Evidence mounts that Marvel Rivals stealthily places losing players in bot matches, and I know because I'm the loser

pcgamer.com:

You might've seen rumblings over the holidays that Marvel Rivals is serving players easy bot matches when they go on a losing streak. That's the sort of claim I usually take with a grain of salt in competitive shooters—yes, bots masquerading as real players are unfortunately common in some of the most popular games around (especially in battle royales and mobile games), but it's also true that players often misidentify actual humans as bots to explain why their team is underperforming.

That was not the case with Reddit user ciaranxy's lengthy post on the Marvel Rivals subreddit called «Everything You Need to Know About Marvel Rivals' Secret Quickplay Bots.» They were not crying bot as a coping mechanism or to complain about teammates, but laying out the results of over a week of testing. ciaranxy determined that Rivals is more than happy to throw losing players a bone by giving them some easy bots to stomp on, alongside a specific set of rules the bots follow:

It's those guidelines that got me curious. I've seen enough questionable clips of «human» Rivals players online to suspect NetEase is throwing bots into the mix sometimes, but is it really serving up entire bot lobbies to boost engagement? If all it takes is going on a losing streak, I could just try it for myself.

So I played a few normal matches, making sure to watch enemy and team behavior for anything sus. After every game I checked my match history and viewed every player's career profile to check against ciaranxy's description of bots: Most real profiles were public, some had set their privacy set to Limited, and none were Restricted. Checking account level was a bit trickier. Public profiles show the number, but if I wanted a peek at a private account level, I had to get killed by them and check their nametag on the killcam. All accounts I saw were past level one.

Despite being pretty ass at Rivals, I was having trouble going on a losing streak, so I did the only thing I could do to sabotage our team