Player sentiment about playing against higher and lower levels

Some weeks ago, Alarak created a poll to quantify players' sentiment about levels. Because on the one hand, general wisdom would say that most players would prefer a game without levels. But on the other hand, levels give players an advantage, so some might actually prefer such a system.

A whopping 214 Rivals players participated in the poll. Alarak posted the results of this survey on Reddit. In collaboration with him, here's some upgraded visuals on the poll results that you might fight interesting.

In the first chart, we look at the answer to the question "How do you feel about playing against opponents with higher levels?"

• Each bar shows the share of respondents that voted for a certain sentiment
• Color indicates the answer to the question for a players' levels in comparison to their "standard league". Translating my categories to the exact answer options:
• Very low: Not enough for Challenge matches in my league. (4 under level cap). (This means less than 11 in tiberium league and less than 9 in Masters)
• Low: Barely enough for Challenge Matches (this would mean between 9-10 in Masters and 11-12 in Tiberium League)
• Middle: Middle of the league. (10-11 in Masters, 12-13 in Tiberium League).
• Top: Almost capped or fully capped. (12-13 in Masters League, 14-15 in Tiberium League)

Click the chart to enlarge

Unsurprisingly, the negative sentiment about playing against higher levels increases if players have lower levels, hence experience the situation more frequently.

In the next chart, we look at answers to the inverted question: "How do you feel about playing against opponents with lower levels?"

Here, players with low levels seem to be able to put themselves into the opponent's shoes more easily. But even among the players with low levels, there's still people who don't chose the clear "I don't like it" option.

Who responded to the poll? Alarak asked questions about the respondents' levels and their (typical) league:

Also, Alarak asked how often players have lower levels compared to their opponents. Below, I plotted this against the players' responses for their own levels compared to the league. One idea of this is to sense-check the responses. E.g. if someone answers "my levels are near the top for my league", e.g. L14-15 for high Tiberium, it would be strange if they responded that they "almost always" play against higher levels. And indeed, none of the respondents chose this combination.

You can read Alarak's thoughts on the answers here and the Reddit discussion here.


Video of the day

After thinking about how much you don't like to play against higher levels, let us look at tournament play, which happens at equal levels. Here's the finals of the weekly Coliseum tournament. You can find more about this weekly tournament series on 13lade's Twitch Channel.

StrikerVX against nickcool, who will prevail?

Sign up to the Rivals Team League with your alliance / friends

Rivals Team League season 1 was an amazingly well organized Rivals tournament for teams / alliances. One great quality of it was the flexibility it allowed for players to arrange their matches with their opponents freely within a week. That means that even people with a busy schedule could play, in contrast to traditional tournaments where you have to commit time on specific days and times. 29 teams participated in season 1.

Now, the next season is about to start, and I highly recommend to join this event if you have an alliance or a number of friends to play with.

Some key information:

• Sign up using this form until Monday, September 2, 9 pm EST (for Europe, that's past midnight)
• Your team should be at least 4 players, I recommend at least 5-6 so you have backup players (vacations, unavailability)
• Join this Discord to get all info and follow the tournament
• Prize pool right now is $300 for the top 3 placed teams
• Matches will consist of four (4) standard sets and one (1) ace set
• Each set will be a best of five (Bo5)
• Maps for standard sets will be determined during line up submission, each captain will select the starting map for two (2) of the sets
• Ace Set starting map will be pre-determined each week

Thank you, AwDaSea from Terminus Shores for organizing this amazing tournament!

The RTL playoff bracket from Season 1;  congratulations for Team Scrappy for the win

How to win with L11/L12 against a full L15 deck?

Facing decks with much higher levels can be frustrating. Yet, especially newer players will be in this situation quite frequently. Hence it's worth to think about: "How can I still win this game, even though my opponent has much higher levels?"

I came across a game that isn't just an example where a strong player beats a much higher-levelled deck, but that also contains some good examples for concepts you can apply. I hope this will be a useful learning moment especially for newer players.

I recorded the game and uploaded it on YouTube. Apologies for the mediocre sound quality, I'm not a YouTuber & used the first-best app to record video on my smartphone. Below the video, I will comment what I see as the key situations and decisions.

