🇭🇺 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
With relatively rare balance patches in the recent months, a problem for tournaments had been that certain units and decks were played very often, leading to more predictable, less exciting games.
To counter that, tournament organizers have been toying with modifications, such as to force players to play both factions, or ban specific units and commanders (such as Razorback, Fanatics, Liang).
In one of his latest tournaments, the Game.TV Finals, 13lade introduced an even more sophisticated system that actually worked great: Both players ban some units or commanders that the opponent can't chose. This allows for an interesting metagame, e.g.:
Do I ban the strongest units/commanders, or what I think this opponents likes / needs the most?
If I ban these units, what will the opponent play? How can I counter it?
Can I bait my opponent into playing a certain type of deck by banning a specific unit?
But see for yourself, it's a 2.5h well spent for any Rivals fan:
What I would like to see more in future tournamnets is more pre-determined maps. E.g. that it's clear which 5 maps are played in order for the semi-finals. This could allow players to come up with a game plan stretching the full series vs. just for each map.
A number of Rivals tournaments nowadays make use of the awesome LEGION bot. It's a discord chat bot that makes organizing and running tournaments much easier, both for the organizers and the players. The bot is created and improved by SarpedonTD and JadeXyan. You can find him on the official Rivals discord.
As a nice side effect of running this bot, SarpedonTD started recording and analyzing the games played. The sample size is already decent: 3,384 games/maps, 1,487 matches in 22 tournaments. From this, he used the Glicko Rating system to calculate player ratings that try to approximate a players' skill / performance. It works similar to MMR / Match Making Rank in games, or ELO in chess.
Here's a top 10 players list based on the games played so far:
The top 3 look "correct", as in that it would be the actual top 3 that you would hear from many if you asked for the best Rivals players in the world.
If two equal-rated players play, 162 points flip to the winner
If a higher-ranked player wins, they risk more points and can gain less points (e.g. Alicia only would get 17 points if she won against a new player now, but would risk hundreds of points)
Of course, not every Rivals tournament uses the LEGION bot. E.g. the recent BikeRush tournamnet, in which AgentShadow won against AliciaDestiny in the finals, is not part of the above.
Now that we talked so much about the LEGION bot and ranking, here's a video from a recent LEGION tournament!
Shoutouts go to:
SarpedonTD and JadeXyan, the master minds behind the bot
KennyEmmy, for his work in running tournaments/events
Praetor Pyro (CrazyPsychopath) and Gizarius bring you another great tournament, with a record-breaking $1337 prize pool. When is the tournament?
Saturday, December 28 at 10 AM PST / 1 PM EST / 7 PM CEST / 5 PM GMT How do I sign up for the tournament?
Go to https://challonge.com/tournaments/signup/SgbBcd16zr and click on signup. Remember to check-in before the tournament starts. Check-ins open two hours before the tournament begins. What is the tournament format?
All matches will be best of three. The quarter-finals and finals will be best of 5. Random maps will be used each time. All matches will be announced on https://discord.gg/UaYwz3D. Where is the tournament bracket? https://challonge.com/PimpRivals2
(Subject to change when the tournament starts) What's the prize pool?
The total tourney prize pool is $1337.
1st place: $800
2nd place: $400
3nd place: $100
Play of the day: $37 Where will the tournament be broadcast? https://www.twitch.tv/praetorpyro
Official stream: https://www.twitch.tv/praetorpyro/
Official Discord: https://discord.gg/UaYwz3D
Yes, you heard it right. Whilst the latest update didn't bring back vanity items to the Rivals shop, there will be some of these items up for grabs in Bikerush's final qualifier for his Command & Conquer Rivals Pro League. Because EA has decided to sponsor this tournament series. Hooray!
The semi finals of Rivals Team League Season 2 have concluded. As there's no live stream, I won't write down the results of the Semi Finals here, but instead encourage you to watch the videos with AwDaSea's calm and thoughtful commentary.
