3 days Ago
Marvel Rivals is just about the hottest free-to-play game short of the eternal Fortnite right now, drawing over 20 million players in just two weeks, and developer NetEase must move quickly to retain them. According to a fairly conspiratorial report, bots are allegedly being added to Quickplay matches, on the down low, to make players feel good after a string of losses and more likely to spend money on something like the game's Battle Pass. Community member ciaranxy posted a handy guide on the game's subreddit to help you spot bots in Quickplay, which they allege to have spent the past week testing (thanks, MP1st ).
Bots are not present in Competitive, they claim, and two Quickplay losses in a row means there is a high chance you will be placed in a bot lobby. A bot lobby will consist of four human players and two bots against a team of six NPC enemies. You will be penalised for leaving these matches; bot accounts are Level 1, and profiles will contain "restricted access" (as opposed to "limited access" for human profiles).
The idea here seems to be to potentially retain players by giving them a confidence boost and thus keep playing. The longer a player spends with a free-to-play game, the thinking goes, the more likely they are to invest in the experience by spending real money. ciaranxy suggests that NetEase has anticipated all of this and will patch the bots out only when and if the community kicks up enough of a stink.
MP1st spoke to Marvel Rivals content creators who agree with these botting claims (but wished to remain anonymous) and has contacted NetEase for comment. Admittedly, multiplayer games are not this scribe's speciality, but we don't necessarily see the issue here, except one of transparency. We'd want to know whether we were facing real foes, but if it's just in Quickplay, then it seems the developer has done some research to back up this behaviour, and attempting to make a game more engaging (allegedly) doesn't seem like the end of the world.
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