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.

Dear devs, please expand the Masters Map pool

The Masters Map pool has been a discussion point for many months. The reason is that many of the most active players spend the majority of their time in Masters league. Because getting there is pretty fast after reset (partly as there's still win streak bonuses below Master league), and because for many players, it's hard to get into Tiberium quickly if they don't have L12/13, yet.

 Back in the first quarter, the Masters Map pool was always identical every month. A particularly unliked map was Canal Row, but the bigger problem was that many active players played 90% of the seasons on the same 5 maps.

Thankfully, Redwood / EA listened to our pleas and started to mix up the Masters Map pool. But the other suggestion wasn't followed: Expanding the Masters Map pool beyond 5 maps. Five maps might be enough if they would be changed monthly, but they are not. So the easiest fix would be to expand the Masters Map pool to 10 maps. That would allow the map diversity to be decent even if no further change will come in the next 3-4 months.

There's also another issue with the current map pool: 3 of the 5 maps are 2 pads. On the one hand, this favors Tech decks, as delaying the nuke is much easier on 2 pads. More on the Tech issue further down this post. On the other hand, it just doesn't reflect the overall map pool very well. Overall distribution is:

• 13 maps have 2 pads (~28%)
• 23 maps have 3 fully disconnected pads that don't touch each other (~49%)
• 5 maps have 3 connected pads that touch each other (~11%)
• 6 maps have 3 pads of which two are connected and one is not (~13%)

Now, I know that connectedness is not the only relevant part of maps. Location of Tiberium, paths, obstactles etc. all also play a role. This is just one way to look at maps to illustrate why the current map pool is lopsided and what we could look at when we construct map pools.

Suggestion for a new 10 map Masters map pool

How we go about constructing it:

1. Popularity. It seems wise to chose popular tournament maps, as they seem well-liked and prepare Masters players a bit for the tournament circuit.
2. Diversity. One variable is the pad connectedness, but we should also look more closely and try to suit a range of playstyles. E.g. we should have map(s) where it's easy to go double harv, and maps where it's hard.

As a measure for popularity, we have the map picks in the Rivals Team League. Rorschach and Open Water clearly stick out. Both also are considered playable/good for a wide range of decks.

Other than that, we want 2-pad maps in the variants good and bad for 2-range / fortress decks. We can roughly group the 2-pad maps into three groups, and we need about 3 to represent them fairly. For the sake of this post, I'll chose 3 that are not currently in the Tiberium map pool. But if the Tiberium map pool changes, other options might be better. For now, I nominate Neutral Zone from the "distant pads" group, Great Divide from the "in between" group and Scorpion Tail from the "close pads" group.

Click image to enlarge

Now, we need 5 more 3-pad maps in the variants connected, semi-connected and very disconnected. All that ideally while considering suitability for 2 harv and whether they are rather enclosed or open. Also, some connected maps play more similar to disconnected maps than to other connected maps, so it's key to keep in mind that this high-level categorization can't be the only criterion.

As we have already picked two fully connected maps based on their popularity (Rorschach and Open Water), we can only add one of the semi-connected maps. From these, The Needle seems like a good pick.

Click image to enlarge

This leaves us to pick 4 maps from the disconnected 3-pad maps. There are many of them, and they are harder to classify. In the below picture, you find one possible way to classify these maps.

Click image to enlarge

This helps a bit, but isn't enough to make the choice. So I also apply my personal experience of which maps work well, are played in tournament, and are different enough. Plus, not in the current Tiberium map pool. That brings me to Three Lanes as a classic 3-pad map that is comparable to Broken Mesa and Slashed Fields. To Open Praerie as a 2-path map with an interesting Tiberium layout. Tiberium Stripes as a map with many blocked hexes / blocked hex segments. And Eruption as a map with few blockers and lots of open space.

This would bring us to the following proposal of 10 Masters maps:

Click image to enlarge

Obviously, there are many alternatives. Any large diverse map pool would be good. The above is just one option of many that developers could adopt.  What's your view? Here's the discussion on Reddit.

Omeleet's thoughts on the Tech issue

Recently, I published a blog post on why Tech should be nerfed. One option to nerf Tech I didn't go deep into is to change the current system of Tiberium acceleration.  Omeleet created an awesome video on this that I recommend to watch. His proposal is to cap the Tiberium acceleration at 90 seconds into the game. I think that would be a great thing to try. Here's the video:

Dear Devs, please change the Races!

Rivals Races are a feature that exists for a few months and comes in two forms:

1. Most players get slotted into a group of 10 players with similar medals. They all "race" to the highest medal count in a 3-day period. #1 gets a Colossal chest, lower significantly worse.
2. Top100 players get their own race. The Top20 get 2 Collossal crates each, 20-40 get 4 Epics and so forth.