Muu against Ten Minute Queues
An epic showdown of a ton of big name players, including AliciaDestiny (USA), Victor Bansemer (Brazil) and wwfyin for Muu against 13lade (UK), srpss (Bulgaria) and StrikerVX (Canada). Some truly excellent games, including both meta decks and very unusual decks created just for this type of tournament situation.
Spartan Warriors against Crazy Russians
In this match, the top Swiss players Agent Shadow and Kelin Drawn, supported by Hungarian kennyemmy22 and pontiki from Greece face off against the Russian-speaking warband of Crazy Psychopath, Sasteek (Russia), ThxforMMR (Belarus) and dice (Uzbekistan). Tense and juicy games, including a cheeky Razorback base kill.
With Rivals Team League Season 2 nearing it's close, be ready to sign up your team / alliance up for Season 3. To do that, join the RTL discord and start assembling your team in the background.
I created a Rivals community survey with questions on Twitch and YouTube channels, Tournaments, and Balance. Please click here to participate. Once I have a good number of responses, I will come back with the results!
December Coliseum
Shortly after the November finals, 13lade announced the new round of his Coliseum tournaments. This time with a prize pool! Here's what you need to know:
To Qualify: Win a qualifier during a regular Friday Night Coliseum! OR win an 8 man group stage qualifier run by Legion13. These qualifiers will begin Sunday 8th December on 13lade's Twitch stream.
To Register: Follow the instructions given by Legion13 in the register channel in 13lade's discord.
Prize Pool: A minimum of $150 will be in the prize pool for the Finals of the December Coliseum.
When: The December Coliseum Finals will take place on Sunday 29th December. Qualifiers are weekly (see above).
Rivals Team League is the team competition for Command & Conquer Rivals. Two weeks ago, the group stages of season 2 had concluded. Time for an update on the playoffs! All matches in the semis were 3-0/4-0 sweeps. This raises expectations for great and hopefully tense semi finals!
You can find YouTube links behind the matches where available. Here's two embeds:
Pontiki vs porkepix, a great battle on eye lecel
And dice as he uses the Shatterer!
Upcoming Semi Finals
Muuu vs Ten Minute Queues -- With players such as 13lade, AliciaDestiny, srpss, this will be a cracker. To a degree, it's the tournament version of the alliance competition between Terminus Shores and the former Hellz Ascendance
Spartan Warriors vs Crazy Russians -- The teams with less tournament success, but still huge amouts of skill facing off against each other. With dice coming from Uzbekistan, which had been part of the Persian Empire in the past, it should be an interesting battle between the Spartans and Crazy 'Xerxes' Psychopath's men.
Thank you to AwDaSea for running this event so well! Follow AwDaSea on YouTube. And if you also would like to play RTL next season, start assembling your team today and join the RTL discord!
The 2nd qualifier went down on December 1st, and "Micro Queen" AliciaDestiny and the Dutch devastator Suzaku could qualify for the January 5 finals. In the finals of this tournament, the most successful Rivals player AliciaDestiny got back on the success trail, as she had announced. And she won in a pretty dominating fashion, e.g. by employing rarely-seen Jackson-boosted MLRS.
Grand finals: AliciaDestiny 4-1 Suzaku (link to video)
Semi finals:
Boswell 0-3 Suzaku
Sasteek 1-3 AliciaDestiny
The two first placed players, AliciaDestiny and Suzaku both qualify for the C&C Rivals Pro League Finals on January 5. They join AgentShadow and VictorBansemer from the in what promises to be an
This will be one of the biggest Rivals events ever, and here's the key information:
Streams on Bikerush's Twitch channel -- follow this channel now to ensure you don't miss these tournaments or Bikerush's other Rivals streams
Swiss top player Agent Shadow won the C&C Rivals Pro League Qualifier 1 by taking out some big names, like VictorBansemer, Suzaku and srpss (who recently beat AliciaDestiny and Suzaku for his first big tournament win).
