Marvel Rivals launched last week and fans are flocking to the game crowdsthey also wonder who is their favorite and least favorite character in the shooter hero lineup. Right now the game looks like it’s in a pre-patched state being a truly disordered shooter which has yet to be smoothed out by months of balancing tweaks. These days, few characters are as disordered as Jeff the Land Shark, a hero strategist who, at first glance, is just a silly little boy. However, as Marvel Rivals players have learned that this lucky guy is actually one of the biggest threats in the game and god I hope NetEase keeps him like this forever.
Jeff is a “strategist.” Marvel Rivals the equivalent of a support hero. Most of the time, he sprays water from his mouth to patch up teammates and leaves bubbles filled with healing on the battlefield for players to pass through and regain some of their HP. However, it was his ultimate that became the bane of most players. “It’s Jeff!” creates a huge vortex on the battlefield that Jeff circles around before devouring any player in the area of effect. From here he can do one of several things. It can bite them while swimming, causing minor damage over time. He may spit them out, displacing them. Or he can do what most players have learned to do and send them off the map.
My initial experience with Hungry Jeffs was that players would swallow several enemies and then spit them off the map into the abyss. As Star-Lord’s main character, this wasn’t usually that large of a deal because I could just fly back to safety. However, as more and more players used this strategy, Jeff’s players wised up and realized they had more to gain by diving off the side of the map while their enemies were still trapped than by simply spitting them out and risking them returning to the safety. This has become such a reliable strategy that seemingly every Jeff player uses it, and everyone else wants land shark blood.
While this is currently the most popular strategy, sometimes there is no hole nearby, and some players exploit Jeff’s Ultimate to knock the team off the target or prepare other, more devastating attacks, such as grouping several enemies to throw them into Scarlet Witch’s explosive Ultimate. Regardless of the strategy Jeff’s players exploit, the character’s destructive power contrasted with his charming, humble demeanor made him the butt of many jokes from the game’s community just a few days after release.
We still don’t know how NetEase will balance Marvel Rivals in the future, but part of me hopes it remains a filthy, half-baked hero shooter and “unfair”, “toxic” crap like Jeff’s ultimate stays in the game. Ultimately, it will depend on what the studio wants from the game. Does he want to? Marvel Rivals become a huge esports sensation, or does it want to continue to attract the attention of the everyday gamer who doesn’t break a sweat and just wants to throw their superhero toys at each other? I prefer the latter at this point, and the chaos in Jeff the Land Shark is one of the best examples of this.
