Last Updated on April 4, 2025
It’s no secret that many players are bewildered by how matchmaking currently runs in Marvel Rivals. And the same topics keep cropping up over and over in the subreddit – There’s too many smurfs, matchmaking is rigged, there’s a loser’s queue and a winner’s queue, why won’t anyone play tank? And so on.
There’s a few things NetEase could do to, well, ease the situation, so to speak. While you cannot completely eradicate the smurfing issue and ranked matchmaking can’t be perfect, there’s still many ways it can be improved. So let’s take a look at some suggestions.
1. Introduce Placement Matches
To more likely avoid smurfs, leavers, and overall frustrating game sessions, placement matches can get you to where you need to be quicker. Many other games already have this system, including League of Legends.
In this case, basically all Marvel Rivals players would start out as “Unranked” instead of “Bronze III”, and they would play about 10 matches or so. After completing all placement matches, players will start the season in a specific rank. The rank they will be given will depend on how many matches they won and how well they performed. So players could start either all the way down in Bronze or all the way up in Platinum.
2. Increase the Player Level Needed to Unlock Competitive
In around 2 to 3 hours of playing, you can quickly get to level 10 to unlock competitive. Honestly, this is way too low. You don’t get much experience in the game itself let alone an understanding of how the game works by level 10. There’s a lot more to the game than just getting a high K/D ratio.
There’s a lot to learn about making and controlling space, knowing when to use your skills and ultimate, focusing the objective, positioning, map awareness, and so on. While learning these skills will take constant practice, increasing the level requirement to 20 will ensure players have a lot more game time, and thus experience, on their hands before they jump into more serious game play. This will also help ensure that people who are serious about trying ranked will be the ones playing, as it will take more time to get there in the first place.
3. Harsher Punishments for Leavers
There is a glaring issue with people AFKing in competitive matches, particularly in the second round. I’ve had multiple matches in a row with people leaving. And one of those matches actually had half the team leave in the second round. It’s bewildering and disappointing to experience.
There needs to be much harsher punishments for people leaving ranked matches in Marvel Rivals. While technical and personal issues do happen and are sometimes unavoidable, many people simply just rage quit the match. There needs to be a much longer punishment for when leavers next launch the game.
Not being able to play ranked for multiple hours or multiple days would be a start. Simply starting the punishment at 15 or 30 minutes isn’t long enough. The rest of us who are rarely or not quitting at all don’t want to be constantly grouped with people who do.
4. Adjust the Point System
Currently, it’s known that even with a below 50% win rate, with enough grinding, most players would be able to get to Grandmaster Rank fairly easily. And you will always gain more points for winning a match than losing points for losing a match.
For a much fairer experience across the board for all players, it may be better to even out how many points are gained and lost per match. This will help to have players get closer to a 50% or higher win rate for achieving higher ranks.
5. Knight Proficiency Requirements for Each Role
This may be a bit more controversial to suggest. But enough of us who have played Marvel Rivals up to this point have noticed an issue with many people simply refusing to tank (vanguard). I think having each player be required to be at “Knight” proficiency for at least one character in each role (Vanguard, Duelist, Strategist) can somewhat help ease off the “instalock DPS” problem. It won’t take too long for a player to achieve this, and it can be acquired in tandem with getting to the proposed player level 20 requirement.
Getting players more comfortable with roles outside of duelist may help players be more confident in switching to other roles when needed.
As a bonus point – NetEase needs to desperately add more vanguards! We have currently 37 characters in the game, but only 8 of them are vanguard. That’s only 21% of the roster – not even a third! There needs to be at least another 4 vanguards added to the game before the end of the year. The Marvel IP has decades of work and dozens of characters to choose from. There’s no reason they can’t add more vanguards sooner than later. The Thing was a welcome addition to the game, and has even seen professional play recently. Let’s hope that sets a precedent for future additions to the roster.
Update April 4th 2025: It seems the devs have implemented 2 suggestions made in this list. The level requirement to unlock ranked will increase to 15, and points earned or lost after matches will favor individual performance. Another thing they’ve implemented is that pick/ban will now begin at Gold III instead of Diamond III – which I think is a necessary change. Hopefully these adjustments will make ranked a smoother experience than it was previously.