This is a lot of free rewards, which in general isn't a bad thing. But there's two fundamental problems:

1. The variant for most players sets a strong incentive to deliberately aim to have fewer medals to get an easier race. Players achieve this by playing less outside of races, or by deliberately losing matches. Both are perverse incentives that are making the experience worse for all players, and are not in the interests of the developers.
2. If you get into the Top20, the Top100 race is great. 8-10 free Colossal crates. The issue: This is so much easier if you have L14/15 decks. For example, I landed in both Top20s in nearly all of the last two months' races. So I got 20 Colossal crates for free, whereas for strong players with L12 decks like VictorBansemer, it's really hard to get into the Top20 (even though he's a much better player than me). So they are punished for landing in the other parts of Top100, as the single Colossal crate of a normal 10-player race would be better rewards.

How could this be fixed without huge changes to the code? Some ideas:

1. Reduce the rewards for the Races overall, and reallocate these rewards to other areas (see further below). 
2. To compensate for the reduced overall rewards, increase rewards in other areas such as:
• Improve rewards for the first 10-20 games (or wins) each day. That is what the races intended to do: Make players more active.
• Increase rewards for events, or add an additional event per month. 
3. Re-introduce vanity items as rewards for the #1 spots and Top20 (instead of Colossal crates). At the same time, bring these vanity items back to the shop.
4. Publish the Top100 on the official EA Rivals page each month to give especially the #1 some limelight.

The effect of this would be to remove the perverse incentives, and create positive incentives instead. Maybe some of the suggestions are a bit tricky to realize, but I bet some form of them is viable without a lot of development time.

An alternative option would be to change the races so that they don't work on medals, but on the # of wins. This would also reduce the tanking, and even increase the "play more ladder" incentive of the races.

Power your own Ladder or Tournament with Google Spreadsheets

This article might be relevant for you, if you ...

• Organize Rivals tournaments (public or for your alliance)
• Want to run your own Custom Match (i.e. Equal Level) ladder within your alliance

In both cases, one of your challenges is to turn reported matches into new tournament or league standings easily. If you do a knock-out system, you can just use a tool like Challonge for this. But what if you have a more sophisticated tournament structure (e.g. group stages), or want to run a skill-based ladder (like the main ranked ladder in Rivals, but with equal levels)?

In these cases, Google Spreadsheets can be a powerful tool for you to save work, and create nicely layouted rankings.

Two case studies:

Rivals Team League (RTL) reporting and standings

RTL is a large team league with dozens of players and hundreds of matches played. It's a large effort for AwDaSea, who runs RTL, to track results and then update tables. To make his life easier, I created a way that he only needs to track the reported results in a spreadsheet, and it automatically updates into new standings and individual player stats.

• Here AwDaSea enters the results 
• The automatically updated group standings (also see image)
• The individual player stats tab, also automatically updated

We also tracked the chosen starting maps, and a simple additional pivot table allows us to check which map was chosen how often. Among the so far 105 picks that were actually played, the top maps were:

• 17% Rorschach 
• 15% Open Water
• 7% Three Lanes
• 6% Tug of War
• 6% Fighting Pit

Now you know which two maps you should be prepared for in tournaments! :)

Your own competitive ladder without levels

Custom Matches are great to train, and play without levels. One challenge about Custom Games is that not everybody is motivated, as you need to arrange them with your buddies, and clicking on the "Battle" buttom for the official ranked ladder is easier.

So, alliances think about how to make Custom Games more engaging and fun. Our first idea was our own league system, in which everyone plays a Best-of-5 against everyone else. This mostly went well, and this table could be used as a template if you want to run your own league. Congrats to Benedikt Ernst for winning season 1, btw!

But the downside of a league is that you have to chase down those that you didn't yet play against. And the most active custom game afficionados would like to play each other more often.

My new solution for this is to turn the league into a ladder. The differences:

1. Anybody can play anybody else how often they want. 0, 1 or 10 times in a week.
2. The spreadsheet automatically calculates a new rating based on the matches played
3. Reporting matches is easy, you just enter winner and loser names from a dropdown

What I use as a rating algorithm is ELO, which is also used in Chess. This ensures that the ratings (over time) are a reflection of player skill. And it ensures it doesn't matter whom you play. If you play the highly rated guy, you will risk less points but can gain many. If you play the lowly ranked guy, it's vice-versa.

Feel free to make copies of these spreadsheets if you want to look closer how they work (a part of the logic, especially in the RTL one, is in hidden tabs). If you need help to understand, reach out to me, you can find me at the offical Rivals discord and at our alliance discord under the nickname 'shuukit'.

Video of the day

Of course, it's gotta be a video from the Rivals Team League! This highly recommended matchup is:

Lopatka / CzechoSlovakia WolfDogs against Conrad / CrazyRussians.

Dear Devs, we need more Events again!

