Currently enjoying an enormous player base, the surprisingly sticky Marvel Rivals is presently sitting pretty, the envy of many in the industry. Fan hype is high, as is anticipation for future heroes. But in a fascinating situation, some in the community have become convinced that developer NetEase is responsible for the recent deluge of seemingly too-good-to-be-true hero leaks as a way of aggressively exposing leakers.
IGN delves into the long and complex story in far greater depth, but we'll try to summarize it for brevity. Following the leak and accurate prediction that the Fantastic Four would be included before their official confirmation, leakers and data miners have been scrutinized more closely. Conventional wisdom in the community suggests that around 20 additional characters are coming to the game, but some think the list of leaked heroes looks somewhat suspicious.
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On the fan-run Marvel Rivals Leaks Discord, user and content creator KeoneSpirit claims to have heard from sources that NetEase intentionally created "fake characters to catch leakers" in the code. The list of characters is largely ridiculous and doesn't inspire a tremendous amount of credibility. Nevertheless, Keone says they'd "been" told the following characters are "very likely fake."
- Quicksilver
- Professor X
- Cyclops
- Colossus
- Paste-Pot Pete
- Jia Jing
- Gambit
- Rogue
- Nightcrawler
- Jubilee
- Beast
- Locus
- Crystal
Others in the data mining community are less convinced NetEase is faking it, citing the amount of work the developers would need to do in order to convincingly create voice lines, events, and gameplay tags. We suppose we'll know one way or the other if extremely low-key characters like Paste-Pot Pete and Locus start turning up.