Evidence mounts that Marvel Rivals stealthily places losing players in bot matches, and I know because I'm the loser

You might've seen rumblings over the holidays that Marvel Rivals is serving players easy bot matches when they go on a losing streak. That's the sort of claim I usually take with a grain of salt in competitive shooters—yes, bots masquerading as real players are unfortunately common in some of the most popular games around (especially in battle royales and mobile games), but it's also true that players often misidentify actual humans as bots to explain why their team is underperforming.

That was not the case with Reddit user ciaranxy's lengthy post on the Marvel Rivals subreddit called "Everything You Need to Know About Marvel Rivals' Secret Quickplay Bots." They were not crying bot, but laying out the results of over a week of testing. ciaranxy determined that Rivals is more than happy to throw losing players a bone by giving them some easy bots to stomp on, but only under certain conditions:

• 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).

Invisible Woman Hidden OP New Tech Discovered from r/marvelrivals

It's those guidelines that got me curious. I've seen enough questionable clips of "human" Rivals players online to suspect NetEase is throwing bots into the mix sometimes, but is it really serving up entire bot lobbies to boost engagement? If all it takes is going on a losing streak, I could just try it for myself.

So I played a few normal matches, making sure to watch enemy and team behavior for anything sus. After every game I checked my match history and viewed every player's career profile to check against ciaranxy's description of bots: Most real profiles were public, some had set their privacy set to Limited, and none were Restricted. Checking account level was a bit trickier. Public profiles show the number, but if I wanted a peek at a private account level, I had to get killed by them and check their nametag on the killcam. All accounts I saw were past level one.

Despite being pretty ass at Rivals, I was having trouble going on a losing streak, so I did the only thing I could do to sabotage our team while still trying to win: Play my first three matches as Spider-Man. I went one match with only a single kill, a couple of teammates politely asked me to switch off Duelist (sorry, can't), and a Rocket Racoon player rubbed it in my face when they successfully 1v1'ed me three times.

It was a bloodbath, but the job got done. I lost two matches in a row. After the third match, another loss, I examined the lobby. Still no bots, but ciaranxy did say it can take more than two losses. So I jumped into one more match, and I could quickly smell something funky going on:

???? For the first time today, there were no console players on the enemy team
???? Their account names were generic or cheesy, like "DieForMe" or "LanettMa"
???? I was actually getting kills as Spider-Man (should've been all the evidence needed, really)
???? I watched every killcam and noticed four accounts were level one (I never saw the other two)
???? After we won, I clicked on their profiles to find all six marked "Restricted"

It was exactly as ciaranxy described. Two bots on my team and six on the other. I'd lost three times in a row against confirmed real players, and then suddenly got nothing but bots. Their playstyles reminded me of the fill-in bot teammates you get in Counter-Strike: impossibly aware, but really bad at finishing a kill. One time the Reed Richards bot (who again, is supposed to be a level one player trying Rivals for the first time) had such an impressive command of his abilities that he yanked me out of the sky mid-Spidey swing. He then proceeded to barely attack.

This sucks no matter which way you slice it. This is bad for the community, who now have to deal with NetEase misleading them with bogus wins. It's bad for the competitive integrity of Rivals, whose default mode of play regularly serves invalid matches. It's even bad for the average player, who might take the wrong lessons out of a bot match they believed was real (though I wager NetEase only does this because its data says bot matches keep folks playing longer).

And fundamentally, it sucks that the goal of this seemingly intentional measure is to lie to us—to insult our intelligence by trying to pass off an obviously phony product as legitimate in the hopes that we don't notice the bots every time, take the victory at face value, and stay glued to Rivals just a bit longer. The live service "package" surrounding the 6v6 shooter that is Marvel Rivals is already one massive, multi-layered engagement trap. Can't this one aspect of Rivals, the core competition, just be pure?

PC Gamer has reached out to NetEase for comment and will update this story if a response arrives.