As far as players know, Marvel Rivals is a multiplayer game that has teams of six duke it out against each other as their favourite Marvel heroes. What’s interesting is, it’s possible that you aren’t playing against people at all.
According to Reddit user u/ciaranxy, there are actually times when the game puts players in bot lobbies and they end up fighting against nobody. So far, the bullet points include:
- Bots only appear in Quickplay not Competitive
- After two consecutive losses, your chances of being put into a bot lobby in Quickplay are very high.
- If put into a bot lobby, it will be 4 human teammates + 2 bot teammates VS 6 bot opponents.
- You will be penalized for leaving these bot lobbies.
- All bots are Account Level 1.
- All bot profiles have “restricted access” (as opposed to “limited access” for human profiles).
The point of the post is essentially to rile up the player base until NetEase does something about it, but Dexerto has also mentioned that other games like Fortnite also makes use of bots to be able to keep less-skilled players engaged. Other comments have also confirmed that this is what NetEase does for their other games like Identity V to be able to fill-up player queues fast.
As someone who had to wait endlessly for Star Wars Battlefront II lobbies to fill-up, I pretty much get what the bots are for; but I guess a good compromise would be to have the bots be optional; maybe even adjust the difficulty level when it comes to the bots.
In the meantime, Marvel Rivals is now playable for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and PC.
