There has apparently been some big conspiracy theory kicking around that NetEase and/or Marvel Games have intentionally be adding fake information into Marvel Rivals updates in order to trick dataminers. Whenever a new update is rolled out, dataminers dive in to see if they can surface information on upcoming roster additions that were not officially announced yet.
Often, future characters would be revealed by what are called "hero tags" in the game's code. Some datamined and leaked information in the past include the addition of the Fantastic Four, Blade, and a variety of X-Men characters. Some of these leaks have obviously come true while others have yet to bear fruit.
Leaks, of any kind, should always be taken with a fair bit of salt or skepticism. There is always a chance that information not meant to be shared publicly is for content that is far away from release, or for content that is just being tested that will never be released.
Due to a few baseless claims that started to circulate, various dataminers started to get paranoid that NetEase was intentionally poisoning the well. That is, dataminers started to spread the conspiracy theory that NetEase was intentionally adding false information into the game code to make it more difficult to determine if the data is legitimate or not.
Still, why not just ask NetEase or Marvel Games if they're adding in fake information to throw off dataminers? That's precisely what IGN did in an interview with Marvel Games executive producer Danny Koo.
(...) you can see that for each character's design actually we come through a very complicated process and we make a lot of concepts, trials, prototypes, development, et cetera. So there could be some information left in the code, and it might mean that we have tried those directions and they may appear or may not appear in our future plans. And whether or not they will appear in our future pipeline is highly depending on what kind of gameplay experience our players would expect in our game.
"If I could have a ten-year plan, it'd be great. But the team experimented with a lot of play styles, heroes. It was like there's someone doing scratch paperwork and then just left a notebook there, and someone [a dataminer] decided to open it with no context."
I pushed a little, asking them point-blank if they were deliberately trolling people. Koo replied, "No. We would rather spend our time developing the actual game."
"If I could have a ten-year plan, it'd be great. But the team experimented with a lot of play styles, heroes. It was like there's someone doing scratch paperwork and then just left a notebook there, and someone [a dataminer] decided to open it with no context."
I pushed a little, asking them point-blank if they were deliberately trolling people. Koo replied, "No. We would rather spend our time developing the actual game."