Ever since Races were introduced in early June, the frequency of other Events has been reduced.  On first sight, this might be understandable if you think about it from a scheduling perspective.  But I see three issues with it:

1. Races are no real events. For many players, Races don't feel like a proper event. At the end of the day, it's just playing ladder with an additional incentive.
2. Incentive to play less. Races, as various people in the community brought up, can even set wrong incentives for people to play less or lose intentionally, to get to an easier race.
3. Bad for developers. Less Events means less Diamond sinks. Experienced players will not buy the normal offers. But they often buy Event reruns and premium tracks. I'm a good example, having re-run the last Resources events as often as my time allowed.

What makes Events so cool?

• They mix up our Rivals experience, especially the Cabal War Games and the latest new Showdown events. But even more "normal" events are cool due to the option to specialize your decks on a limited set of 1-3 maps.
• There are players who are frustrated by ladder. Events gives them an outlet, which keeps up the motivation.
• They are a great way to measure your skill even if you're not (yet) having higher-levelled units.
• They make spending money more fun, as your own performance influences what you get for reruns and premium track.

Showdown is a great event format that really feels fresh

So, what is my recommendation to the developers?

1. Up the schedule from currently less than 2 to more than 2 events per week (see July schedule, 8 events for 31 days are 1.8 events per week)
• If necessary, dilute the free track rewards to keep your goals for the economy intact
2. Run fewer Races (maybe 2 per month) and only use vanity items for the Races
• By redistributing the crate rewards from Races to Events, the economy balance can stay intact without reducing rewards per event

With 11-12 instead of 8 events per month, we'd have 22-24 days of events in a month, which allows for a greater diversity of play, more motivation, and likely also more Diamond purchases, as Event reruns and premium tracks should be a key Diamond sink at least for a pretty significant part of the player population.

CABAL War Games also is a fun mode that mixes up the playing experience

Dear Devs, please expand the Masters Map Pool

Masters League is a special league in that a lot of the active players in our community spend a lot of time in it each season. The reasons for that are:

1. Below Masters, there's win streak bonuses, which makes climbing to the next leagues easier
2. Masters already has an L13 cap, which is far higher than most players' decks. This means they have to fight against higher-levelled decks a lot of the time.
3. The seasonal reset puts Masters players into leagues from where they can climb quickly back to Masters, but then need a lot of time to potentially get to Tiberium

You can say much of the above also for Tiberium. Yet, in Tiberium League, the map pool gets a lot of love from the devs:

• There is no limitation of Tiberium League maps to one tileset. In Masters, there's the limitation to "Ice tile set" maps.
• The Tiberium League map pool gets shuffled around each month
• The Tiberium League map pool is larger, i.e. you have more diversity within a season

In April, I had suggested to at least change the Masters Map pool, leveraging the other Ice maps that existed in lower leagues. And whether my suggestion was the reason for it or not, that's what the devs thankfully did a couple of weeks later.

Now, in my view, it's time to apply the same logic of the Tiberium League map pool to the Masters League. Map diversity for a large share of the core player base is just more important than the (in my view artificial) self-imposed rule that Masters maps must be of "Ice tile set".

Hence, my suggestion to the devs:

Please make the Masters map pool larger, and don't restrict it to Ice maps. Your community will thank you.

One additional, more optional suggestion:

• Assume there's a Masters map pool of 8 or 10 maps.
• Each month, there could be a public poll, sent to Masters players via in-game message, to ask them which 4-5 maps should be rotated out.
• That way, the players can help the devs in changing the map pool. And the devs can make the players feel more heard & involved.

To support this message to the devs (or prove it wrong!), you can participate in this short survey on map pools and map diversity. Thanks for doing so!

[Edit] The survey reached 45 responses so far, 70% of them from players who spend most of the time in a month in Masters league. Results:

• Most players want a map pool size of 10 (both average and median is at 10)
• Masters players' average is even higher at 11
• Only 3 of the 45 respondents want only Ice maps in Masters league
• 31% of the respondents don't care about the tile set, and 62% would even prefer tile set diversity in Masters league

I think the result is very clear. Of course it's a biased subset of highly engaged Masters players. But I cannot conceive that the average Masters player would have a vastly different opinion.

Besides Ice, Ice, Ice getting a bit one-sided aesthetically, the Ice maps also contain some "anti favorites", like good old Canal Row

Video of the Day: Bikerush playing Giga Cannon first before Harvester

Voluntary Personal Level Cap – would this work for both EA and the players?

Many in our community would agree that Rivals is the best Mobile RTS out there. Yet, it's not as popular as we might wish for. There's a number of reasons for that:

1. Skill-heavy RTS like Rivals are not the right thing for everyone, i.e. the overall potential audience is smaller than for titles like Fortnite or Clash Royale.
2. Those who like skill-heavy RTS often come from a "classic desktop gaming background". I.e. they played and loved the classic C&C titles, StarCraft or WarCraft 3. And for these, micro-transactiions that impact the multiplayer balance (aka "P2W") are a big turn-off. This also explained the negative PR after the announcement of Rivals about a year ago.

