Technologies
Get a Free Thing Skin, Thor Skin and More in Marvel Rivals Season 3.5
The battle heats up in Season 3.5 as a Phoenix Force-infused Blade enters the fray. Kit out your heroes in these free skins to prepare for the fight.

Marvel Rivals season 2 may have taken our heroes off-world as they battled across Arakko, but season 3 is throwing us into the furthest reaches of space to fight a new threat: Knull and his symbiote army.
Stopping one symbiote is tough enough. Fighting off an army of them is going to require a whole new wardrobe’s worth of battle gear. Luckily for you, there are many ways to unlock some free skins in the hit hero shooter right now — including the Queen’s Codex event pass that evens the odds with a free Thing Symbiote Thing skin and the Summer Special pass that includes the free Thor Worthy Waves skin.
Outside of the latest event, there are still other ways to earn free skins right now. Whether you’re getting used to Phoenix’s dense set of abilities or you’re still getting used to the ever-shifting landscape of team-up moves, season 3.5 has introduced a slate of free skins that you can use to deck out your favorite characters.
Here’s every free skin available right now in Marvel Rivals season 3.5, including in-game events, Twitch drops, competitive rewards and more.
What Marvel Rivals skins are available for free right now?
There are currently 12 free skins available. Here’s how you get them:
- Thor Worthy Waves: Complete tier 14 on the Summer Special event pass by Aug. 15 in order to unlock this skin.
- Thing Symbiote Thing: Complete tier 18 on the Queen’s Codex event pass by Sept. 12 in order to unlock this skin.
- Mantis Will of Galacta: To claim this skin, you’ll need to link a Twitch account to your Marvel Rivals account and then watch four hours of livestreams from streamers participating in the drop campaign. The Mantis Will of Galacta skin is available until Friday, Sept. 5.
- Star Lord Ignite: To claim this skin, you’ll need to link a Twitch account to your Marvel Rivals account and then watch four hours of livestreams from the Marvel Rivals Ignite mid-season finals tournament matches. This Twitch campaign is available concurrently with the Mantis Will of Galacta skin, but watching streams will only contribute to one set of drops at a time. The Star Lord Ignite skin is available until Saturday, Sept. 6.
- Phoenix Emerald Flames: Reach Gold rank or higher in competitive mode in season 3. You must play at least 10 competitive matches to be eligible to receive the skin.
- Blade Emerald Blade: Reach Gold rank or higher in competitive mode in season 3.5. You must play at least 10 competitive matches to be eligible to receive the skin.
- Groot Symbiote Flora: Reach page 4 in the season 3 battle pass by Sept. 11.
- Rocket Raccoon Symbiote Raccoon: Reach page 10 in the season 3 battle pass by Sept. 11.
Four of the currently available free skins are not time-gated, although they are locked behind achievements or platform exclusivity. Here are the Marvel Rivals skins you can unlock at any time:
- Spider-Man Scarlet Spider: This skin is available to PS Plus subscribers who play the game on the PS5. It can be found on the PSN Store under Marvel Rivals DLC.
- Peni Parker Ven#m: Like the Scarlet Spider skin, this Ven#m skin is available for PS Plus subscribers and can be found in the PSN Store. This skin is also available in the Marvel Rivals in-game store, where it can be purchased with units.
- Storm Ivory Breeze: Earn 200 Achievement Points in the Heroic Journey achievement section.
- Star-Lord Jovial Star: Earn 400 Achievement Points in the Heroic Journey achievement section.
How can I get free skins during Marvel Rivals season 3.5?
Players who link their Twitch account to their Marvel Rivals account can nab a free Mantis and Star Lord skin by watching participating streams.
But if you only care about rewards you can earn in-game, free Phoenix and Blade skins are available by progressing through the competitive ladder and new looks for Groot and Rocket Raccoon are available for free on the season 3 battle pass.
Take part in the synthesis of stone and tentacles with the free Symbiote Thing skin
Another mini battle pass just arrived in Marvel Rivals, hot on the heels of the Summer Special pass from the first half of Season 3. The Queen’s Codex event pass is themed around Knull-infused Hela, and the premium reward track includes 24 separate rewards.
You can purchase this pass for 690 Lattice (which is roughly equivalent to $7) to have a chance to unlock the Black Widow Phoenix Widow and Hela Queen in Black skins, as well as remove the time limit from the event.
But if you’re a free-to-play gamer, there’s still a big incentive for you on this pass. The Thing Symbiote Thing skin is on the free reward track, and it’s available at tier 18. You need only play quick match and competitive game modes to earn XP points to unlock the new free skin.
