High Voltage: Overdrive Issues – Second Dinner’s Big Mistake?

If you’ve been on social media over the last week, you probably have seen some drama around Marvel Snap’s new game mode “High Voltage: Overdrive“. Players have been in an uproar over Second Dinner’s newest card pricing stunt, and their responses afterwards have not been any better. This post aims to give you a clear picture of the situation, the dev’s responses, and what it all means for Snap.

What’s the Problem?

The new game mode came with a reward shop similar to the popular “Sanctum Showdown” shop from a few months back. The big difference though is one of the new cards isn’t realistically unlockable without spending gold on it. Kid Omega costs 50,000 Volts, and Cobra costs up to 45,000 Volts (or 15,000 Volts if you get a lucky roll). If you collect every Volts reward from missions, milestones, wins, and daily bonuses, you should net just under 40,000 total Volts earned.

To make up that 10,000 volt difference, you have 2 options: win about 500 games, or spend gold (aka your money). Obviously that many wins is a bit ridiculous, even if you spread it out evenly over the entire event week. You don’t get anything for a loss, and the randomness of the mode makes strategy kind of pointless. Needless to say, the grind isn’t actually possible. So what did Second Dinner have to say about this?

Players flooded the official Discord with feedback about the mode. We did get a response about Kid Omega’s crazy price in this statement:

Our ongoing goal with Limited Time Game Mode (LTGM) Shop rewards is to give players more control and flexibility over how they spend their earned currencies.

Most rewards in the LTGM Shop will be fully earnable using LTGM currencies alone. However, some top-tier items may require additional gameplay in other modes to earn enough Gold to make up the difference.

For example, Kid Omega from HV:O is priced in the Shop at a premium to that of a standard Series 5 card. Players who want to acquire it can use their earned Volts to reduce the cost by buying it directly and supplementing with Gold. Alternatively, players can use Gold to purchase bonus Mission Refreshes that help them earn more Volts.

One thing we didn’t mention in the blog: we’re delivering 500 Volts daily to all players’ inboxes and 1,000 Volts on the final day.

As always, we appreciate your feedback on LTGMs and Shop rewards. Your thoughts help shape future updates and improvements.

Griffin – Community Manager

To simplify the response, the intention of the mode wasn’t to let the card be free. They intended for players to spend a little money (gold) to get the new card.

This obviously sent the community into an uproar. Days went by without any further news outside of “we hear your feedback” type messages. Now on Friday the 20th, Second Dinner issued this statement:

We want to thank everyone for providing your honest feedback about High Voltage: Overdrive and its rewards – specifically Kid Omega.

The intent behind Kid Omega’s pricing was to offer players a significant discount off the price of a Series 5 card using Volts. We set a precedent in previous Limited Time Game Modes and we didn’t clearly set new expectations which caused frustration. Moving forward, we’ll set better expectations for event rewards, including when cards like Kid Omega will be added to the Series Pack pool, which will be next month. Our aim is for all new LTGM card rewards to hit their respective pools around 30 days after its debut.

We’ll continue to iterate when it comes to how LTGMs play and also how we structure their rewards. Our goal for all of these modes is to have something that players want to earn, regardless of their level of spend. Some events will be more focused on free-to-play rewards while others may include other rewards that provide more purchase value.

For the remainder of this edition of High Voltage: Overdrive, we’ll be sending a one time delivery of 2500 Volts to players’ Inboxes due to some impactful bugs dampening Volts and XP acquisition. It was also pointed out that it is cheaper to directly supplement Volts for Gold, as opposed to the more expensive Mission refresh. That was unintended, and we’ll look at fixing that in the future.

To lead off improving our communications around events ahead of time we’ll be sharing details about next week’s Sanctum Showdown very soon.

Your feedback is not only helpful but key to the future of Marvel Snap. This conversation isn’t one-and-done. It evolves, just like the game and your feedback helps shape it. We’re committed to keeping that conversation open. It will never be perfect for everyone, but our goal is fairness and transparency.

There’s quite a lot to unpack here, so its break it down:

Second Dinner’s Response Analysis

Let’s start with the “intent” behind Kid Omega’s cost. The team stated they wanted to offer a new card at a discount compared to other cards. The idea itself isn’t the worst thing SD has come up with, but it screams out tonedeaf to the community’s voice. The game’s biggest criticism has been card acquisition, which was recently addressed with the release of Snap Packs. The packs have overall been much easier to acquire cards with, and feedback has been mostly positive. Now this new game mode is restricting card acquisition again immediately after… At best, it was poor timing on SD’s part to introduce card restrictions so soon after Snap Packs. At worst, its SD being out of touch with their player base.

In the early days if Snap, Second Dinner tried to monetize cards with Nexus events. It turned out terribly and they quickly rolled it back. At one point, Stephen from SD mentioned the team would be focusing on monetizing the game through the season pass and cosmetics. Now that its clear that SD wants to find some way of monetizing card acquisition, that earlier plan must not have been profitable enough.