The conundrum is that the only proven monetization model for Mobile games are either F2P with ads, or F2P with in-game transactions:

• Ads won't work for Rivals because you need huge audiences like the hyper casual games
• Micro transactions that don't impact the gameplay itself (like vanity) don't attract enough buyers
• That leaves micro transactions that give you an advantage in the game, like the unit level system in Rivals

Still, a lot of people tried Rivals, and fell in love with the game. They know it has P2W elements, but still recognize that the P2W component is not horrible.

At the same time, even if you accept many of them get frustrated over time. Because even if you spend some money (say, $20 per month), you'll be behind the L13 or higher decks you see on the ladder for many months. It can be frustrating for all kinds of players:

• New players are in catch-up mode, so they will meet a huge amount of players with higher unit levels
• Experienced players of mediocre skill will lose a huge amount of games if they don't pay a lot. They might accept they are not the best players, but losing a lot because of skill and then another lot because of levels can suck hard
• Experienced players with high skill love the game, but they can still hate to go up against decent players with 2-3 higher unit levels – often, they will play as little ladder as possible, and just play events and customs

So, let's assume that the monetization model of Rivals is a "necessary evil". How can we still make it work better for the players to reduce frustration? 

Three months ago, others and I suggested a Casual Mode for Rivals. Yet, we never heard a word from the devs. Hence, we can assume that it won't happen for one reason or another.

That's why I tried to come up with another idea that keeps the motivation to pay for unit levels intact, but at the same time reduces frustration for players who don't pay a lot to get their units to L13 quickly:

A voluntary level cap!

How it would work:

• There is an option in the settings
• If you toggle it, your own units will be capped at the level of the highest unit in the opponent's deck
• Example: 
• I have a deck with L13-14
• If I would now meet Alarak, whose best units are L13, all my units would be capped at L13 max
• If I meet a player whose best unit is L12, all my units would be capped at L12
• If I meet a player with an L14 or L15 unit, my unit levels would be exactly as they are today
• That way, if a player uses the toggle, he will much less frequently have a significant level advantage. (Of course, it would sometimes still happen. like when someone has a L12 deck, but upgraded their tank to L14.)

You might wonder: Why would a player use this toggle? Well, I certainly would! Because I prefer to play on equal levels, even though I spent a lot of money to get my deck to L13-14:

• I spent money partly because I like to support Rivals
• And I spent money partly because I wanted to climb the ladder & because I didn't like to play against significantly higher levels all time time
• But the downside is that today, I too often have a big unit level advantage for my own taste. Some of these matches might still be fun (e.g. against top players like Lopatka who gives me a hell of a time even though he is ~2 levels below my units), but others will just become "not fun anymore" if I feel I just mostly win through levels

Hence, with this toggle, I could still benefit from my unit levels when I meet the L14-15 players of Rivals. But I would get better games against a ton of the other players. My winrate will certainly drop 10 percentage points (or more)., but that would be worth it! 

There's even a very rational component to use this toggle: Playing against good players without level advantage is better training value. Which is not just great for tournaments, but also for the Rivals events. Through better training, I can perform better at Events, giving me better rewards (incl. on the premium track), which then further boosts my unit levels.

(Speaking of tournamnets, RLong will soon announce his 2nd tournament. Join his discord to stay in the loop and play it!)

It's not clear how many players would use this toggle. But I bet that at least 50 of the top 200 players might. This would already be a significant change, especially as it's likely that stronger players will do this more often than weaker players. People who try to break into the Top200 with L10-11 decks would now meet strong players on about equal level far more often than today.

And the best thing: It would not be a disadvantage for "whales" at all. On the contrary: Those who don't use the toggle would be in a more unique position of having level advantage. Their relative winrate to other top players would improve (because e.g. my winrate would drop).

Maybe I miss a downside (besides the hopefully limited development effort). If not, it could be a great opportunity to protect the interests of EA, to protect the status of "whales", and still to significantly improve the experience of many of the other players.

What's your view?

A 2v2 mode for Rivals? (and other ideas)

Recently, there were some critical posts on Reddit by very active Rivals players and community contributors. Omeleet announced that he might stop playing Rivals, and AliciaDestiny voiced her worries about the growth of the player base. These are not two random complaints, but they come from people who really understand the game, and contribute a lot to the community (see the interviews with Alicia and Omeleet to learn more about the two).

To paraphrase, their combined worries are:

1. The player base isn't growing, and EA / Redwood seem to do little about it (be it performance marketing, or increasing the buzz about the game with events, tournaments etc.)
2. To many players, the design of events, their rewards and unit levels (like the recent new War Games) seems like milking the existing player base too much for short-term gain.
3. The game might benefit from new content to appeal to certain audiences better; Alicia suggested 2v2.

