We're just days away from Marvel Rivals Season 3.5, and with it comes a bunch of new stuff, including Blade, a limited-time event, and a ton of changes to competitive play, some of which may make matches slightly easier for low-elo players.
There's a long list of competitive adjustments in the latest patch notes for Marvel Rivals. In keeping with other updates, there's ranked rewards up for grabs, including an Emerald Blade costume for those who reach Gold rank and above, as well as some new nameplate frames for Diamond and Platinum, plus additional crests for GM, Celestial, Eternity, and One Above All.
The real shift comes with a new matchmaking adjustment, which sees new rules for queuing in competitive. "Players in Bronze, Silver, and Gold can queue for competitive in any team size except 5-player teams," the patch notes say. This means a Bronze player could queue alongside up to three Gold players, massively improving their capacity to rank up.
You see, you don't just rank up depending on whether you win or lose a game in Marvel Rivals—there are also other conditions which the game takes into account, like your rank compared to other players in your team and those you play against. If you're one of the only Bronze players in a predominantly Gold lobby, your rank will skyrocket if you win.
There are also changes for higher elos. Plat, Diamond, and GM players can queue for ranked in teams of up to three other players, and Celestial, Eternity, and One Above All can group up with one other player. But this will likely have less of an impact on ranked progression, as it's already pretty minimal when you're close to the top.
But the best parts of this small competitive update are the adjustments to disconnection penalties and compensation: "If any player disconnects during loading, ban/pick phase, hero select, or within the first 70 seconds of a match, the match is deemed invalid. The disconnected player receives a T1 Penalty that scales with repeated offences and penalty count increases. For other players, the match ends with no result or penalty."
There's no worse feeling than arriving at the first team fight with one less player, knowing that there's almost no chance you're going to come out of the skirmish on top.
But a disconnect isn't always due to someone rage-quitting—it can also be down to connectivity issues, which are sometimes remedied within the span of a match. So this update now adds a more holistic approach to disconnected players, adding more situations to what counts as a valid and an invalid match.
Now, if a player disconnects after 70 seconds and does not reconnect before the match ends, the team affected by the leaver will receive "rank point compensation". But if the player manages to reconnect before the match ends, it's a different story: if their team wins, everyone gets the normal settlement, and no penalty is dished out. But if their team loses, their teammates will receive compensation and the player in question will receive a penalty "based on disconnect-to-reconnect time, but no competitive matchmaking ban."
If this all seems far too convoluted, then just check out the new compensation table, which NetEase has shared, as it explains all the situations and repercussions that players could encounter. The gist of it is that players no longer need to worry about whether there's a leaver on their team—it'll be taken into consideration and won't likely count negatively towards your rank level.
