There’s growing evidence that Marvel Rivals is secretly putting losing players in matches with bots, and I know this because I’m a loser.
You may have heard rumors over the holidays that Marvel Rivals is offering players easy matches against bots when they’re losing. This is a statement I usually take with a grain of salt in competitive shooters – yes, bots masquerading as real players are unfortunately common in some of the most popular games (especially battle royales and mobile games), but it is also true that players often mistaking real people for bots to explain why their team is ineffective.
That didn’t happen with Reddit user ciaranxy’s lengthy post on the Marvel Rivals subreddit titled “Everything You Need to Know About Secret Bots to Quickly Play Marvel Rivals.” They didn’t use the crying bot as a way to cope or complain about teammates, but rather laid out the results of more than a week of testing. ciaranxy determined that Rivals is more than happy to throw losing players a bone by providing them with some simple bots, as well as a specific set of rules that the bots follow:
- Bots only appear in quick play and not in competitive mode.
- After two losses in a row, your chances of getting into the bot lobby in Quickplay are very high.
- If you put bots in the lobby, it will be 4 human teammates + 2 bot teammates against 6 bot opponents.
- You will be fined for leaving these bot lobbies.
- All bots have account level 1.
- All bot profiles have “restricted access” (as opposed to “restricted access” for human profiles).
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It was these recommendations that piqued my curiosity. I’ve seen enough questionable videos of “human” Rivals players online to suspect that NetEase sometimes adds bots to the game, but does it actually cater to entire bot lobbies to increase engagement? If all it takes is a continuation of the losing streak, I might just try it myself.
So, I played a few regular matches, monitoring the behavior of the enemy and the team for anything like this. After each game, I checked my match history and looked at each player’s career profile to check against ciaranxy’s description of the bots: Most of the actual profiles were public, some had their privacy set to Restricted, and none were restricted. Verifying the account level was a little more difficult. Public profiles display a number, but if I wanted to look at the private account level, I would have to be killed by them and check their badge on the kill cam. All the accounts I saw were above the first level.
Even though I was a pretty great Rivals player, I was having trouble continuing my losing streak, so I did the only thing I could to sabotage our team while still trying to win: play my first three matches as Spider-Man. I made it through one match with a single kill, a couple of teammates politely asked me to turn off Duelist (sorry, I can’t), and a Rocket Racoon player rubbed it in my face when they successfully 1v1ed me three times.
It was a bloodbath, but the job was done. I lost two matches in a row. After the third match, another defeat, I looked around the lobby. Still no bots, but ciaranxy said it might take more than two losses. So I jumped onto another match and quickly felt something. funk happens:
🚩 For the first time today there were no console players on the enemy team
🚩 Their account names were generic or banal, like “DieForMe” or “LanettMa.”
🚩 In fact, I was killed while playing as Spider-Man (although there should have been all the necessary evidence)
🚩 I looked through each kill cam and noticed that four accounts belong to the first level (I have never seen the other two)
🚩 After we won, I opened their profiles and found that all six were marked “Limited”.
Everything was exactly as Ciaranksi described. Two bots in my team and six in another. I lost three times to verified real players and then suddenly got nothing but bots. Their playstyles reminded me of the bot teammates you find in Counter-Strike: they’re incredibly knowledgeable, but very bad at killing. One day, the bot Reed Richards (who, again, had to be a level 1 player trying out Rivals for the first time) was so impressive with his abilities that he yanked me out of the sky in the middle of Spidey’s swing. Then he started to barely attack.
It sucks no matter how you slice it. This is bad for the community, who now have to deal with NetEase misleading them with fake wins. This is bad for the competitiveness of Rivals, whose default game mode regularly serves invalid matches. This is even bad for the average player, who may learn the wrong lessons from a bot match that he thought was real (though I bet NetEase is only doing this because its data says that bot matches get people to play longer).
And what really sucks is that the purpose of this seemingly deliberate measure is to lie to us, to insult our intelligence, by trying to pass off a patently fake product as legitimate in the hopes that we won’t notice the bots every time. win by par and stay glued to Rivals for a little while longer. The livestream “package” surrounding the 6v6 shooter called Marvel Rivals is already one huge, multi-layered interaction trap. Can’t this aspect of Rivals, the main competition, be pure?
PC Gamer has reached out to NetEase for comment and will update this story if a response is received.