Conspiracy was briefly afoot in the Marvel Rivals community following NetEase hero plant rumours

The Marvel Rivals community was briefly awash with rumours than publisher NetEase were playing 4D chess with their hero-loving hearts last week, according to a new report by Michael Cripe for Ian Games The rumours began in a Discord for the team shooter named Marvel Rivals Leaks, where user Keone speculated that NetEase were seeding fake information on upcoming heroes for dataminers to find.

“It has come to our attention that the devs have set up fake characters to catch leakers,” wrote Keone in the Discord. “Not only the ones in the code – but potentially inside sources too”. They then gave a list of previously rumoured heroes they now believed were “very likely fake”, including Quicksilver, Professor X, and Paste Pot Pete, who I hadn’t heard of until now and suddenly I have a renewed interested in Marvel.

The Discord, says the report, had previously found some success catching heroes before their official announcement, such as the Fantastic Four. The rumour gained some traction before reaching datamining group X0XLeak, who weren’t so convinced. “Could they be intended troll by NetEase? I guess,” an X0XLeak spokesninja told IGN. “Would it make sense, in my opinion? No. The way I see it, they could have made it way easier if their goal was to troll us.” They also posted an X thread as evidence that the rumoured-then-unrumoured heroes existed in the game’s code, thoroughly re-rumouring them once again. From IGN’s report:

X0X’s matfacio told IGN that, if NetEase had truly tucked away bait to trick leakers in this way, it would need to know exactly how dataminers are rummaging through the Marvel Rivals backend, explaining: “I think it would require reverse engineering a reverse engineer.”

The existence of new, hidden hero names in Marvel Rivals doesn’t totally poor cold water on the idea that the developers are attempting to mislead, but some believe the studio would have to go through a lot of trouble — likely more trouble than it’s worth — just to keep the more dedicated fans on their toes.

That “trouble” includes things like datamined voice line events and gameplay tags, which some community members reckoned represented far too much work to be part of an elaborate hoax. Keone did end up amending their initial stance, saying that their post spread beyond their control before they could make edits.

“The primary assumption from the main leakers (separate from me, the ones who have most info) now is that the ‘plants’ are in fact still real. And the developers did not intend for us to find them,” Keone says. “That’s why I edited the original post and since deleted it, and have worked to help clear up confusion surrounding it.”

Please do have a read of the report in full for all the details and context. I don’t play Marvel Rivals myself, but I found this one interesting since – while it’s somewhat of a well-seasoned nothing burger – it’s fundamentally just a group of passionate players wanting to share the excitement of getting new toys to play with. Hell, I’m excited about Paste Pot Pete and I haven’t watched a Marvel film since X-Men 2, nor played a videogame in 15 years.

“A server that started small to spread information has now become a cornerstone of information across the entire community, and sometimes we can misinterpret things or make mistakes,” Keone told IGN. “We’re a group of people working hard to find and share information, and there’s never malice behind what we post. We’ll work hard to make sure things don’t spread like wildfire again unless it’s been verified first, and are grateful for everything we’ve been able to share thus far.”