In his matches, AgentShadow heavily utilized Razorback and Sandstorm, but also some other decks such as a MSV/Mammoth deck to cleverly counter srpss's more vanilla Mammoth deck. In the tournament, we also saw quite some Basilisk and Avatars. This illustrates how different tournament play (where the map is known in advance) is from the ladder meta.
AgentShadow on his victory: "srpss has great micro, so I benefited from having chosen the right decks against him. VictorBansemer is hard to play because he has an unconventional playstyle and you need to be prepared for surprises! I think the best match was my game against srpss on Middle Oasis"
The two first placed players, AgentShadow and VictorBansemer, both qualify for the C&C Rivals Pro League Finals on January 5. This will be one of the biggest Rivals events ever, and here's the key information:
Streams on Bikerush's Twitch channel -- follow this channel now to ensure you don't miss these tournaments or Bikerush's other Rivals streams
4 qualifiers on Nov 24, Dec 1, Dec 8 and Dec 15, top 2 qualify and winner gets $25 in each qualifier
To get a glimpse into how Rivals tournaments casted by Bikerush look like, check out this awesome highlights reel from the last big tournament Bikerush hosted:
The group stage of the 2nd season of the Rivals Team League ("RTL") has concluded. 138 players in 20 teams participated, playing 1,314 games / maps. 8 teams qualfiied for the playoff phase. The Top 3 teams will get a total prize pool of $300. Here's all the info about the group phase, and the upcoming playoffs.
To stay in loop with the playoffs, and for the upcoming Season 3, join the RTL discord. Also, follow the RTL YouTube channel, where you can find a lot of games casted by AwDaSea himself, the mastermind behind RTL.
Playoff Grid
Group Stages Final Table
The teams qualified by # match wins first, # set wins second, and # map wins third. Differences between won/lost didn't play a role to create an incentive to always play all games, instead of stopping at 3-0.
As you can see, the fight for #4 was quite close, with CzechoSlovak Wolfdogs and Kraut Control narrowly missing out on a playoff spot. An honorable mention goes to the German team T2D, who sent two full teams to the competition.
Top RTL Games on Video
AwDaSea casted a ton of games and put them on YouTube. Here's a selection of some of them with top players:
AgentShadow vs srpss -- Ace Match between Ten Minute Queues and Spartan Warriors, deciding the top spot for group B
German player Aelberson going up against Eric from the Top Team Spartan Warriors.
Conrad from the Crazy Russian against Lopatka from the CzechoSlovak Wolfdogs
Star Players
Season 1 had been won by "Team Scrappy", in which AliciaDestiny had been the star player. AliciaDestiny plays season 2 again, this time as part of team "Muuu", who qualified as first for the playoffs in group A.
The top players ranked by "map delta" (maps won minus maps lost) can be seen in the table below. For the full list, see this spreadsheet. If we plot the # maps played against the winrate, we get the following chart with all the RTL S2 players:
And if we plot the winrate of all RTL S2 players against their # of maps played, we get the following picture. As you can see, the frequency of famous names such as Suzaku, srpss and 13lade is quite high. StrikerVX' 18-0 in maps and the good performances of the lesser-known Dice (Uzbekistan), KlarJK (South Korea), RaptorIT (USA) and kennyemmy22 (Hungary) also deserve mentioning.
Map Statistics
We tracked the first map choice throughout the entire group phase. The favorite first map choices were Open Water (22%), Rorschach (18%) followed by a Three Lanes, Tug of War, Fighting Pit with 4% each -- and only 3 maps have not been chosen as first maps by any player. You can see the full breakdown here.
Thank you to AwDaSea for running this event so well! Follow AwDaSea on YouTube. And if you also would like to play RTL next season, start assembling your team today and join the RTL discord!
The Bandito Smackdown tournament concluded, and Bulgarian Rivals prodigy srpss could take the crown against Dutch top player Suzaku. Key to win the series, srpss showed great usage of the Razorback in a 2-2-2 deck with Jackson - Rifle, Missile - Slingshot, Predator - Razorback, Mohawk.
