With an honest to god organized strike coming from players in “Marvel Rivals,” I want to talk about why I don’t think we can sustain a world of hero shooters in gaming like they do.
Today’s article is a rather sporadic one—with a week to go, I finally am at a point in which I have more ideas than time to execute them and I needed to plan out what I would be writing in order to avoid overbooking myself. This free space is filled courtesy of a reddit thread about the 5v5 hero shooter game “Marvel Rivals” and an ongoing strike that support players are putting out. From my limited understanding, this was incited by a streamer by the name of Necros making a negative comment towards support players that had a shockwave effect across the community. The strike itself is simple—support players are now locking dps or tank roles and leaving their teams without healing. While we’re only 1 day in since this reddit post, the effects are apparent enough to be covered within other news outlets such as Kotaku in which Kenneth Shepard notes the spread onto platforms such as X and TikTok as well as the coverage of various other influencers.
Now, I have a much more limited view because I stopped playing Marvel Rivals quickly after it came out. My view is also biased as I specifically stopped playing because of issues like this. As a fill player in games who looks to help the team succeed by playing roles that are missing, I got perpetually trapped in either the supporting role or tank role for many games at a time with too little control over the team’s success that ended up with losing games in character select. It was a session of almost 3 hours played with my best friend in which we both slowly came to the realization we’d barely spoken or joked during the entire voice call. We both stepped away from the game and moved on to other things, and I haven’t been back since. The problem is exacerbated by the lack of a role queue, something the devs mention is not in consideration as they continue to balance the game. The idea of this is based on good intentions—the goal is to make a more flexible and freeform game in which players don’t feel forced to conform to the requirements. The issue is that in practice a game with multiple roles is often designed and balanced around the interactions between these roles, something that makes opening the floor for experimentation both suboptimal and counter-intuitive.
I want to extend this thought process further—games like “Overwatch” and their clear influence on the hero shooter genre is obvious, but other role-based games such as “Valorant” or even MMOs like “Final Fantasy XIV” also struggle with these problems. Friends with me in Valorant games know of the pain of having 2 players instantly lock in Reyna and Jett as well as my friends playing FFXIV noting how they party with support friends to avoid the long dps queue for dungeons. Watching this manifest in these games is always disheartening—As a fill player, the hope is that I can get a more even spread of the characters and roles I play in order to get more of a feel for all the systems and ways to play the game. Despite this, I find myself locked into one or two corners of the game without a way to attempt to get into the rest without actively hurting the team and its composition. The introduction of role queue—as is with FFXIV—makes this no longer cause an issue with the strength of team composition but instead causes the length of queue time to become a problem. This problem, however, I believe is much more beneficial for the health of the game as well as the health of all gamers in moving towards a place where a hero shooter could exist without role queue.
The comparison between problems with and without role queue explains my case for me. With role queue, the punishment falls directly onto the player attempting to fill an oversaturated role in the sense of a long queue time. Dps players in FFXIV must wait for enough tank or support players while those unwanted positions can queue incredibly quickly. This means that the undersaturated roles have an unimpeded experience, something enticing that might inspire people in the oversaturated roles to try something new and move to try a different role. For players who are absolutely certain of the role they want, the punishment is something that is tolerable and doesn’t impede the actual gameplay experience other than the waiting time beforehand. Without a role queue, the issue is put onto the entire team because of the way it affects composition. Players are forced to change their plans or fill other roles due to people’s choices to fill oversaturated roles, and fill players can only cover so much of a lobby until too many players choose a preferred role over what the team needs.
I want to also illustrate that this doesn’t apply as easily to unrated—in casual play, the increase of queue times is a lot more of an issue compared to team compositions considering that a majority of players in that genre are just trying to enjoy the gameplay. This is also likely why the Marvel Rivals devs maintain this stance of no role queue—they want casual play to have improved queue times and allow for flexibility even if the choices made are suboptimal. However, this does not excuse the lack of role queue in the most simple of competitive rulesets or modes within games. For a game to have this competitive nature, these steps must be taken so that a game doesn’t end by the time the characters are picked.
Overall, I barely find a space in which I could play a hero shooter that wouldn’t cause me to become frustrated by these issues. Games like the upcoming “Marathon” will allow no limit to choices of Runners and let combinations flourish as well as games like “Valorant” that I play because I can coordinate with a large number of friends who join me, but otherwise it’ll be a tough sell for me. I’m hoping that progressively we’ll see more role queues or other solutions implemented in games like these to move us as a society towards a future in which these roles don’t get oversaturated so quickly. Until then, I hope to see more people have a bit more flexibility and help create a balanced team ready to succeed.
Be the change you wish to see in the world.