u/KevinCow

And if you're defending and haven't even exited the spawn room by 10 seconds on the match countdown, you should be extra super banned.

I'm so sick of getting into the game and still not knowing what our team comp is gonna look like, then getting to the point and having our first fight be a 5v6 because someone on our team couldn't get off their goddamn phone and play the goddamn game.

We get this same argument every time they announce a character who's even slightly out of the mainstream. "Who is this obscure nobody? Give us a character people actually care about, like Cyclops/Ghost Rider/whatever!"

Based on the characters these players tend to suggest, it seems like their familiarity with Marvel is based primarily on the 90s cartoons and the 00s/10s live action movies.

But the thing is, Marvel Rivals isn't a game based on cartoons and movies. Marvel Rivals is a game based on comic books. And there are a LOT of characters and stories that are notable and relevant in the comics, that just haven't broken into the mainstream with a big movie yet.

And I think that applies to pretty much all of the characters in this game that are considered obscure. None of them are just random nobodies. All of them were chosen because they'd already been successful on a smaller scale.

Going through the characters I've seen people complain about:

Magik, Psylocke, Emma Frost - Some of the most popular X-Men in the comics, just haven't gotten their time to shine in the movies. Emma had a small, forgettable side role in a couple of them, and Magik and Psylocke were in some of the later movies nobody watched, but in the comics they're consistently major players.

Black Cat - By far the most significant Spider-Man character who hasn't gotten a live-action adaptation yet. I'm surprised people thought she was obscure. Also just an incredibly obvious pick for a game that loves its thirst skins.

Squirrel Girl - Has been around for 35 years, was mostly a recurring joke for much of that, but in 2014 she got her own book, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. It ran for 5 years, which is quite successful by modern standards. The book did especially well as collected editions sold in school book fairs, and the character was popular enough that she was going to be the lead of a live-action New Warriors show. The pilot was shot, but unfortunately this was happening as Marvel was restructuring their TV direction, so it wasn't picked up. Still, the actress who was going to play Squirrel Girl, Milana Vayntrub, has continued to voice the character, including in Rivals.

Jeff - The ultimate "who?" character at launch. And understandably so. But still not a nobody. He had a webcomic that helped launch Marvel's foray into vertical scrolling Infinity comics on their Marvel Unlimited app. And his comic was successful enough that it spawned a whole circle of the Marvel universe based around these funny animal vertical comics: Alligator Loki, Lockheed, Cosmo, Marvel Mutts, Marvel Meow, even a crossover event called Infinity Paws. Jeff was a niche character, but he was very popular and successful within that niche, and I always knew his big break into the mainstream was basically inevitable.

Angela - If nothing else, a well known character among comics fans just for her publication history. She started as a Spawn character, but through legal shenanigans, got transported to the Marvel universe, where it was revealed that she was actually Thor's long lost sister. And I don't mean they rebooted the character in the Marvel universe - it's literally the same character. She canonically was born in the Marvel universe, wound up in the Spawn universe, and then came back to the Marvel universe.

Elsa Bloodstone - Constantly pops up around the Marvel universe when monsters are involved, was popular enough in 2019 to get into Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3, and had a live-action appearance in Werewolf by Night. Frankly I thought she was a given for this game, since she's a hot woman who uses guns, and this is a shooter that loves selling its thirst skins.

Devil Dinosaur - Has been around for almost 50 years. For much of that he was just kind of a gimmick character writers could use if they wanted Spider-Man to hang out with a dinosaur for an issue, but in 2015 he met Moon Girl, and their book was a hit. Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur ran for 4 years, like Squirrel Girl they saw a lot of success as collected editions sold at school book fairs, they quickly became a staple of the Marvel universe who frequently popped up on teams and crossovers, and eventually got an animated series that ran for 2 seasons. Along with Ms Marvel, they were the only real lasting successes of the failed Inhumans push.

As someone who actually pays attention to what's going on in the comics, none of these characters were really surprising picks to me. Angela was the closest to surprising, but that's just because I didn't expect the Thor side of things to get so much love, and I would've expected Valkyrie first.

Of course, there's two more characters, who I think are the exceptions to this, and actually were quite obscure in the comics:

Luna Snow and White Fox - These are characters even I hadn't heard of before Rivals, because their main claim to fame is appearing in the mobile game Marvel Future Fight. A game that is, as I understand, massively more successful in Asia. So again, these aren't random nobodies. Their success was just in a different region from where most of the English-speaking playerbase lives.

Anyway I know this isn't gonna convince anyone, and we're gonna get the same complaints when they announce characters like Armor, or Wiccan, or Wave, or even Gwenpool. But I guess this is Marvel Rivals Rants, and not Marvel Rivals Solutions.