You can watch the four hour video below, the grand finals start at time stamp 3 hours, 27 minutes.
What do the players say?
srpss: "Wow, I finally won a tournament that isn't the 13lade Coliseum!"
Suzaku: "Congratulations to srpss for winning! Razorback has shown to be a really powerful unit for tournaments, as a lot of players have shown today. I'm looking forward to see how decks evolve to counter it. Oh, and: Kane lives!"
Smackdown!
Grand finals: srpss 3-1 Suzaku
Map 1: Middle Oasis - Suzaku wins with Seth Tick Tank
Map 2: Down the Middle - srpss wins with Jackson Razorback against Kane Tick Tank
Map 3: Cracked Ice - srpss wins with Jackson Mammoth against the quintessential Suzaku APC
Map 4: Fighting Spirit - srpss wins with Jackson Razorback against a Giga/Stealth Tank deck
Semi finals:
srpss 3-0 AliciaDestiny
Suzaku 3-0 wwfyin
Quarter finals:
AliciaDestiny 2-0 Byah (North America quarters)
srpss 2-0 Sasteek (Eastern Europe)
13lade 1-2 Suzaku (Western Europe)
wwfyin 2-1 Red Alert (Asia-Pacific)
Thanks to the Bandito Collective for this awesome event. Make sure to follow their Twitch channel, as well as the streams of Jeffrey and Nukin, who casted this event for us today.
The Smackdown Tournament sets a new prize pool record for Rivals shortly after the Rivals World Cup. It's a tournament presented by the Bandito Collective, with casting by Nukin and Jeffrey.
When? Starting with the Western Europe Regional Finals on Nov 16, 11am EST (4 pm London, 5 pm Paris/Rome/Berlin)
This is a great video, because 13lade deliberately plays four very different meta decks, and adds insightful commentary on why he does what. Absolute must-watch especially for newer players who want to learn!
GDI Suzaku APC Liang variant: Liang - Riflemen, Missile Troopers - Pitbull, APC - Dronesawarm, Orca (read more about this deck in this interview with Suzaku)
Nod Jade Laser Drone deck ckm111 variant: Jade - Militants, Laser Troopers, Chem Troopers - Bikes - Laser Dromes, Phantom (read more about this deck here)
The Rivals Twitter account has also become active again, so let's support this by following on Twitter and giving the latest posts some love and retweets!
The Rivals tournament scene is alive and kicking, so just a couple weeks after the most recent "super tournament weekend", we had a similarly amazing amount of Rivals content to watch and indulge. Rivals World Cup
Bikerush and Gizarius hosted a tournament with $1,000 prize pool. The biggest prize pool ever attracted a great lineup of participating players, and also a large viewership -- more than 200 simultaneous viewers in the stream. You can watch the full video recording on Bikerush's Twitch channel. If you want to thank Giza/Bike for the tournament, or provide feedback, here's the Reddit thread.
AliciaDestiny beat VictorBansemer in the finals with 4-0, and didn't drop a single game in the whole tournament -- very impressive once again!
The top 4 with country of origin and what they won:
AliciaDestiny -- USA -- $650
VictorBansemer -- Brazil -- $200
Benven2 -- USA -- $100
Nukin -- USA -- $50
The field was super stacked beyond the top 4 as well. We even had some big upsets, such as 13lade being eliminated by CrazyPsychopath. And we saw interesting decks, e.g. Suzaku was having a successful 9-0 ruun with a Kane/Tick Tank deck (unheard of!) in this and another recent tournament before VictorBansemer found a way to defeat it in the quarterfinals. You can see the full brackets here.
If you didn't watch it yet, I can also recommend to check out the trailer for this tournament. Grade A shit talking, and Alicia delivered on it:
RIFLE 3, Qualifier 2
On Saturday, 4 more players qualified for the main event of the RIFLE 3 tournament. You can watch the full video here.
