Technologies

Marvel Rivals Season 2: Here Are Emma Frost’s Abilities

Emma Frost is joining the Rivals roster in season 2 as a vanguard with a set of abilities that change depending on her form.

Marvel Rivals players are getting invited to the shores of Krakoa for the start of season 2 on April 11. The game dropped the first trailer for the new season, giving us our first official look at the new heroes, and a developer vision video dropped major news about the future of hero releases.

The trailer features Emma Frost, wearing slightly more clothes than usual, inviting people from across Rivals’ various timelines to the mutant nation of Krakoa, where everyone gets dressed up for a fancy gala — even Wolverine puts on a white tux. The event, however, is unceremoniously interrupted when Ultron shows up preaching extermination.

Emma Frost abilities revealed

Emma Frost joins the roster as a vanguard who can project a shield forward, give herself damage reduction by going into her diamond form and also choke-slam people while insulting them. We got a glimpse at her abilities in her hero trailer and a streamer event on Friday confirmed her full kit.

In Frost’s default form, her primary fire is a beam with damage that ramps up over time and her alternate fire projects a barrier forward. In her normal form, Frost has a Psychic Spear ability that pulls an enemy’s sentience into a crystal form, damaging them by attacking and shattering the crystal.

However, all of these abilities change when Frost transforms into her diamond form, which gives her damage reduction and makes her unstoppable. In diamond form, her primary fire turns into a punch and her alt fire kicks enemies back, dealing extra damage if they hit a wall. Diamond-form Frost can no longer attack people’s sentience but she can lunge forward to grab enemies and slam them into the ground.

Her Psyonic Seduction ultimate has different effects. It damages and stuns enemies in range and locks them out of activating ultimate abilities. Additionally, enemies who are caught in the blast for long enough will be psychically compelled to move toward Frost, making it easier for her to grab them, kick them, slam them, etc. Rivals devs have seen the players’ thirst and seem to be leaning heavily into it.

Ultron is coming in the season 2.5 update, which should be in late May.

Team-up changes and other season 2 balance adjustments

Some team-ups are changing in season 2, including three new team-up abilities that were previewed in the newest developer vision video.

Emma Frost allows Magneto and Psylocke to create illusions of themselves.
Doctor Strange teams up with Scarlet Witch allowing her to use small portals to seemingly increase her damage output via a rapid-shooting alternate fire.
Cap finally teams up with Bucky, allowing the Winter Soldier to leap to allies.

A few existing team-ups are getting adjustments, with Psylocke, Winter Soldier and Doctor Strange being removed from older team-ups in favor of new ones, and Namor is moving from working with Luna’s anchor to Hulk’s to empower his squids with gamma energy. Two team-ups are being removed entirely: Magneto can no longer team up with Scarlet Witch, and Thor is no longer anchoring Cap and Storm.

Rivals announced the full list of season 2 balance changes, including buffs to Peni, Mister Fantastic and Moon Knight, with Strange losing some damage for more survivability (via his new anchor buff) and Rocket getting several adjustments, while Loki and Adam Warlock receive nerfs to their Regeneration Domain and Soul Bond abilities.

Future seasons will be shorter, which means more new heroes

One of the most surprising moments in the developer video was the announcement that, beginning with season 3, seasons will be two months long instead of roughly three. There has been a lot of discussion online about whether Rivals’ pace of new heroes (about eight per year based on three-month seasons) was sustainable. Well, apparently the Rivals devs took that personally and are cranking up that pace to a new hero every month, meaning 12 new heroes per year.

This feels borderline ludicrous compared with other hero shooters that average about three new heroes per year, or even MOBAs like League of Legends, which has averaged about four new champions per year in the past five years. Rivals benefits from having an overflowing stable of Marvel characters to pull from rather than inventing their own hero concepts, and compared with Overwatch, the developers seem less worried about mechanical overlap in their heroes, as seen with many support ultimates. Still, a new hero every month feels unheard of for a hero shooter.

New Krakoa map and competitive changes

Season 2 is adding two new maps, including a Krakoa-themed domination map at the season’s start. Yggsgard: Royal Palace (domination) and Tokyo 2099: Shin-Shibuya (convergence) will rotate out of the map pool for ranked modes, though they’ll still be available in quick play and custom games.

