Despite the saturation of the hero shooter genre, Marvel Rivals is still going strong with plenty of exciting new characters and events on the way. Improving from the playtest from July, the developers of Marvel Rivals have made significant balance changes and minor tweaks that provide a much more fun-filled gameplay experience. Even with these improvements, Marvel Rivals has a long way to go before it can make a significant mark on the competitive gaming scene.

Balancing concerns are often the biggest source of controversy and updates for competitive games, but regardless of a game's meta scene, most shooters strive to create a consistent experience for all players. If a character's abilities or weapons are too overpowered, it still gives other players a chance to use them for their own benefit, but an unfair advantage can quickly sour the mood of a match. Unfortunately for fans, there's one Marvel Rivals bug that offers certain players a significant advantage over the rest depending on their hardware, which they desperately need to fix.

Marvel Rival Has A Severe Pay-To-Win Problem

Giving A Portion Of Players An Unfair Advantage

Over the past few weeks, clips and discussions over a recently discovered issue with certain heroes have been spreading like wildfire. In the current version of Marvel Rivals, certain characters are able to move, attack, and even deal more damage with their attacks for players running the game with higher frames per second. Some of the most notable examples are seen with Dr. Strange, Wolverine, Venom, Magik, and Star-Lord, with Reddit nyin_ compiling some video examples of the differences.

While it requires a significant FPS increase to have a noticeable impact, there are still plenty of graphics settings that let more players take advantage of this bug, or simply improve the smoothness of their overall gameplay experience.

Thankfully, the developers have already acknowledged this issue and are currently working to fix it as soon as possible, according to a post on their Discord. While it's only a matter of time until these issues are resolved, it still leaves room for concern over players using other undiscovered bugs to their advantage without spreading the word online. Despite these concerns, these kinds of bugs are often quickly spread by players, ensuring the developers hear about them before they can be abused for too long.

Cross-Play Is Another Big Source Of Potential Frustration

Ensuring A Fair Experience For All Players

With Marvel Rivals featuring semi-cross-play compatibility, the fast-paced nature of certain characters like Spider-Man in Marvel Rivals gives mouse and keyboard players a massive benefit even without the latest FPS bug. The precise aiming and quick movements of a mouse give PC players a large advantage in most games, which is often offset by the use of varying levels of auto-aim that's built into most console editions for shooters. Occasionally, this buffed source of aiming can become so strong that PC players start using controllers instead, becoming a consistent problem for movement-based games like Apex Legends.

PC players also have more flexibility when it comes to bind her ultimate ability to the mouse wheel to reap the benefits of both healing and damage output simultaneously.

Thankfully, Marvel Rivals developers thought about these issues ahead of time for their ranked play and matchmaking mechanics. In the current version of the game, PC and console players aren't able to match up together before playing, and the ranked mode has crossplay entirely removed for balancing reasons.

Riding The Line Between Bug Fixes And Balance Changes

A Double-Edged Sword For Players On All Systems

On top of the latest game-breaking FPS bug, one of the biggest areas of controversy is over Marvel Rivals' lack of Overwatch's role-lock, or their own version of a similar feature. While this kind of gameplay mechanic is fine for casual game modes, a lack of role lock easily causes frustration in competition matches, resulting in a drastically higher number of unbalanced teams overly relying on duelists. So far, the development team has no plans on adding the feature to Marvel Rivals, while seeming to be focused on managing these pressing bugs rather than working towards balancing issues.

A lack of role lock easily causes frustration in competition matches.

Only time will tell if Marvel Rivals will follow common trends in the hero shooter genre, but these gameplay decisions provide a breath of fresh air compared to the competition. Certain character abilities, like Jeff the Shark being able to single-handedly eliminate an entire lobby, offer plenty of memorable and exciting gameplay experiences across each match. While these abilities or mechanics run the risk of losing Marvel Rivals' edge in the competitive gaming scene, it's what made the game stand apart from the crowd in the first place.

Source: nyin_/Reddit