Summary
- A new trick with Invisible Woman fuels suspicion of bots in Marvel Rivals.
- The addition of Fantastic Four characters boosts the game’s popularity.
- Fans suspect bot presence due to unusual gameplay behaviors.
A Marvel Rivals player has shown off a trick using Invisible Woman that gives support to the theory that NetEase’s hero shooter is incorporating bots into quickplay matches. While NetEase has yet to confirm the presence of bots in Marvel Rivals, many players have been suspicious about them since the game’s launch, and the new evidence lends credence to that suspicion.
Since its release on December 6, 2024, the free-to-play hero shooter has attracted a lot of attention, and the launch of its Season 1 content on January 9 has only seen its popularity grow, with a record number of concurrent players in excess of 560,000 on the season’s launch date. Part of that popularity is owed to the addition of The Fantastic Four to the character roster, and while fans will have to wait a few weeks for the Thing and the Human Torch to arrive, Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman are already a big hit in Marvel Rivals.
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But one unintended consequence of putting Sue Storm in the character roster is the boost it’s given to the Marvel Rivals bot lobby theory. Many fans have suspected for some time that the game has been throwing bots into quickplay matches, particularly as opponents for players who have lost multiple matches in a row. A video released on Reddit by user barky1616 seems to be lending support to this theory, as it shows three different heroes becoming bottlenecked by Sue as she stands next to a staircase with her invisibility powers activated, running up to her location and stopping dead in their tracks, seemingly unable to figure out how to navigate around the invisible obstacle she caused with her presence.
Invisible Woman May Have Revealed Bots in Marvel Rivals
Although the video does show some unusual behavior, it’s not the only evidence that players are using to support their theory of bot presence in the game. A fan’s controversial report of Marvel Rivals bots from the end of December used collected data to theorize that after two consecutive quickplay losses, players will be placed on a team that includes two bots and will face off against a team composed entirely of bots. This report also claims that players can identify bots by their profiles, which are all set at level 1 and show the profiles under “restricted access,” as opposed to some human profiles, which show “limited access.”
Even without using Sue’s invisibility, players think they have identified other ways of sussing out bots without digging into their profiles. Some of these theories are based simply on watching characters’ movements, with reports of bot-controlled versions of Marvel Rivals‘ Jeff the Land Shark performing odd circular movements and Iron Man repeatedly wiggling while flying when controlled by a bot.
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