Marvel Rivals Devs Denied Trolling Data Miners With Fake Characters

As NetEase’s hero shooter Marvel Rivals gains great popularity, the community grows stronger, and so do those who serve the community, like data miners who are keen on providing early information before official channels. 

There are various findings or theories coming from data mining, and one of them is an allegation that developers add fake heroes to the game to catch those who leak the information on the title. 

Is this the real case? IGN got the chance to talk with the developers directly, asking producer Weicong Wu and executive producer Danny Koo if they deliberately “troll” people. Koo answered straightforwardly, “No. We would rather spend our time developing the actual game.”

Then, if those characters are not used to catch leakers or to tease fans, how would the developers explain why they appear in the game? What’s the purpose, and how they ended up there? Weicong explained: 

Koo further added, “The team experimented with a lot of play styles, heroes. It was like there’s someone doing scratch paperwork and then just left a notebook there, and someone [a dataminer] decided to open it with no context.”

Then what will happen to such characters that are believed to be “baits” for data miners? Do they stay behind the curtain without having a chance to stand on the stage, or is there a rule that the team follows to decide whether they’ll make an appearance in the game? According to the game’s producer, it’s “highly dependending on what kind of gameplay experience our players would expect in our game.” 

Now, the situation has been made clear, and this is not the first time that the Marvel Rivals team has clarified such speculations. Earlier, they denied an allegation that the game would feature a loot box mechanism. Similarly, “the icons and materials related to the loot boxes are leftover content in the game development stage and will not appear in the game.”