Rivals Community Survey November 2020 – analysis of results

 🇭🇺 Kennyemmy conducted a survey that will be used by 🇮🇳 Avinash as input for further steps in maintaining the game. More than 700 players participated in the survey, making this the biggest Rivals survey, ever. Here’s what we learn from it: 

Respondent groups

• 241 Tiberium players (33%) 
• 380 Masters players (54%) 
• 63 Diamond players (9%) 
• 40 players from Platinum or lower (6%) 

It’s safe to say that this survey over-represents Masters/Tiberium league compared to the total player pool who might not have learned about the survey, as they are not that active on Discords on average, which have been the primary tool to distribute the survey. 

Making money for EA 

Of the respondents, … 

• >90% said they would spend Diamonds on vanity items (skins, emotes, explojis) 
• >70% said they would spend real money on vanity items 
• Within the vanity items, unit skins (41%) were the most popular, followed by Commander emotes (31%), Commander skins (15%) and Explojis (13%)

It seems to be a very good idea to bring back esp skins and emotes to the score. If I personally were to make a recommendation (not part of the survey!): 

• Bring back 2 skins and one commander emote set back to the store 
• Rotate weekly 
• Price point 1000 Diamonds or $5 

Custom Matches & Tournaments 

• More than half of the respondents play Custom Matches at least once a week 
• Especially lower-league players don’t play much Customs – which is a shame, as they are often playing underlevelled decks in their league, so playing Custom Matches could improve their experience playing Rivals immensely

percentages sum up to 100% in each row 

Unsurprisingly, there is a strong correlation between interest in tournaments and custom matches: 

• 38% of all respondents already participated in a tournament 
• 65% of the most active custom match players played in a tournament 

But still, even 26% of those who never played customs would love to play a tournament, and 47% would at least consider it, depending on the event. 

Overall, 166 of the respondents would love to participate in a tournament, but didn’t do it so far.  And a further 206 would consider it.  Maybe that’s partly just lip service, but it shows that there’s still a big player audience to be reached for tournament organizers by advertising their tournament in the same way that made this survey reach these, i.e. primarily through all the Rivals discords and Reddit. 

Personally, I want to highlight the Rivals Team League (RTL discord), which is one of the smoothest-run Rivals events, and it’s one where you have some flexibility to arrange the time when you play your match with your opponent.  The current season just started, but you might want to follow it & plan your alliances’ team for the next season that should start early in 2021. 

Important Fixes 

One question asked was: “Which of these issues affects you the most?” 

• 28% say Android crashes 
• 33% say iOS flickering 
• 39% say Scavengers in the Showdown events I find that this question and it’s result is a bit misleading. 

Obviously, it’s a bigger deal if your game crashes than that for 2 days a month, you’re annoyed by some units in one of the events. Hence, I’d vote to clearly prioritize the Android crashes and the graphics bug on iOS over Scavengers/Showdown. 

Balance perception 

The question was: “on a scale of 1-5,how good do you think the balance of the game is”? Overall, the feedback is quite good: 

• 58% positive (8% “5”, 49% “4”) 
• 31% neutral (“3”) 
• 12% negative (8% “2”, 4% “1”) 

Interestingly, this doesn’t change that much between the leagues, except that Tiberium players have a bit more negative perception of the balance.

balance perception by league

Playing customs also doesn’t have a radical impact on balance perception: 

• The average score overall is 3.5 
• Respondents who play customs the most give a 3.4 
• Respondents who play customs weekly or monthly give a 4.6 
• Respondents who never played customs give a 3.5 – but are more likely to give the extreme scores 1 or 5 

What should be changed about balance? 

If we rank the options by the share of respondents who voted “very important” or “important”: 

• 53% - nerf the most used / overpowered units 
• 48% - revamp the Tiberium economy 
• 46% - buff weak / less used units 
• 45% - rework Tech units 
• 18% - increase base health 

Interesting deviations by player type: 

• Unsurprisingly, players less satisfied with balance (voted 1 or 2 of 5) generally find more changes important. 
• But if we correct for that, they put relatively more emphasis especially on ...
• Tech rework 60% importance vs 45% for the average 
• Nerf overpowered units 68% importance vs 53% average
• Players who play customs most often have the following perception 
• Higher importance (+5 ppt) on buffing weak / less used units 
• Lower importance (-6 ppt) on reworking Tech units 

How do respondents stay up-to-date about Rivals? 

• 60% said Discords are their primary source of information. The official Rivals discord is always a great starting point, but there’s plenty of other cool discords to join. Important to note here that the Discords have been a key tool to distribute the survey. 
• 14% said ingame mail – which shows how important this channel still continues to be, especially for all the newer players who would not have responded to this survey 
• 11% said the Rivals Reddit 
• 6% said YouTube, likely especially 13lade’s YouTube channel 
• 5% said Twitch streams, here’s the Rivals Twitch category
• 3% said Facebook, where we have a surprisingly active Rivals group

You can find the full responses here, as I didn’t bring all data points into this post.