‘Marvel Rivals’ May Be Planting Fake Character Leaks To Fool Us

I’ll be honest, in covering the increasingly high number of leaked characters coming out through datamining of new Marvel Rivals updates, things have gone a bit wonky. As it stands at the beginning of season 1, there are allegedly 22 different heroes that are coming to the game. Given that there will now be two characters per three month season, we are supposedly almost at seeing almost three full years of content laid out in front of us.

Now, there’s a debate among leakers about whether or not Marvel Rivals developer NetEase may be planting fake names and information in the data that’s being mined in order to throw off these leakers and all the reporting on those leaks.

This showed up in the Marvel Leak Discord channel from leaker Keone who said:

“Hello everyone, it has come to our attention that the devs have set up characters to catch leakers, not only the ones in the code – but potentially insider sources, too. Kang will probably explain this more as we go on, but here is the current list as far as we can figure out.”

It’s not fully clear how they came this conclusion, but he posted a list of what they believe are real leaks, and what are “plants.” The list:

REAL: Ultron, Blade, Jean Grey, Emma Frost, Captain Marvel, Hit Monkey, Angela, The Hood, Valkyrie, MODOK, Valkyrie

FAKE: Locus, Quicksilver, Cyclops, Professor X, Colossus, Paste-Pot Pete, Gambit Rogue, Nightcrawler, Beast, Jubilee and two other characters I don’t recognize.

As someone covering this for a while, I will note that the first group are characters that have leaked much earlier than the new batch below, especially that new crop of X-Men which was posted as recently as this past week. That could indicate that NetEase was not amused about the actual leaks, and then started planting fake leaks in the code after. And again, as someone who has covered many leaks in the past, a hero shooter having actual data about 22 full characters for three years of content in the backend at season 1 does not make a ton of sense to me.

However, this has been pushed back on by other leakers, including the XOXLEAK team, who said that this would be a pretty elaborate fake, as it’s not just passing mentions of these heroes in the files, there are actual ability tables in there as well which are more in-depth. Though again, that may be fake. The XOX team also admits that it may not be the case that all of these are for-sure coming even if the information is not planted.

As much as it sounds like a conspiracy theory, I may actually believe the fake leaks theory. Why?

• The fake list was almost entirely reported after the original list went live, indicating that may be something cooked up by NetEase in response to that happening.
• The fake list contains a few different hyper-obscure characters that seem potentially unlikely to arrive. There are also situations like, why would you need Locus and Nightcrawler when both are teleporters? And I just cannot believe this game is going to add Paste-Pot Pete, a character no one has ever heard of and is super ridiculous as one half of the characters in a season. But he does have a move table.
• Finally, it just seems ludicrous to me that a full 22 heroes for almost three years of planned content would be leaking this early. Even adding two per season, it is hard to believe that they would put all this in the game now.

We may not find out if this is fake or not for a while, but if these leaks keep coming adding even more to the pile, I’m going to be increasingly suspicious.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.