The Marvel Rivals community was sent into a frenzy last week after the rumor spread that developer NetEase Games may be planting misleading information in the game’s code to catch leakers — even if there’s little evidence to suggest such a thing is actually happening.Video games sometimes leave behind traces of in-development content as developers work tirelessly to publish updates for the public.
Sleuths known as dataminers spend their time sifting through code to uncover these traces and often report them back to excited fans, with one Marvel Rivals example including references to the Fantastic Four being discovered before their official confirmation earlier this month.
It started with inclusions like Blade and Ultron and quickly ballooned to the point that there are now around 20 names rumored to join the hero shooter’s roster of playable characters.
As the list has grown, players have let the excitement carry them from patch to patch while they wait to see what NetEase has up its sleeve.
That anticipation turned into confusion and suspicion last week.So a bunch of the Rivals leaks are fake lol pic.twitter.com/hzlVvkkx1CAlarm bells rang when Marvel Rivals Leaks Discord user and content creator KeoneSpirit shared a post suggesting that NetEase is using a few elaborate tricks to throw dataminers for a loop.