Marvel Rivals players love to throw around every "insult" in the book. From the extremely creative "kys" to the hilariously juvenile "Strange is gay" (the latter tossed at a friend of mine after, as Dr Strange, he failed to immediately pull up a portal for a very insistent Jeff the Shark), I'm both amazed and enraged by things I've seen and heard people saying in live service video games.
Nobody likes it, but it's been a longtime pet hate of mine that actively puts me off even attempting most online PvP games. Even with voice comms turned off, text chat gives rise to more ways to bully your allies and enemies alike. It's not just shooter games, either. I used to play a lot of Dead by Daylight and quickly learned that certain player actions – crouch spamming, flashlight click spamming, overuse of emotes, and so on – can be construed as BMing (that's "bad manners"-ing, for the blissfully uninitiated). Once I picked that up, it suddenly made me fume. All of it is silly, and I know it's daft to let emotion get the better of me, but there's only so many times I can put up with griefers before I want to take a bath with my toaster.
Enter: Marvel Snap. As a fun and flashy mobile game, its approach to PvP etiquette is streamlined and simple. There's no text chat, no voice comms, and only a select handful of emotes at the ready, allowing me to lose myself in the tactical minutes-long matches without getting side-tracked by professional trolls. It's a near perfect approach to punishing BMers: simply don't grant people the opportunity in the first place.
