What Do Upvotes Do in Marvel Rivals?

Packed full of great Marvel characters and cool locations ripped right out of the comics, Marvel Rivals is an excellent team-based action game. There’s so much in the game that when you’re just getting started it’s hard to figure out what it all means. One such element is the upvote, which allows you to give a thumbs-up to your teammates after each match. It’s something you might have seen in other games with varying effects, but you might be wondering what its purpose is here. What do upvotes do in Marvel Rivals, anyway?

What do upvotes do in Marvel Rivals?

While Marvel Rivals takes a lot of cues from Overwatch, it diverges in many ways. One of those ways, unfortunately, is in how it handles its upvoting system. In Overwatch, both the voter and the recipient get a little experience point boost. Not much, but a little incentive and reward. You won’t get anything like that in Marvel Rivals. By and large, upvotes do nothing tangible in the game outside of earning some achievements. It’s just a little way to show appreciation for your teammates after a match, or for yourself. Yes, you can upvote yourself. Well, being loved starts with loving oneself, as they say.

This feels like a system that could and perhaps should change in the future. As it stands, it comes off like a mostly pointless feature that is only here because other games do it. Time will tell if some kind of motivation is added to the game to encourage people to keep upvoting. Without it, this feature isn’t very important at all outside of showing a tiny slice of kindness. Hey, maybe that’s the real heroic act after all!

Marvel Rivals is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X, and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store.