Ever since Marvel Rivals launched last month, the PC modding community has gotten to work creating a litany of content for the shooter, from new skins and model swaps, to fresh beats for Luna Snow to jam out in her ultimate to. But one of the biggest modding communities online has found itself in a firestorm of death threats over the removal of a series of mods that transformed Captain America into top U.S. politicians.
By and large, many of the cosmetic mods for Rivals that have popped up since release are harmless—they’re client-side alterations, rather than server-side, meaning that only players who’ve installed the mod (either the user themselves or others in a match with it installed) will see that you’ve given Spider-Man his Sam Raimi suit, or turned Iron Fist into Deku from My Hero Academia. But despite that, a brouhaha kicked up this week after one of the biggest online mod sites, Nexus Mods, banned a series of mods that swapped out Captain America’s heads for stylized renditions of President-Elect Donald Trump, and current President Joe Biden.
While the mods themselves were removed from Nexus last week on January 2, today the Nexus Mods X account released an extended statement clarifying the decision, after community moderators and site ownership found themselves facing a wave of harassment and death threats over claims of bias and censorship. “In 2020 we updated our Terms of Service to state that we would remove any American political mods from our site,” the statement reads in part. “By removing the Trump mod, we are simply executing our existing file submission policies. What has been overlooked in much of the conversation is that we also removed other mods featuring U.S. Presidents uploaded to the site for Marvel Rivals, such as Biden and Obama.”
“While we have the right to choose what we host on our platform, we are not the authority on what you do or do not decide to mod into your games, and these mods can be found elsewhere on other sites,” the statement concluded, before linking to Nexus Mods’ terms of service page.
Earlier this week in a now-locked Reddit thread criticizing the decision, Nexus Mods owner TheDarkOne noted that several members of the Nexus Mods moderator team had faced abuse for the removal of the Trump mod, while ignoring the similar decision to also take down the Biden version of it. “Case in point, today, with all the nutjobs coming out of the woodwork sending us death threats, calling us pedos and all the other ‘wah wahs’ that come with this ridiculous situation because some YouTuber told them we are only removing Trump mods.”
“It’s so dumb, and these people are so dumb, that I really cannot be fucked with it. I’m not expecting any of my staff to have to handle these whackjobs any more than showing them the door either,” TheDarkOne continued. “So we delete all the mods we see/that get reported to us on the topic, and all the people this upsets can trot-on because it’s really not worth our time or effort to care about.”
Suffice to say, if you want Captain America to dive into some backlines as an actual figure of American politics (and again, it’ll mostly be for your own pleasure rather than whatever poor strategists you’re harassing in-game), you’ll need to get your fix elsewhere. But maybe you should ask yourself if Steve himself would approve before searching those out—and also, why not do something infinitely cooler and have his Marvel vs. Capcom theme play when he uses his ult instead?
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