Marvel Rivals has been expectedly rolling out swimsuit skins for all its characters for pretty much the entire summer. Fans were annoyed that of all characters, Storm, who lacks a lot of skins in total, wasn’t initially on the list. And when she finally arrived? Her higher-tier skin looked less impressive than the ones below her. That drew enough complaints that developer NetEase has been forced to act.

NetEase issued a statement about what they are planning to do about the situation:

1) We will be upgrading the Sacred Skies swimsuit costume to Legendary for free in the near future. This upgrade will include an all-new lobby animation and an updated MVP animation. The costume will still be sold at the current price of $16.

2) Players who purchase the costume will receive a free Ultimate effect upgrade.

3) We want to ensure the community that there will be more Storm Legendary tier Costumes coming, so please keep your eyes on the skies over the rest of the year.

The post goes on to say that while they understand how passionate everyone is about this, harassment of its developers, which has been happening, is “not acceptable.” Some players are saying that NetEase shouldn’t have given in to this, which could be interpreted as harassment producing results, but here we are.

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There’s no timeline on when these changes will be made, but it’s clear NetEase did not expect this reaction or have any of this ready. Marvel Rivals has already introduced 20 different summer skins, honestly, pretty equal opportunity between the men and women in terms of the well-selling, revealing outfits. Most hero-based games do summer skins at this point, but Marvel Rivals’ art style makes them more well-designed than most.

Marvel Rivals remains a top-performing game 1.5 years after its initial release. It has not only retained a consistent player count for at least a year now; this summer it has noticeably gone up. It easily reaches over 100,000 concurrent players on Steam alone every night, even weekdays. The launch of season 9 in July spiked that to over 200,000.

Rivals is an extremely rare success in the cutthroat live service PvP genre, very much ripping off aspects of Overwatch (also performing well as of late) but with a third-person view, Marvel IP, and a frankly stunning pace of new character releases, one a month. After a year and a half, Marvel Rivals already has 53 playable heroes, getting more into MOBA territory than hero shooters ( Overwatch has 45 heroes since its release in 2016). And while there are always balance issues, this pace of release has not destabilized the game, as seen by its consistent and now increasing player count. Very impressive.

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