A Marvel Rivals match loads. In the time it takes you to blink, four of your teammates have instalocked their hero picks. There’s a Wanda, a Wolverine, a Psylocke, and one Spider-Man. The fifth player’s cursor is also hovering over Spider-Man, but they weren’t fast enough to pick him. A flurry of stars descends from the team chat. The other Spider-Man, bold yet seemingly lost in the match-wide chat, cries out: HEALS???
You could pick a Strategist, Marvel Rivals’ version of a healer, and help your pals out, since most viable team compositions that effectively keep a squad’s health topped up have a minimum of two healing characters. Spider-Man 2 hasn’t settled on a character yet.
Oh, nevermind. They’re going Black Widow, otherwise known as the hero with the worst win rate. You sigh and pick Punisher, the sixth DPS on the roster.
Toxicity is inevitable in most multiplayer games, especially in hero-based shooters, where the glory of high kill-death ratios seduces players into believing they are the only main character. Yet in April, radiation levels in Marvel Rivals became nuclear. For weeks, players reported that many of their superhero matches had become tortuously devoid of support characters. Healers had reached a breaking point. A “strike” had begun.
The exact start of the healer exodus is difficult to pinpoint. Some attribute it as a reaction to comments made by the top Spider-Man player in the world, a content creator known as Necros. Midway through April, a video began floating around where the bespectacled streamer called Strategist roles “easier by order of magnitudes” compared to damage-dealing roles. The incendiary clip went on to decry support skill floors as so low that Necros would need multiple books to capture the extent of his sentiment.
Except Necros wasn’t talking about the current season of Marvel Rivals in that footage, he was talking about how the role felt when the game was initially released. The clip was taken out of context on sites like TikTok and Twitter, where enraged Strategists responded to it by declaring that they would stop playing the role entirely. A few viral clips like these amassed millions of views, which may have contributed to the perception that it all trailed back to Necros. But as he says in a video breaking down why he got “cancelled” over his negative Strategist comments, millions of people play Marvel Rivals. A fraction of them probably engage in anything related to the game on social media, and an even smaller percentage of those players probably watch Necros to begin with. Even in a clip where he’s shit talking Strategists more directly, it’s in response to a thread that mentions him by name, not an unprovoked comment.
But Necros made for a perfect villain in the larger narrative. He is, after all, the best Spider-Man player around. And nobody likes Spider-Man except other Spider-Man players: Either he’s terrorizing your back lane or he’s going 0-11 and never gracing the objective with his presence. The anti sentiment is so pervasive that most ranked matches will immediately ban Spider-Man even if it means screwing over their own teammates. Strategists in particular abhor Spider-Man: the hero can swiftly one-shot most fragile characters and leave the premises before anyone even notices.
Curiously, there’s a thread with over 700 upvotes on Reddit where a healer strike was actively called for that was drafted two months ago. It describes an apparent incident where a support player used the in-game report system to alert the developers of a death threat, only to be met with inaction. Frustrated, the Redditor encouraged other fellow supports to abstain from playing until toxicity conditions for Strategist players improved.
“Treat your healer, and fellow players, with RESPECT,” the post demanded. “Stop blaming healers every time you die. Stop blaming healers when you walk into a 5v1 and get melted. Stop saying ‘gg heals’ when you’re a 3 and 8 diving DPS. Stop saying ‘not enough heals!’ while not switching to healer yourself.”
While the Reddit thread is almost entirely absent from conversations about the strike, the event didn’t quite come out of nowhere. Demoralizing as it may be, everything that the thread described will sound familiar to anyone who has ever played a support role in a multiplayer game. By and large, healing characters are undervalued by selfish teammates who do not seem to understand the concept of a cooldown or why a healer may not be able to be in multiple places at once. Support players tend to bear this treatment for the greater good; it’s difficult to win a match if you can’t stay alive.
A patch that arrived with the latest season made things even worse. Marvel Rivals has never been a game that prioritizes “balance” or esport viability. NetEase has made it clear that their focus is on keeping the game fun, which in practice means that the hero shooter is wildly unfair. Spider-Man is but one patch in a larger tapestry of bullshit that includes features like “characters who do not even have to perceive you to kill you in seconds.”
Still, there’s a limit to how far you can push a chaotic design ethos like this. In games like Fortnite, players accept the brutality of dying with nothing more than a gray pistol to a lucky player who found a golden bazooka because they know that eventually, the lady luck will shine will grant them a bazooka instead. Everyone gets to be a menace, you just can’t be a menace all the time.