The threshold for competitive picks and bans, which currently only happen in diamond-ranked lobbies, will be lowered to gold 3. Players in Eternity or One Above All ranks will only be able to duo queue, instead of queuing with larger groups — a measure that’s likely intended to keep high-level teams from stomping lobbies.

Speaking of ranks, season 2 will drop everyone by 9 divisions, which is equal to 3 ranks. That means players in Eternity will drop to diamond, and any players at platinum 3 or below will start their climb from bronze 3 again. (AGAIN… AGAIN.)

Rivals developers also announced that individual player performance will be weighted higher when determining competitive progress after a match, meaning if your stats outperform your team’s, you’ll earn more for winning and drop less for losing. This change can help elevate smurfs and other high-skill players in lower-ranked lobbies by getting them into their appropriate ranks faster. However, it can also lead to players stat-farming, instead of playing in a way that is most effective for winning games. Overall, given that Rivals doesn’t use any sort of competitive placement matches, this should be a net positive for the game.

Other announcements

Rivals is adding new skin recolors to certain hero skins and (finally) giving players the option to gift costumes to their friends so they can surprise someone for their birthday, which you definitely did not forget about.

Missions are changing a bit, with the addition of weekly missions and a redistribution of where battle-pass-progressing chrono tokens are earned. The devs framed this as creating a «smoother expectation» of how to earn chrono tokens, but the surface-level description sounds like they’re just making it harder to earn battle pass progress over the season by tucking away more progress under missions with shorter time limits.

The developer vision update also gave us our first look at the competitive distribution, showing how many Rivals players are in each tier as of season 1.5.

The Hellfire Gala trailer says season 2 will start on April 11 UTC. While it doesn’t give a specific start time, expect the between-seasons maintenance to finish sometime in the middle of the night in the US.

For more on Marvel Rivals, check out which heroes and roles you should play and how to get free skins.

Technologies

Cloudflare Says Winter Olympics Cybersecurity Is at Risk in Spat With Italian Regulators

But Cloudflare’s global head of policy tells CNET the company is open to an agreement with Italy.

The CEO of the networking company Cloudflare is lashing out at Italy in response to regulatory anti-piracy fines, threatening to withdraw from the country and potentially the 2026 Winter Olympics.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

Italy announced on Jan. 8 that it had issued a fine of 14.2 million euros (approximately $16.5 million) against Cloudflare for failing to block access to pirated content. Soon after that, Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince took to X to call out the fines, describing Cloudflare’s decision not to comply as a fight over censorship. Prince said that complying with Italy’s demands under its Piracy Shield policies would affect content globally.

Italy’s Piracy Shield is a program implemented by the country’s telecommunications regulator, AGCOM. In order to cut down on piracy in the country, such as hosting illegal streams of sporting events, the program allows IP holders to report content violations to a rapid-response automated system. However, some have complained that the 30-minute window given is not enough time for ISPs to properly vet complains, and is resulting in legitimate, non-pirated content being blocked as well.

«In other words, Italy insists a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online,» Prince said.

Yesterday a quasi-judicial body in Italy fined @Cloudflare $17 million for failing to go along with their scheme to censor the Internet. The scheme, which even the EU has called concerning, required us within a mere 30 minutes of notification to fully censor from the Internet any… pic.twitter.com/qZf9UKEAY5

— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) January 9, 2026

In his posts, Prince specifically mentioned the 30-minute timeframe that Italy requires for Cloudflare to disable access to suspected piracy traffic.

«We block pirate streams every time we find one,» he wrote. «We hate them.» But, he said, «we can’t put in place a system where a shadowy cabal can require us to remove GLOBALLY anything they don’t like on the internet within 30 minutes. That’s insane.»

Some of the proponents of Italy’s piracy rules are soccer teams that want to prevent the illegal streaming of their matches.

Prince went on to list steps his company might take, including pulling its cybersecurity service from the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, removing Cloudflare servers from Italian cities and holding off on any plans to invest in the country. Prince also suggested he would get US government leaders involved, tagging Vice President JD Vance in his post. Prince also reposted a message addressed to the Italian prime minister, along with an article about Italy’s actions.

The Winter Olympics, scheduled to take place between Feb. 6 and Feb. 22 at sites across Lombardy and Northeast Italy, are a sensitive subject when it comes to cybersecurity, considering the potential that many may use VPN technology to view broadcasts of the event.

