Competitive unlocks at account level 15, hero bans kick in once everyone in the lobby is Gold III or higher, and there's still no role queue — team-ups do more to decide your pick than the tier list does.
Competitive unlocks once your account hits level 15 — that's the whole gate, no hero quota and no fee. From there you climb nine ranks, from Bronze to One Above All, and the further up you go the more the mode changes shape: bans appear, duo restrictions kick in, and the hero you queue up with stops being about the tier list and starts being about who else is on your team.
The level-15 requirement is newer than a lot of guides floating around still say. Marvel Rivals launched with competitive open at level 10, and NetEase raised the bar to 15 with the Season 2.0 patch, specifically so new players spend more time learning heroes and maps in Quick Match before they're dropped into ranked lobbies. If you already played a ranked match before that change went live, you kept access below level 15 — but anyone starting fresh now needs the full 15 levels, which usually means 15 to 25 Quick Matches worth of experience first.
Ranked runs on points, not raw win count. You gain points for winning, lose some for losing, and 100 points clears a division — three divisions per rank for the first seven ranks, so a full rank is a 300-point climb.
| Rank | Divisions |
|---|---|
| Bronze | III – I |
| Silver | III – I |
| Gold | III – I |
| Platinum | III – I |
| Diamond | III – I |
| Grandmaster | III – I |
| Celestial | III – I |
| Eternity | single tier |
| One Above All | top 500 players only |
Eternity has no sub-divisions, and One Above All isn't really a rank you climb into — it's a leaderboard cutoff, reserved for the top 500 point totals at season's end. Note that your placement doesn't survive a season change the way your account currency does: check the FAQ on what carries over between seasons for how a rank reset actually plays out, because it's a demotion, not a wipe back to Bronze.
This is the detail that's moved the most across seasons, and it's worth being precise about when. For the first season and a half, ban/pick only applied once every player in the lobby was Diamond rank or above. Season 2.0's patch notes changed that outright: "Pick/ban will now come into play starting from Gold III rather than Diamond tier," opening the phase to a much bigger slice of the ranked population. As of Season 9.5 that Gold III threshold is still what's live — if everyone in your lobby is Gold III or higher, a ban phase runs before hero select, split into two rounds where both teams vote on which heroes to strike from the match. You still pre-select the hero you actually want to play before voting starts, so you don't accidentally torpedo your own pick.
What that means in practice: from Gold III up, you can't assume your best hero will be available, and the heroes worth banning shift every balance patch — whatever's dominating that particular week's meta is usually gone before champ select even opens.
The reason ban priority and pick order don't map cleanly onto a tier list is team-ups. Every hero carries two independent team-up loadouts, each tied to a specific partner hero, and each loadout has a base effect that's always active plus an enhanced effect that only turns on if that partner is actually on your team. With more than a hundred team-up abilities across the roster at this point, a hero that looks mediocre alone can become a priority pick the moment their partner is already locked in — and a "top tier" hero loses a chunk of their value if nobody on the team can trigger their enhanced effect. If you want to swap which team-up loadout you're running mid-match, you have to walk back to spawn and reopen hero select; it doesn't happen on the fly.
This is also why bans get contested picks removed early: banning a hero doesn't just take away their kit, it takes away every team-up that hero could have unlocked for someone else on your side.
Marvel Rivals still doesn't lock you into a role before matchmaking. NetEase has said directly it isn't planning a role queue, wanting to leave team-building — Vanguard, Duelist, Strategist, in whatever mix — up to the players rather than enforcing it. A "2-2-2" split across the three roles is the convention people reach for because it works, but nothing in the client stops six Duelists from queuing together; it's a bad idea, not a blocked one.
Where the game does restrict things is grouping at the top of the ladder, not role choice. From Gold I up through Celestial, teammates queuing together need to be within three divisions of each other. Once you're at Eternity or One Above All, you can only queue solo or in a duo — full pre-made squads aren't allowed that high — and if a Celestial player groups with someone at Eternity+, they need to be within roughly 200 rank points of each other.
A single early leave doesn't sink you: the first time you abandon a match, the game issues a warning without a penalty. From there it escalates — a short lockout from Quick Match and Competitive that lengthens with each repeat offense, climbing toward multi-hour bans for players who keep doing it. Disconnects and AFK players get treated the same as intentional leavers, though a match that falls apart in its opening seconds is voided for everyone rather than punishing the other five players for someone else's crash. Chronic leaving in ranked specifically escalates further than in casual modes, up to being locked out of competitive for a stretch of the season — reason enough to treat a ranked queue as a real commitment once you've hit accept.