Marvel Rivals developers announced that they’re preparing a new combat behavior detection system to spot the players who are passively farming hero proficiency points by remaining stationary or even AFK.
Disruptive behavior like that directly harms the quality of the matches. The dev team stated that penalties could range from warnings to suspensions, depending on severity and repeat offenses. In the edge cases, people will even be permanently banned.
Anyone who played Marvel Rivals for long enough can attest that this behavior isn’t new or recent, and players have been passively farming the Lord rank for as long as the game has been out. The devs tried to discourage this before by segmenting proficiency missions by mode and introducing daily repeat limits, but that didn’t really stop low-effort farming.
But recently, Marvel Rivals has been actively adjusting the value of proficiency, adding more value to it as a progression system with its latest patch that also introduced the hero who never shuts up, Deadpool. The system is now giving out cosmetic items and even currency for attaining specific ranks. That means long-time players effectively got auto-credited in this refreshed system when the patch landed, and this was the entire point.
But on the other side of the rewards medal are always the people trying to exploit and game the system. And now, with more rewards tied to proficiency, plus additional mastery ranks, it can create incentives for players to chase points in ways the matchmaking wasn’t really built to tolerate.
While the community at large is supportive of the change, because several modes, and especially the Doom Match, were being actively disrupted, there are some concerns regarding this combat behavior detection system. People are hoping there will be a human doing the reviews, as any automated system could be prone to false positives, with drawn-out processes to challenge the decision. There are doubts about whether the automated system will be good at separating nefarious behavior from cases like short real-life interruptions, late spawns, or disconnects being misread as exploitative behavior.
Those concerns aren’t theoretical, as Marvel Rivals has already had to deal with fairness systems that occasionally catch the wrong people, with century-long bans for Mac and Steam Deck players.
The studio hasn’t shared the exact details about how the system will work, and we don’t expect that they will, so people don’t try to circumvent its boundaries.
