It’s no secret thatMarvel Rivalshas a smurfing problem,helped primarily down to the lack of placement matches. Previously, there was nothing stopping a high-level player from creating a new account to go stomping newbies in Bronze for a bit, but NetEase appears to be cracking down on the problem a lot harder.
Starting in Season 3, those that have been smurfing or doing Bronze to GM challenges (also smurfing, fight me)have been getting hit with warnings, with the promise of further penalties if their behavior persists. Sounds pretty great in theory, but it seems NetEase is a little too ban-heavy when it comes to smurfing, as one person has already caught an unjustified ban due to how ridiculous the current ranked system is.
Marvel Rivals Returns To Ranked After A Break, Immediately Gets Banned For Smurfing
Since Marvel Rivals drops you several tiers at the start of every new season, it’s very possible for Celestial-tier players to drop to Silver if they take an extended break. That’s what happened toa Reddit user called PoorF2Pnoob, who decided to jump back into Marvel Rivals at the start of Season 3. Since they’d taken a break, they were in Silver, and clearly much better at the game than those around them.
Unfortunately, a single match of this was enough for Marvel Rivals to deem PoorF2Pnoob a smurf, which issued them a ban until the end of the season. It was also explained to them that their Competitive rank and score would be completely reset, dropping them down to Bronze whenever Season 3.5 rolls around.
Thankfully,PoorF2Pnoob has been unbanned since their initial post, but the whole debacle has players calling for placement matches at the start of every season, as they’d just immediately stop this kind of thing from happening in the first place. They would also make smurfing harder in general, but it’s never been a topic that NetEase has even remotely acknowledged.
And even though this player was unbanned, we now know that the penalty for smurfing is to drop players down to Bronze, which… makes it easier to start smurfing next season? It’s an incredibly flawed ranked systemthat players have been unhappy with for some time, and while NetEase is thankfully taking steps to combat smurfing, a lot of people think those steps are in the wrong direction.
