the delays in matchmaking became more of a chore, and my #1 rule of gaming is not to feel like I “have” to play the game for more than a few days at a time. When real life gets busy, sometimes a game just is not an option, and when you play multiple games you have to prioritize. So Star Wars Force Arena got the boot – for a while.

Remembering the timing of when I started play SWFA again is a challenge, but I remember updates to the matchmaking and the addition of the 1-2 week long board game style events. I found the board game style event (like last week’s Death Star II event) to be quite enjoyable. At this time I also started being Pay To Play (PTP) to build up my leaders and their decks. While I enjoyed this and joined a competitive guild, after a few months of playing I had a rough week schedule-wise and the guild I was a part of sent me packing. While I was not thrilled, nor was I one of the bottom five in the guild, I decided a break was necessary. But the break was short-lived with the Force Arena 3.0 update in May 2018 around the release of SOLO: A Star Wars Story, and I felt that SWFA deserved another look. Since that time I have been playing at a very high level, PTP to get caught back up, and reaching Tier 14 with both my Light Side and Dark Side leaders. I went all-in on Data Cards and Perks to enhance these characters and I was in a Top 50 guild meeting the weekly quotas. While the daily grind was getting a bit annoying, it was not yet “work” but it was close. Then, while trying to get my dailies in last week, this happened (see photo above on the right). On a day where I needed to knock out 10 turrets in 2v2 Arcade mode, I attempted to fight my battles. After 12:09 on the first attempt, immediately followed by a 4:28 wait for the next, I ended both attempts. Then, after fighting a 1v1 ranked match (which took 10 seconds to find), I waited another 3:06 to play a 2v2 Arcade battle before calling it quits. Rage quit. Well not really a rage, but I just up and uninstalled SWFA.

While some may say I need to be more patient my counter is this – it is 2018 and there are better options out there. So no, I do not need to be more patient with a mobile game. With my kids and my RL yes, I need to be more patient, but not with Star Wars Force Arena. I play Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes at a very high level (officer in a Top 100 guild, oversee 7 total guilds) and I play Transformers Earth Wars along with being the Content Director here at Gaming-fans.com in my non-RL.  A lot of time goes into gaming – more than most people. So when I cannot open my game and play it and instead have to wait for the game to work properly, that is an issue and I expect better. It is like any piece of technology – if it works we are happy, but when it doesn’t…

At the end of the day my feedback to the team at Star Wars Force Arena is this. 1) Make your game better. I am sure you guys are trying, but when you require a daily activity you need to make sure the game works so that players can actually perform the activity and work towards it. Anything more than 10-15 seconds of waiting is too long in today’s world, so develop a backup plan. 2) Marketing & Professionalism. First you had no marketing, then there was this 3rd party wannabe social platform where you made announcements with all kinds of unprofessional content, tags, etc. While that site was cleaned up a bit, it still looks like a hack job. Meanwhile the community has few, if any advocates (media, YouTube) to help build your image. Oh, and I nearly forgot the “Community Manager” who was going to revamp your Twitter account in early 2018 then did nothing for 2 months before the SWFA Twitter account magically disappeared from the face of the Earth.

What will I do now? Further dedicate my time to SWGoH (a far superior game) and TFEW. I have thought about adding more games to the site, but my focus currently is on making what we cover as top-notch as possible since these games, while imperfect, are setup for success much better than Force Arena has ever been.