If you don’t buy the premium track for this pass, it will disappear on Sept. 12 — if you haven’t unlocked the new Thing skin by then, it’ll be consumed by the symbiotes on Klyntar and disappear forevermore. So long as you earn Symbiote Thing before that date, the skin will be permanently unlocked on your account.
How can I get more free Marvel Rivals skins?
There are many ways to get skins in Marvel Rivals. Sometimes the developer issues special codes to unlock them while others require completing challenges. There are also some made available by watching streams on Twitch and many skins are «free» for progressing through the Marvel Rivals Battle Pass, which costs 990 Lattice, or about $10.
You can also earn skins through regularly playing the game, as a free skin is frequently awarded with the completion of seasonal events. Players who reach gold rank or higher in competitive mode also receive a free skin as a reward for their performance. Live events like season 3’s Milano Repair Logs challenge include free skins as a completion reward.
What free skins used to be available in Marvel Rivals?
Twitch drops, battle passes, and promo codes get cycled in and out of rotation, allowing Marvel Rivals players to earn different free skins from engaging with the game during different events. Here are all of the previously available free skins, what season they were introduced in and how they were obtainable.
Technologies
iOS 26: AI Summaries Come Back to iPhone News Apps, but With a Warning
Apple initially disabled these summaries in January.

Apple released iOS 26 on Monday, a few months after the company announced it at the June Worldwide Developers Conference. The update brings a new Liquid Glass redesign, call screening and hidden features to your iPhone. The update also brings AI notification summaries for news and entertainment apps back to Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone.
Apple disabled AI notification summaries for news and entertainment apps in January. That came a few weeks after the BBC pointed out in December that the feature twisted the media organization’s notifications and displayed inaccurate information.
Here’s what to know about those AI summaries and the new warning.
Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.
iOS 26 warns about summary inaccuracies
When I updated to iOS 26, I was greeted by some splash screens asking for various permissions. One splash screen was for the AI notification summaries. When you see this screen, you have two options: Choose Notifications to Summarize or Not Now. If you tap Not Now, the splash screen goes away.
If you tap Choose Notifications to Summarize, you’re taken to a new page where you’ll see three categories: News & Entertainment, Communication & Social and All Other Apps. Tapping one of these categories allows notification summaries for apps in that category. Beneath the News & Entertainment category, there’s a warning that gets outlined in red if you tap it.
«Summarization may change the meaning of the original headline,» the warning reads, adding, «Verify information.»
There’s also a warning across the bottom of the screen that reads, «This is a beta feature. Summaries may contain errors.»
After tapping the categories you want, tap Summarize Selected Notifications across the bottom of your screen. If you selected all the categories, this button will read Summarize All Notifications.
And if you don’t want these summaries, you can tap Do Not Summarize Notifications. If you allow these summaries and don’t like them, you can easily turn them off. Here’s how.
How to turn off AI notification summaries
1. Tap Settings.
2. Tap Notifications.
3. Tap Summarize Notifications.
4. Tap the Summarize Notifications toggle in the new menu.
You can also follow the above steps to turn AI notification summaries back on. You’ll have to select which categories you want these summaries for again, too.
For more on iOS 26, here’s my review of the OS, how to reduce the Liquid Glass effects in the update and how to enable call screening on your iPhone. You can also check out our iOS 26 cheat sheet.
Technologies
Amazon Prime Is Ending Shared Free Shipping. What to Know and When It Happens
How Prime Invitee program’s end could affect your free deliveries.

If you’ve been using someone else’s Amazon Prime membership for free shipping, but you don’t live in the same house, you may need to pay another subscription fee soon. According to Amazon’s updated customer service page, the online retail giant is ending its Prime Invitee benefit-sharing program Oct. 1.
Amazon’s Prime Invitee program is being replaced by Amazon Family, as reported earlier by The Verge. It includes many of the same benefits, but Amazon Family only works for up to two adults and four children living in the same «primary residential address» — a shared home.
You’ll still be able to use free shipping to send gifts elsewhere, but your Prime Invitees will no longer be able to use the perk.
Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.
Amazon isn’t the first company to prevent membership sharing between family and friends. The e-commerce giant is just the latest to follow Netflix’s account-sharing crackdown. While it’s unclear whether this change will work for Amazon, Netflix gained over 200,000 subscribers following its policy change. We also saw a similar account-sharing crackdown with Disney Plus and YouTube Premium.