As you read on through the team’s latest statement, they make it pretty clear this is the new format they want to use moving forward. They set the “precedent” that limited time modes have free cards, only to suddenly make this shift right after Snap Packs. If the team doesn’t actually plan to make cards accessible free to play, just be straightforward and say that. Addressing the card acquisition problem is all fake if you just intend to recreate the problem through different methods after fixing it.

As for the future of limited time modes, its nice that the team wants to ensure the rewards have something to offer for everyone. What isn’t nice is putting the single most requested reward behind a paywall. But the fact that they are doing it seems to signal that their most profitable sales come from new cards.

The last portion of this response is just outright silly. The game mode has plenty of bugs and glitches. It’s always nice to see the team acknowledge an issue and compensate for the inconvenience, but this is clearly not the time or place to drop that news. The bugs are annoying, sure. Players aren’t in uproar about it though. To give compensation for that, but nothing for what is actually a problem has completely negated that “good will” they were intending to give out.

Edit: For those of you wondering why I didn’t consider the 2,500 volt compensation in the total volts you can earn, it’s because those volts weren’t intended to ease the pressure of getting the new card. Second Dinner is giving those out strictly due to bug compensation, meaning they found no issues needed to compensate over Kid Omega. If the event had zero bugs at launch, this entire situation would be very similar still, which shows the problem here.

What Does This Mean For Snap?

By now its painfully obvious that Second Dinner wants to continue the practice of putting cards behind paywalls. Their response is nothing but a statement acknowledging that they intended for this to happen. How will it affect the game though?

If this new system makes them more money than the outrage loses them, it will probably stick around. While it sounds ridiculous to many players, there are plenty of people who have no issue dropping money for new cards. I personally got a friend into Snap, and they showed me they paid for the Series 3 Silver Surfer in a $10 personalized bundle. No variant, just the base card. They could have gotten it for free guaranteed by playing the game, but they said to me “the card looked fun, so I bought it so I didn’t have to wait”.

What I’m conveying here is these practices are happening because players are paying for it, signaling to SD that it’s a good idea. If Kid Omega costing money makes SD money, they will do it again. It may not look like what it is at this moment due to outrage, but it will very likely return in some way. The only way it won’t happen again (in my opinion) is if the team outright states they will not be monetizing new cards anymore.

So what does that mean for Snap’s future? Well, that’s up to you. If you spend money on cards, you are green lighting whatever format it came in. That means season pass cards, personalized bundles, special variants (to get the base card), and events like this. Actions speak louder than words. If players continue to buy, the game will continue on as it has been. If players decide enough is enough and close their wallets, that’s where either change will come, or the game’s end will come. So you individually get to impact that outcome.

What Can You Do?

Shouting at the skies in frustration does absolutely nothing. If you want to see things change, you have 2 things that you can do:

Firstly, make your voice heard. Be it on social media, on twitch streams, in store reviews, discord feedback, or survey responses, just find an outlet to let the team know how you feel. Making noise can bring light to the issue and highlight the severity of it. Bad press is also bad for the game, so they are more likely to address it. Change doesn’t happen in silence.

The second thing you can do is give suggestions on how the team could change things. I don’t mean “make everything free all the time” because obviously Second Dinner has to make money in some way. The team does, in fact, read your feedback. So if you tell them what you want to see in the game, they can better steer the game in that direction. If players never say what you want out of the game, it’s much more likely they get things they didn’t want. As an example, I want to see the gold tickets removed from the collector reserves, especially on the last week of the Season. Nothing is more frustrating than getting a gold ticket from a box 4 hours before the new season starts.

As one suggestion I would throw out to players, if you spend money on the game regularly, tell them what would be acceptable to you to purchase. It might sound ridiculous to tell them what to put a price tag on, but it could keep price tags off of things that should be free.

For example, personally, I have told the team in past surveys that I buy every season pass because I find it to be well worth my money each month. If they asked me now, I would say I am not paying for a new card in a limited time mode, but I would pay for super exclusive variants if I liked the art. If there was a Arishem variant for 50,000 Volts, I could see myself spending that extra gold to get it. That’s because I wasn’t pressured to do it to get new game mechanics, and it was my choice to go all out and show off a card I enjoy.

There are other suggestions you can give to help the team to understand their player base more than what makes them upset. Your feedback helps shape these live service games. The most important thing for you is to not back down. If the heat dies down, any urgency for change dies with it. Your feedback got Nexus events canceled in the beta. Your feedback introduced tokens to the game so you can unlock specific cards. Your feedback got Spotlight Caches removed. Your feedback matters!

If you want an outlet for your voice to be heard, leave it in the comments here! The dev team looks at the community content like articles and twitch streams. Let them know here what you think, what you don’t like, and what you want to see changed.