Changing role after a death costs 4.3 points of your next fights in Marvel Rivals

With no role queue, every player in a Marvel Rivals match can be asked to swap. One r/marvelrivals thread asked why everyone sticks to their main and refuses to counter-swap, and the replies pushed back that a swap has a price.

On the record

if i tried to play a tank outside the two i mentioned, id just be bad

I make Counterwatch, and the app records what every player in a tracked lobby does after each death, stay on the hero or swap, and who wins the next up to 3 decisive fights of that round. That makes it possible to put a number on that price.

Each swap is held against a stay on the same hero, after dying to the same enemy, in a fight that went the same way. Stayers win 46.0% of the next fights and same-role swappers 43.4%, over 1,088,056 swaps. Role changes are 400,901 more, at 41.5% against 45.8%.

People swap more when a match is going badly, and teams that are behind lose more fights, so the comparison above could partly be that. So I held the match's kill score equal at the moment of the death. Across all swaps the gap falls from -3.46 to -2.55. Being behind explains about a quarter of it, and the rest is there when the score is level or in your favour.

Players 10 or more kills ahead have no reason to think they're losing, and they still lose 1.96 points by swapping.

For uploaders the app also knows how long they've played each hero in tracked matches over the last 90 days. Set against the uploaders' own stays, swapping to a hero with under 30 minutes costs 5.7 points, and one with 5 hours or more costs 1.8. This cut can't hold the match score equal, so some of the gap may be people trying something else in a match they've given up on.

Eternity has 2 swaps and is left out.

Of 3,073 matchups, 94.4% sit within 3 points of what that hero usually does after a death. Only 119 of 1,520 swaps, read by role, killer and swap target, beat staying.

A swap that answers the enemy can pay. Duelists going to Namor after dying to Spider-Man gain 1.8 points, the rare positive, while strategists making the same swap lose 5.1.

Before any of this data existed I wrote down the matchups that should read as hard counters. All three of Wolverine's came out the wrong way round: players who stay after dying to him do better than usual, against nearly everyone. That reads more like something about Wolverine himself than his victims, and I can't yet say what. These per-matchup numbers aren't in the app.

The score-held cost is the same, -2.5. Role queue means almost nobody there changes role mid-match, so the role-change cost is the Marvel Rivals part of this.