• The game starts with wheel scout before harvester against harvester into Missile Squads.
• Benedikt sees two Missile Squads, and knows that his L11.0 Cyber Wheels cannot really deal with the L15.3 Missile Troopers, so he knows he has to go into Flames to be able to compete for the first Missile. 
• Just for context: A L15.3 unit has 37% more hitpoints 
• 37% more damage compared to a L11.0 unit
• Critical moment #1 in the game at 0:35 seconds: Benedikt moves his wheels to the bottom for a scout and the option to block the harvester. He might know Gizarius likes to play tech (hence likes dual harvester), or he might just want to get information and option value. Critical concept #1: Get information. To beat higher levels, you need to have the right unit composition. This needs either luck, anticipation, or good scouting.
• Either way, it allows him to delay the 2nd harvester while engaging the Missiles with his Flame Squad, thus creating two parallel challenges for the opponent. This is a critical concept, as to beat higher-level decks, you need to bank on making better decisions and force the opponent into mistakes. and multiple parallel challenges are a great way to allow the opponent to react sub-optimally.
• Gizarius follows up with Snipers, which is a right decision in my view. He prioritizes further delaying or even winning the first nuke, which gives him more time for his deck that, not just for levels, will be far superior in the late game.
• Benedikt simultaneously plays bikes to go after the harvesters. This is an interesting choice. as he cannot expect to kill Harvesters that have so many hitpoints (level difference!) and can be healed by Liang. But there's a lot of value in the bikes:
• Further aggression that can keep the opponent occupied and/or spend money (delaying the tech)
• Bikes are generally useful against Liang when the Nuke goes off soon, as the Liang player will often try to get pad control with the Liang drone
• Bikes also have the option value of being the anticipatory counter for potential Talons or Drones, which are the likely alternatives to Snipers
• Even if Benedikt would know that Snipers come, it seems likely that another wheels Wheels would not have been enough to win the first Nuke, as he wouöd have no unit to bear the Liang drone hovering over a bad, and 3 underlevelled Wheel squads would likely not have beaten the Missile/Sniper and possible follow-up unit from Gizarius quick enough to win first Nuke
• A rule of thumb is also that you don't want to overbuild one type of unit except there's a clear reason. The first bike gives you more options than the third wheel. 
• There's a tiny mistake from Benedikt at 0:50, who could have moved his Flames up to the opponent Lasers a bit earlier (also good to engage the Sniper and get a bit more damage on it) earlier, and move the Wheels to the hex where it can engage Snipers but not be shot by Wheels. I mention this to show that there's always room for improvement in Rivals.
• The second bike is more interesting from Benedikt. Gizarius, as expected, plays another Missile, as he can be happy with pad control and saving money whilst cheaply defending the bike. But soon we'll see what a good player can do with these bikes!
• The bikes can be seen as a diversion to pull units and focus away from the pads shortly before the nuke. It made Gizarius move his new Missiles down instead of up to the pads, so shortly before the Nuke goes off. At 1:06, Benedikt swings both of his bikes up to take pads, being able to sneak between the Missiles as a consequence of the aforementioned "luring the Missiles down to defend". 
• The right bikes quickly deal with the Liang drone. Gizarius slightly late reaction to make his Snipers attack the new Flamers instead of the Bikes means that the 11.0 Flamers get to the centre pad and contest it just long enough for the nuke to go off.
• Note the pattern: Controlling one Nuke, and contesting the other two. Especially against higher-level decks, this is often a much more realistic way to win a Nuke compared to controlling two pads, which ususally needs winning a fight. When you feel you're behind, keep this pattern in mind: Which is the one pad you can control, and how can you contest the other two just in time for the nuke?
• Directly after the Nuke, Benedikt adds some chipping damage to the Snipers with his bikes rather than go for the harvesters. This seems pointless at first, but consider this:
• First, he needs to quickly abandon the pad with the bikes anyways. Time is still on Gizarius' side, and so Benedikt correctly decides to let the opponent charge the pads
• Second, good players have the habit to take small edges. Shortly stopping bikes for one volley before moving on to the harvesters does not cost much time.
• Third, he might hope he is able to bring down the snipers to a single unit in the squad in the coming phase of the game. This might make it potentially much easier for him to take the second nuke, as a single-unit Sniper doesn't kill his Flamers as quickly, and, when the time is right, can be taken out much faster.
• This shows us a second small potential mistake from Benedikt: He forgets about his single Wheel near Gizarius' base, which pop caps him and has little value outside of scouting. On the other hand, the scouting info is invaluable, and currently the pads are charging. So Benedikt might actually prefer to have more information right now than more units, to create the plan on how to steal the second nuke. Whether intentional or not, this play of thought shows that there's often a trade-off between getting more information vs. having more control of the battlefield. Control of the battlefield is often temporary, especially if you're so behind in levels. But information might help you come up with the one sneaky plan to be ahead just when the time is right.
• In the next phase, Gizarius has the upper hand. This is pretty natural, consdering his unit level advantage, dual harvester income, and the sacrifices Benedikt had to make to steal the first nuke. In this phase, Benedikt's key achievement are ..
•  to prevent his harvester being killed, which could be the nail in his coffin against a tech deck.
• to ensure someone charges the pads at all times
• The final phase for the second nuke then shows good decision making and timing, and illustrates the power of Cyber Wheels: As a squad unit, the Predator needs four shots, no matter many levels it's higher.

