For a game that ostensibly wants to support the growth of its burgeoning competitive scene,Marvel Rivalssure is doing a lot to upset that player base. The hero shooter has already faced criticism aboutimbalanced or overpowered characters,constant bullying of Supports that led to a “Support strike”, and an imperfect ranked system. Now, it’s given players a new thing to complain about.
Chrono Shield Cards Will Allow You To Negate Losses
Announced last week that as part of the Galacta’s Gift event, you’ll soon be able to earn Chrono Shield Cards, which will allow players to avoid the penalty for losing matches while playing in ranked. You can earn up to eight of these consumable items through the event, but the limit is 20, which means there will likely be more ways to get them in the future.
Chrono Shields are already a thing in the lower ranks of competitive mode. They activate after a string of consecutive losses to block one loss, but go on cooldown afterward.Overwatch 2has a similar mechanic in Demotion Protection.
One of the major issues that players were immediately worried about was that NetEase would be making these consumables purchasable, which would essentially make competitive mode pay to win, since you’d be able to game the system to reach high ranks.
However, NetEasehas confirmedthat they will not be for sale, and can only be used in Gold rank or below. The idea is that lower-ranked players will have an easier time ascending to Gold, since the lower ranks can be pretty hard to get out of – your teammates are, after all, typically less cooperative and skilled, and games have lots more trolls.
According toRivalsTracker, there are currently over 113,000 players stuck in Bronze 3.
Marvel Rivals Is Diluting The Competitive Scene
This limits some of theconcerns about rank inflation, which these cards certainly would have caused if they were usable in Platinum ranks and above. Even so, there will still likely be rank inflation in the lower ranks, considering there’s already Chrono Shield in place, and it’ll be easier for less skilled players to get into Platinum and there make those matches worse for players who worked their way into that rank the hard way.
But this is a matchmaking issue that’s being solved by giving players the ability to manipulate and avoid consequences for losing in competitive matches. Instead of implementing placement matches to assess skill instead of forcing players to duke it out in the hellscape that is Bronze rank, as players have been calling for, NetEase is making it so that ranked mode is less punishing and more akin to casual.
But that’s not supposed to be the purpose of competitive play, and adding buffers for players instead of fixing poor matchmaking and offering more effective solutions for bad placement only serves to dilute Marvel Rivals’ future esports potential. That’s before you even consider the potential for players acting in bad faith and using these cards to troll and throw games without penalty, which is something that tends to happen more in lower ranks anyway.
WhileRivals developer Danny Koo says, “With or without, [there] will be throwers”, that doesn’t change the fact that facilitating this in ranked play negatively impacts players who do take competitive mode seriously. If Rivals ever wants to have a serious stage in the esports world, it has to actually fix the problems with matchmaking and ranking up instead of offering players worse options.