Door is open to an agreement, Cloudflare says

In an interview with CNET, a Cloudflare representative said that while the fine from Italy represents more than the company’s total revenue from the country, Cloudflare is still open to an agreement to avoid saying arrivederci to the country.

«We’re still evaluating, and we’re still open to working something out,» said Alyssa Starzak, Cloudflare’s deputy chief legal officer and global head of policy. «That would be a better solution. The hope is we can have some discussions for a more reasonable result.»

Starzak said the company has posted information and conducted outreach to Italian stakeholders about the ways Cloudflare is working to combat unauthorized streaming. But Italy’s law, she said, leaves no room for negotiation or nuance.

«It’s been very much a ‘You must do what we say’ » situation, she said.

Technologies

Transport Your Dungeons & Dragons Hero Off the Page With This Tabletop Gadget

At CES 2026, I found a couple ways that players and dungeon masters can use tech to upgrade their gameplaying experience.

As I walked around CES 2026, my eyes drifted over a poster awash with fantasy heroes, dastardly monsters and rolling dice — and I failed my saving throw to look away. If you’re a fellow tabletop gaming nerd, you might want to follow this pair of gadgets due out later this year.

Tabletop gaming continues to appeal to players with its deliberately analog gameplay, using miniatures, maps, dice and other physical trinkets to keep the focus on real-world play. The niche has grown in popularity over the decades, and a supporting industry has risen around it, offering third-party materials and accessories to enhance the experience. Digital gadgets and software have been added to this mix in recent years, and a new company, Arcalink, has its own supporting products for the avid Dungeons & Dragons player.

The first of Arcalink’s upcoming tabletop augmentations is a gadget that’s small but mighty. About the size of a film canister, the Arcalink One is a rectangular display around 2 to 3 inches long that’s covered in fantasy decorations. These can be swapped out, with one looking like a doorway in stone ruins and another appearing like a blue wizard’s portal (a third, not present but described to me, would look like a Mimic, the classic D&D monster that appears as a treasure chest to trick adventurers).

The Arcalink One’s screen shows a player’s avatar, and since it was built with the fantasy roleplaying game D&D in mind, animations for popular spells that can be triggered by voice commands. Tabletop RPGs encourage the theater of the mind, with players envisioning their characters through vocal descriptions, but the Arcalink One seems like a neat way for them to accessorize with a digital version of their hero (uploaded in JPG or MP4 file formats) that’s neither essential to play nor large enough to be obtrusive — a totemic treat to take from one game to another, swapping out character portraits by using the paired app.

The basilisk in the room is the price tag: the Arcalink One is expected to cost between $100 and $150, Arcalink founder Lizheng Liu told me. While the company hasn’t hashed out the final numbers, that first number is the device itself, and the high end of the range will bundle more of those clip-on decorations along with it.

Over $100 for an optional device is prohibitive for most tabletop players, but I imagine this would appeal to adventurers with deeper pockets who want a neat little plug-and-play gadget to bring more flair to the game table. Also, let’s not pretend tabletop fans aren’t already spending a good amount of money on accessories, dice and miniatures (looking at you, wargamers).

The company plans to let a select group of supporters start backing the Arcalink One in March or April, with a full Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign launching around June.

The second product, Arca Studio, is entirely digital: AI-powered software to help dungeon masters, the thankless gameplay managers who tell the story and give voice to their world’s denizens for their characters to experience. No, it’s not using generative AI to spit out campaign ideas — this AI software records your game sessions and will make it easy to go back and search for characters and plot events while planning ahead of your next game day.

Yes, this is a sort of gaming version of the AI summaries that productivity apps offer when, say, you’ve finished a video chat, but there are a few unique features tailored to tabletop gaming. One makes a word cloud grouping together recurring names and concepts in your campaign recordings to visualize the themes and frequent elements — great for dungeon masters to see which plot lines and adventure types they might be overusing to switch them up.

Arca Studio will launch around May or June and will be a subscription service, though Arcalink hasn’t decided on an expected monthly cost yet. It’s worth pointing out that anything could change in pricing or product features before these two products reach the market — and just like a good tabletop campaign, there might be some last-minute twists that change everything.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Tuesday, Jan. 13

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Jan. 13.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? It features one of those annoying elements, where the puzzlemakers tie two clues together. In this case, you can’t really solve 4-Across and 7-Across separately, so you need to fill in the other answers to see these answers develop. Read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.