Counterwatch vs Blitz for Marvel Rivals: what happened and what to use instead

Short version: Blitz was banned from Marvel Rivals by NetEase. If you are searching for an alternative to Blitz for MR: especially an overlay or companion app that actually helps you pick heroes: Counterwatch is the Overwolf-sanctioned option that stays on the right side of NetEase's third-party policy. This post walks through what Blitz did that got it banned, why that ban matters for your account, and what Counterwatch does differently.

What happened to Blitz for Marvel Rivals

Blitz, the Overwolf-adjacent assistant app that also supports titles like League of Legends, Valorant, and Apex Legends, launched Marvel Rivals support shortly after the game released. NetEase subsequently banned it.

The public reason, per NetEase's announcement about third-party plugins: Blitz injects itself into the Marvel Rivals game process, which let it pull real-time information the developers consider confidential, including in-match damage and healing statistics for players you are not supposed to have direct stats on.

NetEase's statement framed Blitz as cheating software. They specifically called out:

Live damage and healing stats pulled from the game process.
Selective hero banning advantages beyond what the game's own pick-ban system provides.
Ultimate ability prediction tools.

Whether you personally think any of those three things constitute cheating is beside the point for a practical user. What matters: NetEase banned the app, and using an unofficial re-release or a workaround puts your account at risk.

Why the ban matters for players

If you land on this post because you installed Blitz, or because you are searching for it to install, read this section before anything else.

Running software that the game publisher has formally banned opens you up to an account action. Marvel Rivals is tied to a NetEase account, and NetEase can and does ban for third-party software use. Even if the ban wave is unevenly applied, the long-term risk is real. The safer read is: do not run Blitz with Marvel Rivals running. Do not install unofficial patched versions. Do not trust forum threads that claim "it's fine again now."

If you already installed Blitz, uninstalling it cleanly is the cheap action. Overwolf apps: which is a different category of third-party software: use a game-approved event stream rather than injecting, and NetEase has treated those separately.

How Counterwatch is different

Counterwatch is a Windows desktop app distributed via Overwolf. That distinction matters.

Overwolf does not inject into the game process. It reads game events through an officially supported pipeline that both Blizzard (for Overwatch) and NetEase (for Marvel Rivals) have explicitly green-lit for third-party companion apps. That is why apps like Counterwatch and the Marvel Rivals Tracker can legitimately display live match info without triggering the bans NetEase applied to Blitz.

Concretely, Counterwatch:

Uses the Overwolf game-events API for live data, not process injection.
Does not display confidential stats NetEase has flagged as restricted. It does not show live damage or healing numbers for players you should not have that info on.
Does not provide ultimate-prediction tooling of the kind NetEase cited in the Blitz ban.
Focuses on community-aggregated pre-match and mid-match pick decisions: counter picks, synergy pairings, team-up combinations, map-specific hero stats.

Nothing Counterwatch does puts your NetEase account at risk. The app is listed on Overwolf's public store. The data shown is aggregated from opted-in players over many matches, not pulled from the enemy team's live process state.

What Counterwatch offers instead

If you were looking at Blitz for the overlay and companion-app feature set, here is what the Counterwatch app gives you within NetEase-approved boundaries:

An in-game overlay that reads enemy picks live and surfaces counter picks, swap suggestions, and win-chance predictions for your current lineup.
A second-screen window for players with a secondary monitor: the same data, more space, no overlap with the game.
Community win rates at the tier-list level, per hero, filterable by rank (Bronze through Eternity) and mode.
Hero-vs-hero matchup data: the counter edge every hero has against every other hero, aggregated across tens of thousands of tracked matches.
Synergy and team-up pair data: which heroes win more when picked together, including coverage of the team-up bonus system.
A team builder that scores full lineups using counter, synergy, and map-performance weights.
Per-map hero stats so you can see how a hero actually performs on the specific map you loaded into.

All of that is free.

When something other than Counterwatch is the right call

Credit where it is due: Counterwatch is not a profile-lookup or personal-stats tool. If what you want is "how many eliminations did I get on this hero last session" or "what is my K/D trend across my last 20 matches," that is the territory where the Marvel Rivals Tracker app by Tracker Network sits. We have a longer comparison post covering that use case specifically.

If what you want is a NetEase-approved pre-match and mid-match companion for picking heroes better, that is the Counterwatch app. The tool matches the job.

TL;DR

Blitz was banned from Marvel Rivals by NetEase for injecting into the game process and exposing confidential stats.
Installing or running Blitz with Marvel Rivals puts your NetEase account at risk of ban.
Counterwatch is an Overwolf app that operates entirely through NetEase-sanctioned data paths. It does not inject, it does not expose confidential mid-match stats, and it focuses on community-aggregated pick decisions rather than real-time per-player information.
If you installed Blitz, uninstall it. If you wanted Blitz's overlay + companion features, install Counterwatch instead.

For the full write-up on how Counterwatch builds its community numbers and what the data actually contains, see the methodology page. For the live tools, the MR team builder and tier list both work in a browser without any install.