"Ask us (nearly) Anything" from the Rivals developers – highlights & unanswered questions

Recently, Redwood (the EA-owned developers of C&C Rivals) did an "Ask us anything" on Reddit. As such a long Reddit thread is sometimes hard to follow, and the devs might not openly answer all questions, here's some commented highlights. starting with the most-upvoted questions.

First, let's start with Alarak's awesome summary of the AMA (thanks for this!!). Afterwards, I'll go into more detail on the top 5 questions, including those that were not answered!

Alarak's summary:

• Balancing is made with a 2 levels difference in mind.
• Redwood will hopefully explore more vanity in the future, when they are more comfortable with it.
• Some way for players to earn Diamonds is on its way, not revealed what yet, they got several ideas. Personal note: A dev said on discord that 1.6 will be focused around Free to Play, so we can hope for the Diamond thing there.
• They do NOT want to mirror all units for GDI and Nod, roles can however overlap sometimes.
• They still are trying to make Tech viable, got some plans for that. 
• They have a long list with QoL changes, if any are easy to make they usually add it but we can hope to get everything in the list to the game one day. 
• All units don’t have to be meta, niche units can work as counter to the meta instead, or at least that’s their ideal. 
• Premium Track is just meant to a player more rewards if they did well, again, they’re implementing some way for you to gain Diamonds. 
• GDI Air will likely get some changes in the next couple of patches. 
• They’re trying other game modes internally at the moment, like core gameplay modifiers.
• Changes to events will probably come soonish.
• An ”Open All” for opening several crates is considered. 
• Apparently there are 12 epic crates despite the community saying several times that it is 10. Redwood have said that the Crate Cycle is bigger than 150 crates that we previously believed. 
• Not being able to open Vault before opening reset crates is geting looked at, hopefully a fix soon. 
• Alliances might get more interesting in the future. 
• Changing username might become a thing one day. 
• Convoy/Bounties etc features are geting looked at and they’re looking if they can improve it in any way, no said plans however. 
• The Devs liked the idea of a mapmaker but isn’t on their roadmap for the moment.
• Hammerhead exactly will get changed sometime in the upcoming patches. 
• It’s explained how their process when balancing a unit works
• Voice lines and announcers are geting looked at. 
• GDI drones are fine, they were intended to become wheels and Shake up the meta a bit. 
• Orca Bomber health revert was mainly because lower tier players couldn’t get value out of it, it was too hard to use.
• The Disruptor change was as said in the patch notes to prevent it from 3shoting a base when close to it. 
• Still having a close eye on the MLRS, likely more buffs in the future.
• Probably no more factions anytime soon. 
• No ”hostile to both players” anytime soon if ever. 
• Change to missile pad charge-time was to give aggro deck a more clear win-condition.
• Mammoth Tank isn’t meant to be an ”counter everything” unit. 
• Over 75% of the player base are tech players.

Question: How many active players does Command & Conquer Rivals have?

Answer: Unsurprisingly, the devs didn't respond to this question. Luckily, there recently was a different Reddit thread on this question and we can look at what smart Redditors responded there:

Languid_lizard speculates that it's 100-300K active players. His logic:

• A YouTube video that is basically only advertised in the app itself racked up 25k views, and it's reasonable to assume only a fraction of the people who are active go and open the in-game message and click on the video link, for example 10x the amount (i.e. 250k)
• From event results, lizard deduces that about 1% of the active players in a league would make 9+ wins. From this assumption and the public event statistics, he gets to 5k Silver, 7k Gold, 15k Diamond, 50k Masters+ (late in Season), plus Bronze, so something between 50k and 100k actives total
• We know there's about 1k-2k Tiberium players towards the end of the season. If that's the top 1-2% of active players, this would be 100k as well

Some additional thoughts on this:

• Downloads on the Google Play Store have been >1 million since January already. So the total number of downloads / installs is likely to be multiple millions, but significantly below 10 million
• So the "monthly active users" might still be very high (esp. for December/January), so daily actives might be a a more specific way to speak about player numbers
• Languid_lizard's event assumptions don't sound too bad, and as an event is shorter, we'd also more likely talk about daily actives than monthly actives there
• Daily actives are mostly a mix of those who just installed the game, and those who are really active (plus some in their first days who might still churn quickly). So about 100k daily active players sounds like a reasonable estimate indeed.

