How Do You Solve a Problem Like Luna Snow?

Marvel Rivals has been in a bit of a rut lately. Seasons come and go for hero shooters, and with them a rise and fall in popularity, especially the longer into their live-service life they go. Rivals has done very well for itself in general, especially driven by a monthly cadence of updates bringing new heroes and changes to the game, but recently that's not felt like the case.

More and more balance concerns from the community—building out of a radical overhaul of the game's character team-up system in season 9, granting a whole new suite of abilities to every character that has generally made the roster flatten out any of its individual weaknesses, especially support characters—have led to a high-survibability meta where fights and matches last for an eternity. The current tenth season only launched with a singular hero instead of two—Gorr the God-Butcher, a DPS in a game with too many DPSes that landed last month with barely an impact—citing development focus on PvE modes tying into Avengers: Doomsday, and with a midseason balance update that did little to shake things up, the game has been in a very flat state for quite a while, and draining players in the process.

Then there's the community itself. Online drama is part and parcel of any fandom, but Rivals feels like it's cranked up that toxicity to another level, as irate players and content creators turn on each other to try and farm drama out of every possible situation in and out of the game. And the game isn't really helping on that front: one particular focus in recent months has been a general concern over what players perceive as biases in character selection for new skins, the lifeblood of any live-service hero shooter. Fantastic Four fans have been up in arms that Johnny Storm is now the only character in the roster without a legendary-quality skin (which usually brings lavish extra VFX for abilities with it).

Black fans in general have bemoaned that Rivals' already meager number of Black characters don't get the spotlight with new skins, especially Storm, who weathered a controversy NetEase was forced to apologize for over the summer when she was the only character in a series of legendary-tier swimsuit skins to receive an epic-tier skin (the studio promised updates to bump the skin up to legendary; two months later that update has yet to arrive). Meanwhile, the same handful of characters seem to get the bulk of new skins, and one character in particular: the icy songstress support hero Luna Snow, who has held the title of having the most legendary skins in the game consistently, regardless of where she sits in the game's meta (usually quite highly).

You would think, then, that all these issues would have an angered, bored playerbase turning their sights on the developers of Rivals in particular. While some are, many aren't.

Instead, they're turning their sights on Luna Snow.