Poor balancing, toxic players, and a flawed approach to cosmetics have put Marvel Rivals in a bad place. It desperately needs an intervention to turn its troubles around. https://t.co/QbeE39cBoL
Gregg Popovich has reportedly married Mary Barth Budenholzer, the ex-wife of his former longtime assistant Mike Budenholzer, per TMZ
Mike coached under Pop for nearly 20 YEARS and helped the Spurs win 4 championships during that span.
Mike and Mary divorced in 2016, and Pop and Mary officially tied the knot on September 16 in Texas.
Pop and Mary were also spotted attending Spurs games together last season 👀
Iman Shumpert on KD joining the Warriors: “Imagine me and Evan come rob your house, next year you come hang with us while we go rob someone else.” (@GilsArenaShow)
Kevin Durant responds 👀
As a voice in the community and someone who makes a living off of Marvel Rivals, what I'm about to tell you all does not benefit me in the slightest, but needs to be said...
Even if you don't watch content creators, seeing a single viral clip bashing an overbuffed hero - or hearing a friend rant in Discord about their miserable high-ranked lobby experiences - is enough to kill your motivation to play.
Imagine making a conscious decision to load into a game that is fundamentally competitive when the messaging suggests that the more you improve, the worse it gets. It doesn't really matter if it's true or not, people won't stick around. This doesn't just apply to ranked.
Sadly, the community of people that Rivals should be catered towards has been rotted out in favor of those who don't value its competitive aspects, hence the uptick in throwers, noobs, cheaters, etc. This in tandem with lost goodwill towards the devs from the community has caused actual good players to leave and be replaced in a sort of trickle-up enshitification of the entire playerbase.
The result? A revolving door of new players being farmed using the Marvel IP who are exposed to multi-billion dollar AI matchmaking algorithms used to feed them slop in hopes they'll get addicted. NetEase doesn't really care if their game "dies" since the data they get from your in-game telemetry (player movements) among other things they track has applications far beyond Rivals or even gaming as a whole - Robotics, HCI, neuroscience even. This would also explain several of the head scratching balance choices they've made throughout the Seasons (e.g. overbuffing Thing/Dino).
If something is free, you are the product.
Game is still fun though, but yes.. I do think it's that deep. Explains a lot.