I guess, when Marvel Rivals opened up the new Annihilation mode with 18 players allowed to fight each other without limitation, chaos reigned, right? Every single participant was matched against another. And the new mode’s playing styles could not be more different. The divisive tweet from the game’s secondary account regarding a team consisting of a single tank combined with a lot of damage dealers and healers surrounds the situation quite accurately. It said: ‘Solo tanking with seventeen other people on the team.’ Of course, the feedback? They were the hottest retelling of the whole conflict.
In case you did not want to be informed about the superhero shooter, here is the very quick summary: Marvel Rivals has turned upside down the switch for the new Annihilation mode, which is an 18-player free-for-all on a tight map. No one must be on a team, no one must follow any rules, and everyone must spawn randomly and fight everyone else. The mode was made to be what the developers described as ‘silly enjoyment.’ But just as the tweet and its mountain of reactions suggest, every gamer has their own definition of silly fun depending on their conflict styles.
The primary conflict in the community is a very straightforward one: Should we even attempt to play a proper team composition in this mode? The gamer community is perfectly split. Those at one end are like, let’s say, Terriermon, who replied: ‘It’s not a competition, man. Just have fun. Winning and numbers don’t matter.’ At the same time, Brickman0819 was really blunt when he declared, ‘I’ve always believed that 18v18 should not be taken in such a serious manner… Choose your character and just have fun.’ The latter group argues that Annihilation is a playground, where one can have fun with bizarre picks or simply watch the spectacle of 18 ultimates exploding simultaneously. Can you imagine 18 Squirrel Girls summoning their gigantic squirrels at once?? Total, jaw-dropping chaos.
But… one can always rely on the other side. They shoo the lone tank player. For them, selecting a tank in this mode is what a player named XenosGift described: ‘frustrating and useless.’ Their argument is quite logical: tanks have large hitboxes, they are usually slow, and in a mode where you are being shot from a dozen different directions, their endurance does not count much when there is no one to cover them. An anonymous user named ronin provided the strategic reasoning: ‘Tanks don’t bring enough to the table in this game mode without being hard pocketed. Their hitboxes are too large and most of them are too slow to get kills as quickly as a DPS.’
This controversy also had an impact on the choice of characters. While most people were of the opinion that only a few tanks should be able to prevail, one player called El Grando Smokio said, ‘Peni and Hulk are the only ones you can run pretty well in that gamemode tbh,’ while another player named Zane Thurman backed with the stories of victories: ‘I got MVP with Thor yesterday, he’s born for that mode.’ The difference in experience, even among tanks, is only a further support to the argument.
Moreover, the online gaming debates could not happen without a bit of… seasoning. A post ridiculed the original poster’s character skin: ‘You’re getting what you deserve for purchasing that awful skin.’ Ouch. Another user recounted a toxic episode when he was ‘called all sorts of horrible names for going 20-6 on Spider-Man’ despite the fact that he was just learning the map. This shows the real problem: when players with different philosophies for the same mode meet, it quite often leads to anger. One side is there for a casual, chaotic fight. The other side is there to take first place on the leaderboard. And the twain shall never meet.
Haha! What was I saying? Oh, yes… the mode itself. It really does seem to be very interesting, as the developers have very clearly made it a cork, a temporary relief from the strategic, teamwork-heavy nature of Quick Play and Ranked. It’s like the popcorn movie of gaming—it’s not supposed to be overly processed and scrutinized. But gamers, being gamers, will overanalyze everything. They’ll drain all the fun by optimizing it if you let them do it. The discussion even went as far as imagining what could be, one player asking, ’18 v 18 objective map would go crazy though.’ Notice, even when confronted with the least intellectual kind of fun, the community’s mind is already working on how to make it structured and competitive.
So, what does it signify for us? If I were to be truthful, I would say it is probably exactly what you’d expect from the PlayStation and Xbox gaming communities.
