Marvel Rivals’ Creator World Cup Championship took place over the weekend, and with a $300,000 prize pool on the line creators from around the world banded together to compete for first place. Team AMER United ended up winning top spot and the $75,000 that went with it, but their win has been slightly overshadowed by some emerging drama.
It all surrounds a professional player named Warn and the rest of Team Canada, which included aramori, Dokibird, Fanfan, xQc, and Surefour. This gist of it is Warn doesn’t play as much Rivals as the rest of the team, was asked to switch heroes by his team and didn’t. It doesn’t sound too bad, but as others on the team will attest there was money to be had not just for the teams who placed on the podium, so every win helped.
“I got Zazza’d in a tournament 10x the prize pool as Basim,” aramori says. “Kingsman was so much meaner and got a bajillion followers.”
If that sounds familiar, that’s because this has happened before, specifically in a creator-led Marvel Rivals tournament. Anyone remember the name Zazza? I sure do, but that’s because my gamertag is just one letter off hers. That meant any match I went into for the couple weeks after the incident I was met with some wise-guy asking me if I was going to stick on sniper and suck ass for the rest of the game. Little did they know there’s no ‘if’ about it.
But I digress. Zazza may sound familiar to some because of the drama that swirled around a $40,000 tournament after one player refused to actually try and made fun of Kingsman, their teammate who actually wanted to try and win matches.
It’s certainly a little strange that this keeps happening. Although, I suppose this comes with the territory when gathering players with vastly different levels of ability, investment, and streamer income. These prize-pools and tournament wins can be worth more to some than others.
The situation took another turn for the worse post tourney after a clip circulated around of Warn blaming his teammates, saying he’d previously won a couple of tournaments with xQc. Although he has since apologised and explained how that clip had been taken out of context: “that out of context clip has nothing to do with them being women, and they’re all incredible players.”
Regardless of how it played out during the tournament, from what I saw it seemed like NetEase didn’t put a great deal of time into balancing the team comps or even organising the event with Warn explaining that the invitation was last minute. It also doesn’t help that in NetEase trying to widen its audience it brought in some creators who don’t play Rivals anywhere near as much as others, again meaning the playing field wasn’t exactly balanced. Hopefully, the next Rivals tournament won’t see any more drama, although that’s likely wishful thinking.
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