184 Bronze Players Banned From Marvel Rivals for Cheating

Out of 488 accounts permanently banned from Marvel Rivals this weekend, the single largest group was Bronze players. 184 of them, to be exact. These people installed cheats, loaded into competitive matches, broke the rules, and still couldn't claw their way out of the game's lowest rank.

NetEase laid all of this out in a blog post that reads less like a penalty announcement and more like a public autopsy. The studio says it detected a wave of "unauthorized third-party enhancements" following a recent weekend update, launched an investigation, and tracked down every offending account. Each one got a permanent ban. Repeat offenders who try to evade with new accounts face IP and hardware bans on top of that. Only three banned players had actually reached One Above All, the game's highest rank. The next biggest clusters were Grandmaster and Diamond at 65 each. The Bronze pile dwarfs all of them.

Yes, some of those accounts were probably throwaways created specifically to cheat on without risking a main account. But that doesn't make the picture less pathetic. You went through the effort of finding cheats, installing them, risking a hardware ban, and your reward was a Bronze ranking and a public listing on NetEase's wall of shame. I don't know what the plan was.

NetEase also used the post to shut down a rumour that had been circulating, including from Twitch streamer Jay3OW, claiming the game's anti-cheat could be disabled through launch parameters. The studio says that's "completely false" and that the parameter in question only hides a pop-up window while the anti-cheat itself keeps running. Players who thought they were outsmarting the system were, in NetEase's words, just closing a notification. The anti-cheat never stopped watching.