Good game, Gizarius & Benedikt! And thanks to the devs for one of the best features of Rivals: The good replay functionality that allows us all to learn from each other, and be entertained by each other.

Liked this post? Check out this game analysis of Alarak beating a deck that has much higher levels.

If you're a newer player, maybe you also want to check out my basic guide for Rivals deck construction

Banshees at an all-time high – Top 50 Nod Decks in August 2019

Welcome to the monthly Rivals meta analysis: What units and commanders do the top 50 players in the ladder play? This is the Nod article, please find the GDI article for this month here.

• Please find the raw data here, incl. a full list of the decks including nicknames, if you want to find a player who plays a certain unit or deck.
• Average deck level was constant at 13.9 (+0.3, and higher than GDI, indicating that more players prioritize pushing their Nod deck e.g. with Cloning Vats)
• 2.1 infantry (+/-0), 2.1 vehicles (+0.2), 1.4 air (+0.1) and 0.4 (-0.3) tech units make up the average deck (changes to last month in brackets)

Now to the main data, the unit frequency. How to read the table below:

• "Frequency" is the share of Decks that run this unit or commander. First, the frequency in % over last 4 months is shown. Then, a bar chart visualizes the June frequency. Third, there is a small line chart that shows the trend over the last 4 months.
• "Δ vs average winrate" is how the winrate decks utilizing this unit/commander deviates from the average (e.g. Inferno decks had a 6% higher winrate compared to the average)
• "Δ vs average levels" is how the levels of decks utilizing this unit/commander deviate from average (e.g. decks utilizing the Inferno are 0.3 levels higher than the average)

Observations:

• Winners
• Banshees, after their cost buff, are at an all-time high of 64%
• Chem Buggy has become popular outside of Jade decks (14% to 22%, with mostly Oxanna decks employing it)
• Giga Cannon became pretty popular, from 4% to 16%
• Fanatic usage went up from 8% to 18%, and it makes appearances in Aggro decks, Giga decks and even tech decks
• Marauders made a bit of a comeback (up from 8% to 14%)
• Bike usage went up even further from 72% to 84%, likely related to the popularity of light anti-infantry air (Talon, Venom)
• Oxanna usage went up, which is a function of deck mix (Seth might be the strongest commander, but it's used mostly with Aggro decks, whereas Tech Decks, Inferno Decks, Giga Decks usually leverage Oxanna)
• Losers
• Artillery disappeared. This is a bit surpising, as it's still a strong unit, as shown by e.g. AliciaDestiny just winning the RIFLE 2 tournament with an Artillery deck
• Militant usage went down by 8 points, related to the increase in Fanatic usage
• Laser Drones expectedly dropped sharply from 32% to 12% after their hefty nerfs
• Venom usage also is down from 40% to 28%; I'd say less because it's weak, and more because other decks have become more popular. 
• Seth is down, with less standard Aggro decks being played
• Reduced play of Scavengers is also a bit surprising, considering how much play it sees in tournaments. Might still partly driven by people having their Lasers at higher levels, but that was the case a month ago even more so.

Balance & Diversity

As with GDI, balance and diversity seems in a reasonable spot.

• 8 Giga decks, most commonly with Scavengers and Banshees
• A constant 11 Jade decks despite a cost buff to Jade. Surprised me a bit, my perception was that there were more Jade decks compared to the previous months
• Less aggro decks (Seth + 2-3-1 or 2-2-2), the most common being 5 decks with Militant, Laser - Bike, Tank - Venom, Banshee
• 7 Marauder decks in a surprising variety (e.g. just 3 with Chem Buggy)
• 6 Avatar decks
• 4 Inferno decks, none of them identical

As mentioned above, it's interesting that Artillery doesn't see more play on Ladder. It's probably because it's not great on some maps, so it makes more sense in tournament play where you know the map in advance.

Interstingly, the average cost of Nod decks is at an all-time low (last 6 months 54, 48, 47, 47, 48, 46), and lower than the GDI average deck cost.

One deck I want to highlight is lessqq's unorthodox Oxanna - Scavenger - Bike, Chem Buggy, Stealth Tank - Confessor, Basilisk deck. 72% winrate with L12.5 is quite impressive. lessqq is a Twitch streamer, you can watch him play this deck for a large part of this video (I recommend to start watching at 1 hour, 57 minutes for a challenge match against a high-level Jade deck).