Question: How large is the team working on Rivals?

Answer: Also not answered. I'd guess something between 10 and 25 people.

• They don't have a lot of marketing going on, so we mostly talk about developers and admins
• Functions like HR, Legal, Accounting, General Management will be run by EA, as it's not an independent developer
• The recent Vanity releases (especially the commander animations) are of a different visual style compared to the release. This implies that some of the artists have moved on to different projects – which makes sense, if you take the vanity launch out, there was not that much to do for artists in recent months (a new unit from time to time). The animation quality also got a lot of backlash, yet was not fixed. Too costly for a small team.
• Many of the core team are reasonably active in the discord. There is dance, a community liaison guy. There are a couple game designers focusing on new units and balance. And then there is the unknown number of developers.

Question: Are there plans to change the (disappointing/cartoonish) commander emotes?

Answer: This also got no response. So unlikely that there will be changes. Which is sad, because it implies they are not able to invest a lot of resources into Rivals. The core team seems very passionate, but (as mentioned above) small and won't get the buy-in for bigger investments from EA unless numbers improve (player numbers and/or revenue numbers).

Question: Is there a plan to make hard counters more reliable with bigger level differences?

Answer: Balance only considers a level difference of up to 2 levels. Which makes sense to me, as this already implies +20% hit points and +20% damage. Beyond that, even reasonable hard counters start to get softer.

Question: Are there plans to improve rewards for F2P players, especially giving them Diamonds for e.g. event reruns?

Answer: On Diamonds, yes, the devs plan to do that. But best we keep our expectations regarding timeline and extent low.

On events, the answer is a bit more open:

My thoughts on this dilemma:

• What Redwood did in recent months was trying to improve the impact of smaller amounts of money
• With the obvious intent to make more of the "free, non-spending players" at least spend a little bit
• This includes e.g. the Cloning Vats, which drastically reduced the money needed to get at least a couple of key units on a high level
• They also wanted to allow more price points for events, with some events allowing relatively affordable reruns for 100-250 diamonds, whilst adding a "premium track" at a higher price point as an alternative
• Yet, this also means that the free run was less attractive than various events before, hurting players who spend no money

The issue is that now ...

1. It's easier to keep up with Whales for "medium amounts of spending". For example, if you spend €50-100 a month, you can run tons of cloning vats and rerun many of the best events. And it gets your levels up quickly for some core units such as a Scorpion Tank.
2. At the same time rewards for totally no-spenders reduced, plus now it's not just the whales with very high levels: A much broader range of players could get key units to L13 now.

The combination sucks for those who are adamant not to spend. I see three potential solutions here:

1. More Diamond rewards for F2P players with above-average skill
2. A different way to earn Diamonds, such as referring new players to the game
3. Making the first free run in events a bit more attractive again, e.g. by giving players one premium run for free

#1 seems in the works. #2 would be a lot of effort. #3 could at least be tried for a single event. Yet, at the end of the day it also needs to make sense for the developers, i.e. it either needs to increase new player numbers, or increase total spending.

Superficially, it might seem that "giving in" to the demands of vocal non-spenders might not achieve any of these goals. But, if it improves the mood of the community on Reddit & Discord, that's also valuable for Redwood. Ultimately, with the lack of news coverage and big marketing, the opinion of the vocal players is important for the game's future.

After all this talk about the in-game economy, I'd lastly wanted to recommend you to watch one awesome video from top Rivals player 13lade:

In it, 13lade showcases both his versatility as a player, and his ability to do pretty insightful commentary whilst playing. He plays 10 different decks in an event, each being either one of the most-played decks right now, or at least being representative of a certain archetype of deck (such as GDI tech or Nod tech).

For total beginners, it might be a bit too quick, but for anyone who played already dozens or hundreds of games, it gives a great overview on a broad range of viable decks, and how different they play.