Behind the capes and superpowers, Marvel Rivals became a battleground for everything wrong with online gaming culture.
Marvel Rivals has been the game on everyone’s mind.
Imagine you get home from a long shift at the office, or you’re just coming back home from school. You open the door, drop your bag at the entrance, and rush into the living room. Exhausted, you crash on the sofa, put on your headset, and wait for friends to hop on the game.
“I got hooked with the game,” said Ashimaru, remembering what the game used to be. The idea of playing with your favourite superhero in an open-world, combat game was unheard of.
Ashimaru dedicated his life to the game since its release. With a strong presence on TikTok, he delves into the technicalities and gameplay experience of Marvel Rivals, giving tips on character use, streaming content, and helping other players get the best out of the game. A proper gaming coach.
“When a new game like that releases, nobody knows how to play.” But when he thinks about the actual state of the game, his tone shifts. “I think around Season 1.5 or 2, things began to change”
Launched on December 6, 2024, Marvel Rivals is an action game based on Marvel Comics. It features a long list of playable characters, including Doctor Strange, Thor, Black Panther and Storm.
It is an immersive multi-map game where you can play with your favourite character and show off an accurate skill-set straight from your favourite comics. For some, this was the best game ever released, but for others, it was close to being the spawn of Satan.
“People were calling it Overwatch killer,” Ashimaru said. “Both games are similar, just that one is rooted in first person.” But for people who have never played Overwatch, Marvel Rivals‘ mechanics can be hard to grasp.
“When people started to understand how certain characters worked, they started to team up. But the matchmaking system was a problem.” He believes the developers began changing the game and stirring players into a toxic community.
“It started to become a problem when they brought stacking.” Stacking, in game terms, is when you are queuing with two or more people in a lobby, waiting for the next game to start. The Marvel lobby consists of six people, but the developers began restricting the number allowed for reasons that players were not aware of.
As this happened, people were unable to team up, so many gamers ended up solo queuing and playing alone instead of with their friends. After losing multiple games, anger built up among the gamers, creating a domino effect that involved other players, too.
“The toxicity from Overwatch transitions to Marvel Rivals, and it became worse,” Ashimaru says. “If you’re going to attract people with this game, you’re gonna attract some flaws too.”
Gaming has historically been notorious for exploitative language that stems from people’s political beliefs, or the simple fact that they are not happy with themselves, so they deflect that onto players from marginalised communities. Around 78% of players have reported experiencing harassment while online gaming.
For women, the situation is even worse; 25% of women, in fact, experience higher rates of unwanted sexual messages. “Once a guy speaks on the mic, he starts saying some sexist stuff,” Ashimaru says. “They can’t say it in your face in real life, they’ll be scared.”
However, it is very unlikely that these people will be punished, so all the victims can do is stay silent. “People don’t really have a strong or fortified mental, they would rather mute and not talk to anybody.”
Ashimura goes on to say that if you are a gamer who plays a lot of first-person shooter games or team-based games, you gain an understanding of how things work. A sort of muscle memory that helps you classify the kinds of people you encounter in your games.
There is a stigma attached to the personalities of people who play action shooter games religiously, often viewed as a childish gimmick that detracts from the fun of the gaming experience. Ashimaru was breaking it down. It is one thing that a lot of gamers say, ‘if I don’t get my way, nobody ever gets a way.’
It became a common practice among participants with incel tendencies to throw picks and intentionally lose games. Throwing picks is a term used in gaming where you purposely play with a character that may not seem the best fit to win the game. Ashimaru believes that this is a sort of “main character syndrome” where one gamer effectively “holds the other five players hostage.”
For some, when people “throw”, it means more than annoyance; it’s a cog in the wheel in their progress through the ranks. “It starts a chain reaction, one person decides to throw a pick, so others do it too. Then it continues into the game,” says Ben, 24, a student and devoted online gamer.
He has picked different types of games, but he also fell for the dreams sold to him by Marvel Rivals. He plays a lot of competitive matches; in fact, the only thing he plays is hoping to rank up with his friends.
Within Marvel Rivals, the ranks follow in this order: bronze, silver, gold, platinum, diamond, grandmaster, celestial, eternity and one above all. The ranked system, like any other game, has to be earned to allow you to advance through the tiers depending on your performance.
It was added to Marvel Rivals shortly after the game’s release in Season 0. It gives players the option to improve their skills against others while focusing on higher-stakes competition. What competitive matches do is to separate the casuals from the real gamers.
Gaming is an intricate mechanism. You do not want someone you’re playing with to be only good at one character. It does not show skill. It does not show ability. It only exposes your true colour.
A recent explosive altercation, still talked about in the Marvel Rivals community, has seen content creators competing for substantial sums of money. It was for the Deadpool Creator Cup, which has seen people competing for a $40,000 (£29,600) prize.
The people involved were famous streamers such as Kingsman, Cecee, and Zazza, who teamed up. Each of them had their own reasons to participate, but Kingsam was in dire need of money for his college fees, so he was ready to lead the team to victory.
But to his surprise, Cecee told him off and refused to listen to any of the advice. As for Zazza, the other Marvel Rival streamer, she was playing as the Black Widow. For context, Black Widow has the most basic skill set, which some would deem useless for playing the game.
Statistics even show that she has the lowest win rate among all characters, at 37%, compared to Peni Parker, who has the highest at 59%. When her teammates proceed to play her, sending a bat signal to teammates that their demise is imminent.
What Zazza wasn’t aware of was that a domino effect shortly took effect, where players now started “playing for the vibes and whatnot” in Ashimaru’s words, in competitive matches, which was to the detriment of their teammates.
This felt validating to those doing it, as a surge of serotonin hit their systems, subtly referencing the lobby. “When that situation happened, I think it was miscommunication and stubbornness,” Ashimaru said passionately.
Gaming has always been seen as escapism, a door to the real world. But the communities built inside the games look remarkably like the ones outside.
“Racism, sexism, you cannot eliminate that. It will always be there. The next game that gets released will have the same thing,” Ashimaru said.
Marvel Rivals is a superhero game; the irony is that the heroes are fictional, but the damage is real.
Featured image courtesy of Marvel Rivals.