In this post, I want to comment on these topics, and try to provide some suggestions to Redwood that try to strike a balance between effort, their interests, and the players' interests.

Events & Monetization

First, let's start with what I like about what Redwood recently did:

1. Higher frequency of events. I think two events a week are great, and help both with diversity of play, and also to balance lower rewards for the free run with keeping total rewards for players up.
2. Event diversity. Especially unranked (L6 cap) and the new War Games format.

At the same time, I think there is room for improvement to meet players' criticism whilst maintaining alignment with the interests of Redwood / EA.

1. Lower the Level Cap for War Games. I believe this can even help strengthen monetization of the game, because:
• War Games makes players test new units
• If the level cap is lower (e.g. L8-9 for Masters), a higher share of players can test these units in a fair, competitive situation
• This can make players want to play with these units longer-term, which then can incentivize spend (e.g. by buying the premium track rewards, which could supply exactly these units)
• The lower level cap also means Redwood could bring in newer units, which is in their interest, as they are connected to spending money
2. Make War Games Reruns a bit cheaper. I believe this is win-win, as the likelihood for a player to want to play a unit outside of the event increases if they play them 20 or 30 times rather than just 10.

Even if the devs are not convinced that this will work better for them, I recommend them to try. It would be appreciated by the community, which I think is important at this stage.

F2P Rewards

There are concerns that the free rewards got worse. I personally believe that this criticism is sometimes a bit too harsh, because:

• As a comparison that things got worse, people often use the best events of the past
• Higher frequency of events (partially) compensates for lower free-run rewards
• At least for players who play a lot (~30 games a day), cloning vats and the changes to the credit-for-games mechanics were positive.

At the same time, the criticism is understandable and justified in many areas. Yet, there are some things I'd strongly recommend to Redwood. Most of them are not costing them a cent, as they just require better active communication.

1. Actively communicate that you plan to keep a 2 events / week frequency, and that you plan to keep the majority of them at lower levels. This allows players to consider the frequency of events (= more free runs) when evaluating the overall economy. If there's 2x the amount of events, it is ok if the free rewards are only about half as good.
2. Actively communicate what the plans to bring back more Diamond rewards for free-to-play players are. Redwood announced this in the Reddit AMA, but it's not going to make players happier unless they know what exactly is coming, and when.
3. It's okay to make your monetization and reward structure a bit opaque in the app. But be more straight-forward and open with your core community on Reddit and Discord, they will appreciate it. For example, you could publish tables for card+credit rewards for the free runs of events. Most players will not read this anyways, but your vocal, core community will appreciate a lot if you treat them like adults.

Buzz for YouTube

I do love Alicia's idea to bring top players to E3 to demonstrate how great high-level play in this game is. Yet, I realize that this cannot be done in the short amount of time until then, and there might be more important areas of focus for EA.

That's why I want to recommend a simple thing would help a bit and not cost EA a single dollar:

A weekly community update in the in-game message. You do have a community manager who reads everything on Reddit. She or he or could gather some top videos every week, and turn them into an in-game message. This is win-win-win:

• A win for your casual players, who get links to good YouTube videos for entertainment & learn about the game
• A win for your YouTubers, who get more views and followers. (And it's also a nice way for the devs to say thank you to the YouTubers.)
• A win for EA / Redwood, as ...
• It reduces player churn: Casual players who watch YouTube videos on Rival are more likely to stay with the game
• It can bring new players: More views and likes on good Rivals videos mean they will also reach more other viewers on YouTube. Great YouTube videos are one of the best ways to get 
• It's also a win for the community, as it would show that the developers care about them

The ideal setup would be:

1. An article on the game website every week, embedding the videos. This also shows to website visitors that this is an active game with an active community
2. A post on the Rivals Subreddit with all the videos
3. Tweet the link to article & Reddit post
4. An in-game message with direct links to all videos, and the EA website article

But for starters, the most important thing would be to just link the videos with a short 1-sentence description each directly from the in-game message.

For example, this week, the following videos could be put into the "Rivals Videos of the Week" message:

13lade's Top 10 Replayes

Bikerush's War Games Run

Alicia's LIANG IS SAVAGE video

One of terRor's replays:

CaptainBenzie's updated Droneswarm report:

The total effort for the community manager / social media manager should be less than 1 hour per week for the basic version of this. Hell, this whole blog post here cost me less than 2 hours!

2v2 mode

Another of Alicia's ideas, and various other people also asked for it in the past. The very valid concerns are:

1. Is it even viable? Would you not need larger maps? How should that work on the mobile screen?
2. Isn't it way too much effort for the developers?

I thought about it, and came up with the following idea that could work well for a lot of causal players, and hopefully be not too much effort for the developers.

