Marvel Rivals Players Keep Discovering Game-Breaking Glitches

Four months in, Marvel Rivals players keep finding ways to make Doctor Strange’s portal ability more broken. The sorcerer can place two portals anywhere on the map during the match, opening a magical pathway between them for your team to use, but players have used and abused it to trick enemies into walking off the map or becoming trapped in their spawn. A lot of those uses feel like fair game, but the latest Doctor Strange exploit is so unfair it seems primed for a patch.

It turns out, if you place one of Doctor Strange’s portals close enough to certain walls it can clip through them and open on the other side. If you place one just right, it’s possible to walk through the portal into inaccessible rooms. As such, if you can get an opposing player to walk through, you can trap them outside the bounds of the usual game space. This is an effective way to get people off an objective, sure, but when it becomes clear there’s no way out they’ll likely either leave the game or get disconnected due to inactivity. Which isn’t much fun. But it’s so much worse than that! Some players are developing a whole strategy around this, combining it with Jeff the Land Shark’s ultimate and spitting enemies into the dodgy portals like they’re being thrown into a prison.

Marvel Rivals streamer Jay3 showcased the strategy on his channel, and it’s diabolical. The Doctor Strange player places one portal inside a wall, while putting the other under Jeff. The little land shark devours his enemies, and instead of spitting them off the side of the map like most players do, he shoots them through the portal and into the inaccessible area. Normally, the portal would linger a little bit longer and players would be able to jump back through, but the strategy here is to have the Doctor Strange player swap heroes immediately after creating the portal, causing it to disappear from the map.

This is the kind of oversight a developer would easily miss during testing, and is only found when a game is in the hands of mischievous players. Hopefully, developer NetEase nips this in the bud before it becomes too widespread, as players being booted from matches is never a good goal.

Marvel Rivals just entered its second season, which adds Emma Frost and Ultron to the roster. It also brought in a new, convoluted way of monetizing the game’s already expensive cosmetics.