I have a migraine, so let's see how this goes. Like my youngest, if I try to speak it takes forever. It's like I've ordered the words from GrubHub and I must wait for them to arrive. I can watch the little dot with my words creep along the screen until they get to my mouth. But typing is mostly okay!

Today's strip is about Marvel Rivals Bot Matches, which are absolutely real and if you have lost three rounds in a row you're definitely gonna be fighting some pretend guys. People feel different ways about it. In a rare overlap, Gabe and I agree that it's a good idea and we'll be surprised if others don't fuck around with a system like this also.

In the PC Gamer article linked above, the author feels manipulated by these tactics and gives a few reasons why it's bad. I would feel more manipulated perhaps if it weren't blindingly obvious what was going on, I guess. The names follow very specific formats, and from a gameplay perspective they're mostly not great with very, very occasional flashes of brilliance depending on the hero. Engaging with the Competitive Mode is probably the best way to avoid these concussed doppelgangers, but in our squad if we just got wrecked three times we recognize and actively celebrate the bot match.

First, their data almost certainly indicates that it increases the length of a session. This is definitely true for us: it's understood in our lobby that the Bot Match "doesn't count," so we end up playing two more matches when we ordinarily would have done something more productive after our third loss, like pounding rail spikes into the ground with our foreheads. Second, the roster in this game is fucking huge. The first couple times I played the mesh of weird sounds and the original thirty-three champs barking out their ults was paralyzing. When the bot match comes up, that's actually a time to try out Moon Knight and learn why he is very fragile but very, very scary. There's a reason characters in this game have specific callouts for his Anks and that is because his Ankhs turn his regular weapon into a kind of mystic bandsaw that shreds human beings. It's a good time to tune a new toon.

Third, these matches - whatever their provenance - still tick the boxes for my season pass. Even Practice vs. AI queuing directly will pay out on quests. We think this system is actually more than fine and speedrunning these matches is its own sorta zone.

The thing that fascinates me about this game is that it really, really isn't precious about what kinds of abilities go where in the sacred Tank/Healer/DPS triangle. It's like, yeah. We can recognize aspects of the overall kits in games like LoL or Overwatch or Deadlock because, similar to the Periodic Table of Ingredients that makes Taco Bell possible, at a certain point we're just combining stuff. I had a reductive take, before. Because the way they've combined the powers is completely nuts.

I was like, oh, Star Lord has Tracer's guns minus the time shit. Except… Star-Lord can fucking fly? And he fires super fast, has AOE shots, can reload by dodging to counter the small magazine size, and his ult is a flying version of the autotargeting Soldier: 76?! This is batshit. It's objectively psycho behavior. I can understand why a person might find that… not fun, a chaos experiment, just twelve croquet balls banging around in a dryer.

I have had the pleasure of speaking with Eric Lang a few times, I even interviewed his as part of a Storytime Keynote at PAX Unplugged once. He told me, and I don't think I'm talking out of school by saying so because he's talked about his process a lot, but he doesn't think "balance" as a cosmic design principle is especially important. It can even impede fun. Marvel Rivals is a game that feels like it adheres to that philosophy. Everybody has toys. Everybody is busted as fuck is some way. The "game" is in countering and carving out a path through that. There's a lot of headroom there, and they just started.

(CW)TB out.