A Marvel Rivals patch that dropped in early April made playing a Strategist into an even rawer deal. Some Strategists had to wait longer before they could use their abilities, while others saw a reduction in their overall health. Making things worse, the patch also tweaked how the game tabulated end-of-match awards. The aim was to reward players in accordance to their specific contribution to the match; the better you did, the more rank XP you’d gain.
It was a great idea in theory, except that the game’s rubric didn’t account for how a Strategist might contribute to a match. After the patch hit, Strategists reported winning matches and only seeing their points go up by 10, a fraction of what they’d normally get before. Even if the Strategist was instrumental to the team’s performance, it would take winning ten matches before you might rank up.
The downsides, at this point, were insurmountable. Strategists started posting on social media that they were joining the strike in solidarity with other supports. In doing so, some even discovered that they were better at dealing damage than they realized. They had no intention of going back now.
“Playing support is not a lot of fun anymore,” said a player named Lucas, who posted a video with 1.8M views about his decision to join the strike on TikTok. “There’s only eight options to choose from, and five of them got a nerf in the most recent update. I mean, poor Mantis mains have gotten a nerf every single update since the game came out,” he explained in the video.
In some ways, the strike is a misnomer. There was no centralized movement, and while some people stopped playing the role, there were plenty of Strategists who agreed with everything people were complaining about yet kept chugging along. Perception may have also been skewed by the fact that support has never been a popular role. Even before the patch hit, it was common to see it take the entire pre-game timer before two people reluctantly picked a support character to play. I’ve been in my share of matches where nobody picked Strategist until well into the match, when things were dire and losing seemed inevitable. Every so often, you’ll get a match where only a single person valiantly picks up the mantle.
But even if it wasn’t exactly a strike, there was still a list of demands. In another video posted in late April, a Twitch streamer named BlanK posted footage where he broke down each point strikers were fighting for–some reasonable, others bordering on parody. For example, one demand was that rather than having the entire team vote on which character got banned from the match, Strategists would get the first ban pick to themselves. A more sensible demand called for a shift in the tone whenever players interacted with Strategists, like making sure to thank them when they healed you. Rivals includes a chat wheel option to say Thanks, but it’s not an option included by default–and most players may never realize it’s there at all.
As word spread about the strike, what started as a fringe concept became mainstream discourse. Necros may not have lighted the fuse, but a week into the patch, at least some players experienced abuse when the strike was actively mentioned. Many of the incidents attributed to Necros’ influence sound awful, but they’re also typical for anyone playing a Strategist. DPS players would routinely try to lobby their entire team to report a fellow teammate for “throwing” simply because the healer didn’t behave like their personal butler throughout the match.
The ruckus reached a fever pitch on April 30th, which pushed NetEase to address the situation with yet another patch. This one focused almost entirely on Strategists, who saw buffs that improved abilities or increased damage. Hilariously, one of the few DPS characters mentioned in the patch is every Strategist’s bane of existence, Spider-Man. The spandex-wearing nightmare now has a slightly smaller radius for his dreaded combo.
Amid this good news, NetEase not only sounded sympathetic to the woes of support players, the developers appeared to throw shade in the direction of players who berate Strategists for poor gameplay.
“Strategists face increased pressure, needing to monitor teammates' health closely while carefully using their key abilities and being mindful of their positioning on the map,” the blog post reads. “Meanwhile, Vanguards and Duelists must not only attack effectively but also provide better protection for their Strategists to achieve victory.”
Necros, on the other hand, still finds himself battling an inaccurate narrative about his role in the fiasco. In a video posted at the end of April, the influencer says that while he doesn’t feel responsible for what happened, he understands why things transpired the way they did. Who wants to get MVP on a match only to barely rank up? The world’s best Spider-Man has also been slightly vindicated after everything is said and done. Necros has spent much of his time in May trying to prove his naysayers wrong by focusing entirely on Strategist gameplay. His goal is to reach one of the highest possible ranks in Marvel Rivals using only support roles. He’s already gloating about having an extended winning streak in a role that detractors swore he’d never played.
Surely such antics aren’t winning Necros any sympathy relative to the amount of backlash he’s received in the wake of the strike. Then again, it was silly to insinuate that one of the best Marvel Rivals players in the world could never be good at a specific role in the game. Whether or not an average person would be able to ascend the ranks nearly as quickly is another story. Ultimately, the skill ceiling for any given character in the game is immaterial without a well-coordinated team.
A few days into the patch, it’s difficult to say whether or not the new changes are tangibly making a difference. Some Strategists may be overjoyed at their newfound power, sure. But no percentage change can undo the lobotomy of wondering why a support didn’t dutifully follow someone into the thick of the enemy spawn. The best we can hope for is that the Punisher crashing out on voice chat will eventually seek out a therapist.