The top 4 with country of origin and what they won:
Suzaku -- Netherlands -- 10,000 Diamonds
VictorBansemer -- Brazil -- 4,000 Diamonds
nickcool -- Taiwan -- 1,000 Diamonds
Lopatka -- Czech Republic
The top 4 also qualified for the main event, where they will face off against the already-qualified AliciaDestiny, 13lade, Alarak and Pontiki -- this is a stunning lineup for the 8-player finals that will happen soon.
Coliseum is a weekly/monthly tournament series run by 13lade. This week's final saw a showdown between NaturalSky, one of the top players from the Netherlands) against srpss from Bulgaria. Here I won't spoil the results, as the video is just under 10 minutes long -- a must-watch!
Gizarius (sponsor) and Bikerush (caster) host another great Rivals tournament: The Rivals 2019 World Cup. Prize money was announced for the first 4 places:
$650 for 1st place
$200 for 2nd place
$100 for 3rd place
$50 for 4th place
The tournament will happen on Sunday, November 10 at 10 AM PST / 1 PM EST / 7 PM CEST / 5 PM GMT.
For viewers: The tournament will be streamed on Bikerush's Twitch channel. Best follow it and set an alert for when he goes live to ensure you don't miss it!
To get a sense for how great Rivals tournaments can be, watch the semi finals and finals of the last collaboration between Gizarius and Bikerush:
Sign-ups for RIFLE 3: Qualifier 2 have started today! If you want to play this great tournament, you can register/sign-up here.
Additional info:
The first 32 players to sign up will be considered for the bracket (Participants), the rest will be put on a reserve list (Reserves) and will be called upon if anyone from the Participants forfeits his position
The bracket will be finalized and announced on November 2 2019
All matches of Round 1 will be held offline and they must be completed before November 9 2019
Matches of Round 2-5 will be broadcasted live on twitch and will be held on November 9 2019 (Tournament Day)
Official broadcast of the tournament will begin with matches of Round 2 on 9 November 2019 at 10:00 AM EDT/ 2:00 PM GMT / 3:00 PM CET
Today, 13lade and TheCopycatTV casted the finals of the monthly Coliseum tournament. It's an unusal tournament, as it's not (only) a knock-out format. 13lade runs weekly qualifiers, and the participants meet in the finals, first playing each other once in a round-robin format before it goes to a short knock-out phase.
The players in order of final ranking:
Suzaku
srpss
SiNKiLLeR
Alarak
nickcool
Watch the video recording:
Decks played include:
Tick Tank + Kane!
Sandstorm -- even a game where it's in both decks
Jumpjet / Orca
A deck with Basilisk, Cyborgs and Rockworm!
Rhinos being praised by 13lade!
Double harvester play without any Tech units
So you see it's pretty worth to watch this!
The decks illustrate that balance changes in tournaments. Once you can pick and build particular decks for particular maps and opponents, other units and deck compositions become viable. GDI was played more than Nod, despite Nod being a bit stronger on ladder. This illustrates that striving for perfect balance for both ladder (higher and lower leagues) and tournaments is quite tricky.
When is the tournament?
Saturday, December 28 at 10 AM PST / 1 PM EST / 7 PM CEST / 5 PM GMT
How do I sign up for the tournament?
Go to https://challonge.com/tournaments/signup/SgbBcd16zr and click on signup. Remember to check-in before the tournament starts. Check-ins open two hours before the tournament begins.
What is the tournament format?
All matches will be best of three. The quarter-finals and finals will be best of 5. Random maps will be used each time. All matches will be announced on https://discord.gg/UaYwz3D.
Where is the tournament bracket?
https://challonge.com/PimpRivals2
(Subject to change when the tournament starts)
What's the prize pool?
The total tourney prize pool is $1337.
1st place: $800
2nd place: $400
3nd place: $100
Play of the day: $37
Where will the tournament be broadcast?
https://www.twitch.tv/praetorpyro
Official stream: https://www.twitch.tv/praetorpyro/
Official Discord: https://discord.gg/UaYwz3D