Read more: More Than Just Free Shipping: Here Are 19 Underrated Amazon Prime Perks
What the Amazon Prime shipping crackdown means for you
If you’re the beneficiary of someone else’s Prime Invitee benefits, you have one more month to take advantage of the current program before the changes take effect.
Starting in October, you’ll have to get your own Amazon Prime subscription to benefit from the company’s free shipping program. First-time subscribers get a year of Prime membership for $15, but you’ll be stuck shelling out $15 a month to maintain your subscription thereafter.
Read more: Your Free Pass to Prime Day Deals (No Membership Required)
Why is Amazon ending the Prime Invitee program?
This move follows shortly after Reuters reported that Amazon’s Prime account signups slowed down recently despite an extended July Prime Day event. While the company reported blowout sales numbers, new Prime subscriptions didn’t meet internal expectations. In the US, they fell short of last year’s signup metrics.
According to Reuters, Amazon registered 5.4 million US signups over the 21-day run-up to the Prime Day event, around 116,000 fewer than during the same period in 2024, and 106,000 below the company’s own goal, a roughly 2% decline in both metrics.
By forcing separate households to have their own subscriptions, Amazon could be looking to attract more Prime accounts after previously failing to do so.
The new Amazon Family program (previously known as Amazon Household) offers Prime benefits to up to two adults and four children in a single home, including free shipping, Prime Video, Prime Reading and Amazon Music. The subscription also includes benefits for certain third-party companies, such as GrubHub.
Technologies
Pokemon TCG Pocket’s Pack Points System Needs an Overhaul Yesterday
The pack-opening pity points system is pitiful. There’s a very easy way to improve it.

Pokemon TCG Pocket is more than a mobile game: It’s a money-making machine. The virtual trading card app raked in more than $900 million in its first six months, eclipsing even Pokemon Go’s revenue in the same post-release time span. As it turns out, fake Pokemon cards are just as much of a hot commodity as the real thing.
People love ripping open card packs, hunting down ones with their favorite illustrations of fan-favorite Pokemon. It feels great to beat the odds by pulling an elaborately-inked full art or a shiny secret rare. But it really starts to irk me when I’m missing only one or two cards from a set and I can’t get lucky enough to pull them out of a pack.
Pokemon TCG Pocket has a «pity points» system that’s supposed to make this feel less terrible: Every time you open a pack, you earn five pack points, which you can directly trade in for a card of your choosing.
You can trade in 35 points for a common card, but if you want to get the rarest cards from a set, they could eat up 500 points, 1,250 points or even a whopping 2,500 points each. That means you’d have to rip open 500 card packs in order to earn a single copy of one of Pokemon TCG Pocket’s rarest cards.
It sounds absurd (and it is), but that’s to be expected for a free-to-play game, especially one where the developer makes money by encouraging players to pay for extra card pulls. My real big issue with pack points is that they’re restricted to the expansion set you earned them in.
For example, I have 210 pack points for the latest card set, Secluded Springs, and I’ve been exclusively pulling those packs since it was released. I also have 700 pack points for the game’s first-ever expansion Genetic Apex — but those points are locked to Genetic Apex, and can’t be used for any other set. I’ve accrued hundreds of pack points, but they’re essentially useless to me because they won’t help me complete the sets I’m still missing cards in.
Pokemon TCG Pocket expansion sets are released on a monthly basis, which means no one really has time to earn enough pack points for a rare card before the next shiny slate of cards is dangled in front of your eyes. It propagates a desperate sense of FOMO that I’ve criticized in the past, but there’s a simple solution that would make the problem disappear overnight.
Instead of locking pack points to any one set, they should be an account-wide currency instead. Every time you earn pack points, they should be added to one large pool that you can use on any of the in-game card sets. That way, players wouldn’t have to feel a manufactured sense of guilt for ripping open packs from older sets.
While it’s customary for gacha games to have a pity system that guarantees a certain reward after a certain amount of pulls, it’s by no means a requirement for these games to have these systems. In a sense, I’m grateful that the pack points exist in Pokemon TCG Pocket in the first place.
I think we should always argue for a more consumer-friendly experience in modern gaming. Overhauling the pity system so that pack points can be used universally across all of the in-game card sets will make the game fairer and give more players a real chance to get the rarest cards.
It creates a greater sense of parity between free-to-play and paying players, and it might even cause some people to spend more money on pack openings to boot. Universal pack points are a win-win for players and DeNA alike.
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