Explaining the Marvel Rivals Winter Celebration Patch Notes Backlash
Marvel Rivals released their first event and first post-release patch notes and it’s gotten very mixed reactions from players. Let’s talk about the fun part first: The event is a Winter Celebration that starts Dec 20th, today, at 11 PM PST. There’ll be a new Game Mode called Jeff’s Winter Splash Festival where the goal is to take your team of Jeffs and splash the entire map with your snow to win.
It’s Splatoon, essentially.
All of Jeff’s attacks will help you cover the arena with more snow while also damaging your enemies. You can still just go all out and kill the enemy team but the goal is still to cover the most amount of ground with your snow.
The best part of this event is that we’re getting this new game mode and a free skin for Jeff just for logging in. Groot and Rocket Raccoon will have holiday skins available in the store as well but only from December 20th to January 10th. Venom and Magik will also have their own winter season skins in store from December 27th to January 17th.
The Winter Celebration is set to end January 9th next year so you’ll have plenty of time to play this silly little game mode.
The event update comes with a quality of life patch and it’s all detailed in the Marvel Rivals’ blog. As great as some of the bug fixes are, there’s one particular update that players are unhappy with.
Previously this week, players found out a way to disable mouse acceleration on PC and fix stutters and improve FPS. Just in case you’re not familiar with mouse acceleration, it’s a setting in a game that changes the speed of your crosshair and cursor based on how fast and far you move your mouse.
So if you’ve noticed that your aim has felt off, this might be why.
Unfortunately, Marvel Rivals doesn’t have an option in the game settings menu to turn this feature off. So to actually get rid of mouse acceleration, as instructed by Steam user RWND, you have to go into where the game’s file location is, navigate to the config folder, create a file named “input.ini” in the same folder and paste a specific script.
You’d load up the game and get to play without any mouse effects. However, it appears that in this Winter Celebration patch, the ability to use this ini file has gone away. Several people on Steam and Reddit have complained about their files not working so it’s safe to assume that adjusting configs is disabled.
When reports of this ini file fix went viral this week, the community manager posted in the official Marvel Rivals Discord channel to not modify any game files. The official post from James, the CM said, “At this time, we kindly advise against modifying any game files in Marvel Rivals, as it may lead to unexpected issues. We truly appreciate your concerns about config file changes, and we want you to know that we’re actively working on optimizing this aspect for future updates. Thank you so much for your understanding and support!”
This statement was posted December 17th, two days before the patch went live. Now there wasn’t anything specifically stated in the patch notes that config files could no longer be used, but players haven’t been able to get them to work.
Another post from the community discord was uploaded onto Reddit earlier today with instructions on how to adjust mouse acceleration in players’ Windows Settings. This was met with disappointed replies from Reddit users who claimed this didn’t solve the issue and were irritated there was no mention of the config files being unusable now.
The post did state that NetEase was planning to introduce the option to disable mouse acceleration in Season 1 but that also seemed to upset fans since they were wondering why this wasn’t included at launch.
Another quick odd thing about this Winter Celebration event is that there’s a giveaway event running from December 20th to the 22nd where players can potentially get a free costume bundle for any hero of their choice. The requirement? Get really really lucky.
Essentially, during specific time frames, players wanting to get a giveaway will have to queue into Quick Match and hope to get in a lobby with the streamer who’s playing during that hour window. Each day will have two streamers live at the same specific time but only for an hour.
If you do get lucky and get your prize, it’ll be confirmed with the in-game mail system and ask you to choose a skin bundle as your reward. Your bundle should arrive in the next five business days.
It’s an interesting giveaway system that I’ve never seen. Usually with giveaways or reward drops, you just need to watch a streamer for a certain amount of time, sometimes hours. However, NetEase is requiring players to actually queue into matches to get their reward.
It’s a good way to boost player numbers and look really good for charts since dozens of players will be attempting to get free skin bundles. It does feel a bit odd that you’re essentially just having to get lucky with the other hundreds of players queuing in, to get a glimpse of the streamer who’s live that day. Having more players load in means diluting the pool even further with lesser chances of queuing into the same lobby as the designated streamer.
Overall, it’ll be fun to play the new game mode and get my free Jeff skin, but there’s a lot this Winter Celebration seems to bring more confusion amongst players than anything else currently.