The general game mechanic is unchanged. Yet, each player's activities are split into two roles:

• Generals (or Strategists) 
• These guys bring the decks (and with it, their unit levels)
• They spend the Tiberium, i.e. ...
• Build harvesters
• Build buildings
• Build units
• Use commander abilities
• Field Commanders (or Tacticians)
• They control the units

On first view, it might feel that the first role is boring. But I don't think so. Even just watching the game is cool for many people. And as the "General", you get to bring the deck, and make a lot of in-game decisions.

I even feel this could work well for certain types of causal players:

• People with weaker micro could prefer the General role. They get to build interesting decks and heavily influence the strategy.
• People with strong micro but low unit levels might be able to get to the top of the 2v2 ladder as Tacticians by playing with other people's units.
• People with high unit levels ("whales") could enjoy utilizing them in a different way.
• In some situations, you might feel you can be the "General", but don't have the focus to be the "Field Commander".

The match making could be relatively simple: 

• You chose 2v2 mode, and then one of the two roles
• As "General", you then chose faction and deck as usual
• For each role, you have a separate medal count for the match making

The implementation could be relatively straight-forward, Yes, it needs rework of the netcode etc., but it's far from the issues with a totally different game mode that would need different maps, different balancing,

What's your take on this? What could EA / Redwood do without huge effort or cost to help Rivals and it's community?

Quality of Life Changes that would make Rivals a better game for everyone

Roughly, you can split the debate on C&C:Rivals into three buckets:

1. Balance (individual units being over- or underpowered, certain styles not being viable, "how to fix tech" debate)
2. Economy (Pay-2-Win elements, reward balance, ability for low spenders to keep up)
3. Quality of Life (usability of the app and other things that have impact on the experience without being related to 1 or 2)

Today, I want to focus on #3. Partly because Redwood recently announced the introduction of some vanity features. This is generally laudable, as it opens revenue sources that are not related to the "Pay 2 Win" elements of Rivals.  The connection to "Quality of Life" is that if implemented badly, these new things could make the usability of the game much worse. If you don't know yet what I'm talking about, watch the video below:

The feedback on this video so far was mostly negative, focused on the quality and style of graphics and voice overs. Check the Reddit thread if you want to read this feedback.

Yet, my main worry is that one player's vanity features reduce the usability of the game for the other player. Hence, my strong recommendation to Redwood: Allow players to deactivate the visual and audible impact of their opponents' vanity purchases such as unit skins, taunts, in-game animations. It's okay to make an exception to small visuals or short audio – but it needs to be subtle, and spam must be prevented.

Below, find a list of additional Quality of Life changes I'd suggest.

Username Changes

There's also downsides to allowing user name changes, especially if you can do it repeatedly. But there's little speaking against at least a one-time username change. Some ways to implement it so that it could be good for the developers include:

• Allow a one-time change for free for Tiberium players
• Put a Diamond cost to changing your username, e.g. 100 Diamonds, and then 100 Diamonds more for each repeated change (100, 200, 300, ...)
• If it's too low priority to implement, but it could be done manually: Consider to offer it manually as a 1,000 Diamond purchase ($10 revenue for probably small effort), or consider it as a courtesy for your loyal spenders (e.g. offer it as a one-time option for players who spent more than $X00 on the game

Unit Filter in C&C TV

One of the obvious goals of the game is to promote diversity of play. Diversity of play is generally desirable from a fun perspective, but it also means players want to level up more units, which can increase their spend. 

At the same time, many rarely used units that seem fun are hard to play. And because they are rare, it's not easy to learn from other good players. But there's an easy fix: Put a unit filter into the C&C TV replay interface. See this mock-up:

That would allow fans of a unit to easily explore in which deck compositions a unit is used, and how good players approach the game and use the unit.

Alliance Comfort

For alliances, I suggest two small changes:

1. Make links in the alliance description clickable. This is not more abuse-able than the alliance name, and the reporting feature can still flag bad links. If the devs want to play it safe, they could restrict it to discord links, so that it's at least easier to contact the alliance / chat with them.
2. Allow it to invite players in your match history to your alliance. This could be a powerful feature, and help with community building and retention of newer players. Imagine a new player playing their first games, losing against a good player, and then getting an alliance invite from them. I bet that would be a cool, friendly user experience for many new players that would make Rivals more persomable and engaging. To prevent spam, this feature could be limited to e.g. 1-3 invites a day, and potentially allow players to toggle that they do not want to be invited at all (e.g. to spare AliciaDestiny invite-spam from 100 alliances)

Masters Map pool

You could argue that this is a bit off-topic, as it's a bit of a balance / meta related ask. But as there are so many good, balanced maps, I feel it's mostly a quality-of-life feature. And a really, really important one.

Why is it important?

