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It's been a bad weekend for Marvel Rivals after a small update opened the floodgates for more cheaters to scurry inside, wreaking havoc in games all the way from Bronze to One Above All. How bad is it you ask? A slew of cheaters actually took to streaming their crimes over the weekend to a sizeable audience, promoting their software, and dunking on high elo players. So yeah, pretty bad.
In response to this NetEase has now issued a warning to cheaters alongside a new ban wave and even took the time to post receipts.
"Recently, our telemetry detected that following the weekend update, a faction of rogue players began promoting and deploying unauthorized third-party enhancements," NetEase says in a blog post. "This blatant disruption of our fair battlefield has sparked widespread concern across the Chronoverse. In response, our security teams have initiated an immediate, targeted purge.
"Maintaining a fair and honorable arena is our primary directive. We continuously combat cheats, scripts, and illicit tech through multi-layered anti-cheat monitoring, abnormal behavior detection, historical data reviews, and manual verification. This recent enforcement wave is a targeted crackdown addressing newly updated cheats, building upon our foundational security frameworks."
Alongside this notice there's also a behemoth account ban list including 485 names, their UID and Rank all shared. However, there's just three accounts in this wave that have been found guilty of "severe violations" resulting in permanent hardware bans.
Seeing the entire ban list of cheaters is insane from r/marvelrivals
While some players are just happy to see NetEase doing something, citing it as a "step in the right direction" others are surprised about how few accounts have been banned compared to the total player population and just how bad cheating is in Rivals.
NetEase goes on to assure players that any new cheating hardware has been "logged by our security team" and "integrated into our automated penalty system". So moving forward any account which gets flagged for using these cheats or software will be "permanently banned".
There in lies the problem. Account bans in a free to play game are like putting a bandaid over a gaping wound. It's so easy to create a new account for Rivals that there's an argument that NetEase needs to start handing out more severe repercussions aka hardware bans, and three accounts out of 488 just isn't enough.
Players have been begging NetEase to take cheating more seriously and bring down the hammer for as long as I can remember now. And while NetEase is clearly trying to stay on top of the issue it doesn't seem as if any great strides have been taken recently, at least not ones that could match the sheer number of cheaters in the game right now.
To end the post NetEase once again reminds players to not download cheat software (that'll do it), to report anything malicious in-game, and sets the record straight concerning "completely false" rumours about its anti-cheat system being bypassed: "Our anti-cheat launches concurrently with the game client and cannot be disabled independently. The parameter in question merely hides the pop-up window; it does not deactivate the anti-cheat software in any capacity." That's something I guess.
