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If you've played an online, team-based multiplayer game like Marvel Rivals, chances are you've come across a thrower. A thrower is someone who purposefully plays badly so that their team loses. It's a mindset that doesn't really make sense to me if you have a fully developed frontal cortex (though I would suspect that there are plenty of throwers out there who are fully grown adults, sadly) or played team sports in real life, but it's unfortunately a reality that Marvel Rivals players have had to contend with, the same way that Overwatch and Valorant players have before them. 

While there's a system in place in Marvel Rivals to report players for throwing, it is apparently not enough for some players. As IGN reports, a player called EchoRivals created a website called Intlist.org where gamers can place a "bounty" on other players they believe to be throwers. The site promises an "80% payout" for players who claim the bounty and then "successfully throw matches in retaliation." In other words, Intlist provides a place for gamers to get paid for throwing matches against alleged throwers. 

Obviously, there are a lot of problems with something like this. First of all, it is "free to post" on the site, meaning that players who don't throw are also at risk of having a bounty placed on them by someone with malicious intent.

On the Inlist X account, they posted "Collateral damage is an unfortunate reality of war." Okay. 

The IGN article notes that a Reddit user has reported that they've been caught in more sabotaged matches since the site went up, and I can attest from my own experience as someone who regularly plays competitive Marvel Rivals that I've also seen an uptick in throwers over the last few days. It isn't fun. 

So, what do these games end up looking like when two groups of throwers are pitted against each other? It looks a lot like this:

The heart symbol in the middle signifies the number of times that a player got knocked out in the match, while the crossed weapons symbol to the left of it is the number of times that the player knocked out an opponent. It goes without saying that it's not normal for a competitive Marvel Rivals player to get KO'd more than 20 times in a match, much less upwards of 50, and if you watch the match's replay, it's obvious that there are multiple players on each time throwing from the get-go by jumping off ledges to their deaths (the replay ID is 10369680696 in case you want to see for yourself). There's also the fact that some of the players in the match are literally called "thrower" and "send 5 I throw," along with names meant to sound like practice AI bots like "Adam-Very Hard."

As of this time of writing, the site is still up. It's not currently known if Marvel Rivals developer NetEase is planning to take action against the site. For everyone involved, I beg you to try a different hobby. Birdwatching is fun. 

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