1. Especially many of the most active players will spend a lot of time in Masters. It has gotten harder to get to Tiberium (without L10 units, many will not make it). But due to win streaks and challenge matches, it's relatively easy to reach Masters for competent players that play for more than a month.
2. Two of the maps (Pillbox and Tiberium Stripes, s. map images below) can feel a bit similar, and one is disliked by many players (Canal Row). I personally actually have grown to appreciate Canal Row for being different – but that's also because I only play it for a couple of days each season before I'm back in Tiberium. I would not want to play it all month long.

Why isn't the Masters map pool changed actually?

The reason the devs give is that it takes a lot of time and effort to change the design of maps. And that they would need to do that, as each league has their own theme ("red dust" for Iron, "beach" for Gold, "volcanic" for Platinum etc.).

But in my view this reason is not valid! Why?

• The argument is also not used for Tiberium, even though Tiberium also has it's own style / flavor in the screen before you start a match.
• Which is good, because Tiberium players prefer a good selection of map (and some rotation each season) over some aesthetic detail. But: This is also true for Masters players! Especially as in recent months, it has gotten harder for new players to get to Masters (due to unit levels going up a bit over time). Masters players also prefer map diversity over this artificial design limitation.
• There are even some ice maps that could be used for Masters – because Bronze League has the ice design, too! See the below list of map images.

So, my recommendation: For next season, expand the Masters map pool with the three maps "Down the Middle", "Open Water" and "Hand and Half". This would make the Masters map pool much more diverse and probably even make Canal Row much less of an issue, because you play it just every 8 matches.

Masters League maps:

Two Fuses (my favorite Masters map)

Tiberium Stripes

Pillbox (yes, not fully identical to Tiberium Stripes, but enough similarities to make certain strategies/matchips feel not that different)

Peaks and Valleys (I like that it's also quite different from nearly all other maps, but it also can get old if you play it too often)

Canal Row (the narrow choke can make it feel very annoying if you don't have enough fast air (incl JJTs or 2-range units, and it also can feel very tough to overcome level differences as there's less room to micro open fights)

(Some of the) Bronze League maps:

Open Water (good enough for the Tiberium map pool, and quite different from other Masters maps)

Half and Half (very different from many maps, as the harvester harass scouting lane is very different from the pad control lane; on basically all other maps a 3-vision-range scout can cover both at the same time)

Down the Middle (another 2-pad map that still feels pretty different from Two Fuses)

Casual Mode – why it could make sense and how it could work

There's a repeated debated to add a casual mode to the game. Typical arguments for it include:

• Ladder is stressful, sometimes I don't feel up for it
• If I want to try new decks, ladder makes me hesitant, thus reducing diversity of play and fun for me
• If I have a whacky network connection, or my baby might wake up any minute, I might not want to "risk medals" in the ladder

Typical arguments against it include:

• For that, there's already the friendly games you can play in your alliance or with people on your friends list!
• This would reduce liquidity from the ladder, increasing queuing times

First, let's look at the counter arguments:

• Casual games in alliance and on friends list are okay for well-connected players who are active on discord. Casual games are basically inaccessible for most players. I would love to play more casual games, and I even am on discord – but I find it too much hassle, especially when I'm short on time.
• The risk of increasing ladder queuing time is indeed real. So the goal must be to design the casual mode in such a way that most players would still want to play ladder in many situations. If we get this right, then the casual mode could even reduce ladder queuing times, because it might keep players interested and invested in the game who really miss that mode. 

There are just certain types of players who find ladder stressful, and I feel we can respect that. Any other traditional RTS caters for these with custom games that can be easily set up, and where others can join easily. And still, most good players play lots of ladder in e.g. WarCraft 3 or StarCraft: Broodwar or StarCraft 2. 

Just a quick mock-up for illustration purposes. And yes, that's the German version of Rivals.

So, done right, casual games would make a lot of players happier without relevant downsides.

What would I suggest?

• There must be no or much slower progression through casual games compared to ladder.
• No fuel gained 
• No vat progress
• No (or fewer) Credits and XP
• Casual games must still involve different unit levels, as on ladder. So that even players who might like that game mode have an incentive to progress, hence play ladder.
• To facilitate a good matchmaking, I would suggest a hidden matchmaking algorithm that combines:
• Medals for active players (in a softer way than on ladder)
• Unit levels, to reduce situations where players with >2 level difference play against each other
• Potentially a secret casual matchmaking score (similar to medals, but hidden) that prevents too easy long loss runs (as they would be demotivating for newer players)
• Advertise the mode as a secondary "test and practice" mode and making it clear that it has downsides

Why do NightEnD, Happy & Co still play ladder, even though there is custom games? 

Would people still play ladder? Yes, of course!

