New website pays players to grief Marvel Rivals cheaters, but it's just making everything worse

We all hate cheaters and griefers. As a longtime League of Legends player and returning Overwatch obsessive, there's nothing worse than loading into a game and getting instantly headshotted by a Widowmaker with an aimbot, or watching your mid-laner run it down as blue Nunu. Bad actors make the entire multiplayer game ecosystem worse, and it often feels like it's not a high priority for developers. I see daily petitions to Riot's head of LoL product Drew 'Just a Capybara' Levin to get players removed (sometimes successfully, other times not so much). I see weekly ban wave reports from various online titans. Still, however, the problem persists, and the latest game that's seen an influx of cheaters is Marvel Rivals.

NetEase's comicbook-inspired hero shooter arrived last year, and I'll happily admit that it replaced Overwatch for me for a good six months. As someone who grew up reading Ghost Rider comics, it was the perfect mashup of the Marvel IP and fast-paced, FPS action, albeit completely unbalanced and unoptimized. However, I've recently dropped off of Marvel Rivals, partly because of Overwatch's surprise resurgence, but also because of cheaters and griefers. Sure, every multiplayer chat has that one guy, but the level of toxicity, mixed with pure aimbotting, has simply grown to be more hassle than it's worth.

That's where new website Intlist (which first appeared on February 23) comes in. "Get paid to throw," it declares, dramatically. "Post a bounty on any thrower. The community queues in, claims it, and earns 80% of the [cash] pool. If you've ever had a ranked game ruined, this is for you."

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Intlist works exactly the way you think it does: players grab clips of the bad actor, including their username. Said clip is then added to Intlist with a cash bounty - an example on X reads "Boosted Grandmaster 2 player in Marvel Rivals playing Rogue only," and includes the player's name as well as a $21 'bounty.' Those looking to cash out will then queue into lobbies where the cheater is playing. Then, they'll throw (intentionally lose) the game to 'punish' said griefer, with the proposed outcome of making them either rage-quit the game entirely or simply think twice about behaving poorly again. It's a morally dubious system for sure: yes, we all hate cheaters, but is effectively bullying another person the best way to deal with it?

The primary focus has been Marvel Rivals as, again to borrow Intlist's words, "Marvel Rivals won't fix EOMM [engagement optimized matchmaking]. They won't punish griefers. They won't protect your ranked games. So we did. Intlist exists because the devs left a gap - and the community filled it. Remove EOMM and actually ban throwers? We'll gladly shut down. Until then, we're not going anywhere." It's a bold statement and an equally bold move, but Intlist's launch hasn't exactly been a smooth one.

On Wednesday February 25, an Intlist representative confirmed on Discord that the team "detected unauthorized access to our database from a single bad actor. They've been identified and banned. A limited number of email addresses tied to bounty posts were exposed. No passwords, payment info, or plaintext IP addresses were compromised - we don't store any of those.

"The site is temporarily offline while we lock everything down - we were not taken down, one person just decided to ruin it for everyone temporarily. We're also working on some upgrades while we're at it." Intlist is still down at the time of writing, with a message that reads "something big is coming" and that the "system [is] being upgraded.

"We're doing some planned downtime to make sure everything is locked down and ready to go for what's next. We're building something great and can't wait to show you."

Now do I think this is the right response? Not particularly. Do I see why it's happened? Absolutely. Cheaters ruin games: it's a fact, and it's annoying. But Intlist just makes the problem worse. Reddit agrees, calling it "braindead" and "transcendentally stupid." A post calling for the website's removal has over 150 upvotes.

I truly believe that it's nice to be nice. Yes, griefing isn't nice, but responding to aggression with more aggression doesn't make anything better - that's why I've not linked out to Intlist here. Instead, it just makes the whole ecosystem worse. Every game under the sun has a report function: use it, take some deep breaths, and move on. It's better for your mental health.