Ladder is amazing because:

• It gives you a sense of progress through leagues, rankings, medal count
• I makes the rough skill level of your opponents transparent, giving you a sense of accomplishment & personal progression in your skill levels
• It ensures the opponents usually try their best, giving you a better sense of accomplishment and better training value

It might be that on the bottom end, some share of newer players would play this game mode a lot. But this might not be a bad thing:

1. Better than them playing less / stopping to play – they can switch to ladder later, or still be incentivized to recommend the game to others or buy something in the game
2. Queue times are not a problem at the lower leagues, so even if casual takes 20% of game volume there, I see no problem

Now, I'm not saying that this must be the #1 priority for the Rivals developers. But I strongly believe that beyond balancing units and the econonmy, it's important that the game improves it's stickiness for the numerous players for whom "ladder only" might not be the perfect experience. 

Beyond directly improving the experience of causal players, I still think that more tournaments, supported by Redwood, could help to improve the community feeling of Rivals & allow casual players (who are not on the discord or in a hyper-active alliance) to connect with the community and top players.


Thanks to Nhiyla, 13lade, CptBenzie, Sven/Eden, ZeroHour and others on discord for their thoughts on this topic.

Why Tournaments are important for Rivals – and how Redwood could support them

Tournaments are the heart of every competitive multi player game. They are great not just for the players, but also for the community: Casual players can watch great games, follow the development of the tournaments, root for their favorite players or decks, and discuss the results.

All this would count for Rivals, too. I for one would love to not just watch top player replays from time to time, but see them perform at their best in a tournament finals, all that with an entertaining and insightful commentary.

Yet, for Rivals, tournaments would be even more important. Rivals carries the baggage of a lot of negative perception from C&C fans, and fans of competitive RTS in general. The negative perception is because Rivals is a F2P game with "pay to win" elements (i.e. spending money gives you an edge in the default game mode).

I laid out in different articles why I believe that Rivals gets the balance right and why I think Rivals is still the best Mobile RTS out there. But what I think doesn't matter. It matters what people think who would in general be interested in playing a good Mobile PvP RTS, but do not – because they fundamentally reject the idea of F2P, or because they never played the game and don't understand why it's still a great game, or because potential new players read negative press and reviews about Rivals.

Yes, there are some examples for positive reviews about Rivals. But much of the feeedback is negative. Some of the negative press and reviews might be understandable, but it's often just focused on the principled issue, and does not check whether Rivals still can be great – even for players who don't want to spend money.

Yes, there are some P2W elements to rivals, but it's still a great games  And in tournaments, there would be no P2W.

Tournaments could help tackle this issue. How?

• Tournaments are held at equal unit levels, i.e. there is no pay 2 win element in Rivals tournament
• Tournaments are a hook to create some buzz and coverage for Rivals. Right now, if you Google for Rivals, you mostly find launch reviews on various gaming sites. Some even positive, but usually not very insightful, and not reflective of the great PvP RTS that Rivals can be. Tournament coverage can show people that Rivals can be an amazing and fair PvP RTS
• Tournaments can create the "meta content" and accessible community feeling that any multiplayer game needs. Yes, we have our discords, but they are intransparent for new players. There's no community sites or forums. There's basically just the Rivals Subreddit as a docking point to the community for new players. Tournaments can increase new player retention because they create community feeling and a meta layer on the game.

What should the Community do?

Simple: Run great tournaments. With a focus on good coverage. Tournaments need to work for the players, but they also need to work for the audience. Casual players who like to 'follow the scene' or just like to watch good games. 

Hence, any tournament run by the community should think about how make it accessible to casual players. Things that help:

1. Twitch stream for the tournament
2. YouTube videos with commented/casted top games from the tournament
3. An easy way to discover all relevant information on the tournament
4. Be reliable – that's not just key for players and watchers, but also to gain trust and buy-in from the developers

How could Redwood support the community?

Easy things Redwood could do for trustworthy, proven tournament formats (of which there are not many, yet – so the ball also lies in the corner of the community).

• Announce tournaments in the app through the notification system
• Announce tournaments on their Twitter or the Facebook page (which is by the way horrendously inactive)
• Advertise YouTube videos of the finals if they are on trusted YouTube channels like Captain Benzie or Excoundrel

Harder things:

• Have a dedicated community & social media manager, whose job is to run Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Discord and liaise with tournament organizers to support them
• Support tournaments with some prizes, e.g. Diamonds or Chests for the prize pool

Very hard (expensive) things to do:

• Support a tournament mode in the app
• Support / run more sophisticated tournaments, potentially even including offline events like the launch celebration

My suggestion would be:

1. For the community to run more events that show Redwood that there is value in them (which needs a bit of reach, good YouTube content etc.)
2. For Redwood to start with the simple things I listed above. The hard things can wait, but there's no reason to not start something soon.

Okay, Flash, Jaedong and Bisu won't play Rivals anytime soon. But let's try to get Rivals tournaments somewhere!