How many decks contain how many units of which type? This chart shows that more than 75% of decks don't use any tech, and more than half of decks use 3 vehicles. This illustrates that the "most typical" deck shape is 1 infantry, 3 vehicles, 1 air.

Jump to the GDI version of this analysis

Liang the healer & pad stealer – Top 50 Deck Analysis August 2019

Welcome to the monthly Rivals meta analysis: What units and commanders do the top 50 players in the ladder play? Jump to the Nod version of this analysis.

• Please find the raw data here, incl. a full list of the decks including nicknames, if you want to find a player who plays a certain unit or deck.
• Average deck level was constant at 13.5
• 2.1 infantry (+0.2), 1.9 vehicles (-0.1), 1.3 air (+0.3) and 0.7 (-0.1) tech units make up the average deck (changes to last month in brackets)

Now to the main data, the unit frequency. How to read the table below:

• "Frequency" is the share of Decks that run this unit or commander. First, the frequency in % over last 4 months is shown. Then, a bar chart visualizes the June frequency. Third, there is a small line chart that shows the trend over the last 4 months.
• "Δ vs average winrate" is how the winrate decks utilizing this unit/commander deviates from the average (e.g. Sniper decks had a 7 percentage point higher winrate than the average deck)
• "Δ vs average levels" is how the levels of decks utilizing this unit/commander deviate from average (e.g. decks utilizing the Shatterer are -0.9 levels under the average)

Observations:

• Winners
• Orca usage went up from 14% to 25% and Mohawk from 14% to 23%. This means that now nearly every second deck contains one of them. If you add Orca Bomber's 17%, most GDI decks now contain a bomber.
• Talon usage jumped from 24% to 34%. It's versatility means it appears in a range of different decks as both secondary anti-infantry and anti-air option.
• Rifle usage (52% to 60%) recovered from lat month's dip, and Snipers went from 16% to 24%
• Grenadier usage grew from 14% to 21% despite 13lade putting it just into C-tier
• APCs made a comeback, growing from 14% to 21%
• Liang's spot as the #1 commander choice solidified (42% to 51%), as it's hugely versatile not just as a healer, but also as a pad stealer (Strongarm being basically only used with APC decks is interesting, and illustrates the versatility and strrength of Liang)
• Losers
• Shock Troopers all but disappeared (16% to 8%), which makes sense as it's hard to see when you'd not either prefer Rifle for the cost or Sniper for the ability to dominate infantry. (Yes, Snipers can also be weaker in some spots.)
• Jackson went down, as Liang is an alternative for typical Jackson decks (Predator, Tech units)
• Pitbull went further down from 60% to 53%, driven by both increased Slingshot usage and decreased Factory usage (13 decks with no vehicles at all)
• Nerf victims from the last patch went down: Zone Troopers, MSV and Shatterer
• Jumpjet troopers went down from 22% to 15%, but still seem useful in Borca decks and some other high-micro decks

Balance & Diversity

I believe balance and deck diversity are in a decent spot. There's a number of very different deck archetypes in the Top 50:

• 12 Mammoth decks, 8 of them with Mammoth as the only Tech unit. Most, but not all of them with Infantry + Air for the phase before Mammoths
• 9 Orca Bomber decks, often with MG.
• 8 classic APC decks in some variants for the air units (Drones vs Talon, Orca vs Mohawk). Plus two APC/MLRS decks.
• 11 decks with predators, of which it seems to play a main role in most of them
• 6 MLRS decks seems like a number that illustrates fair balance
• A number of different "high micro" decks are used by players with low level decks, as examples I'd give:
• heroic farmer with Strongarm - JJ, Sniper - Dogs, Slingshot - Talon, Mohawk has a 71% winrate with a L12 deck
• VictorBansemer with an unorthodox Solomon  Rifle, Missile, JJ - Slingshot - Talon, Orca deck , 69% winrate at L11.8

• Slingshot being used in all of these deck archetypes, but nearly none of these use only the Slingshot. Good sign that Slignshot is an option, but neither a must have nor useless.
• Highly microable units like Jumpjets and Snipers being useful, but not dominant.
• Grenadiers seeing good usage despite being seen as weak by a number of top players
• All air units being in a relatively narrow usage range from 13% (Hammerhead) to 34% (Talon)
• There's decks with 0-3 of all unit types, and even some decks with 4 infantry, 4 vehicles and 4 air units. And except for Infantry, it really seems pretty viable to skip any particular of the buildings (which inversely means there's no must-have unit)

So my recommendation to the devs would be to make no significant balance changes but if/where needed, play with small tweaks. 

For example, play with nerf areas that create micro potential such as the Turn Rate.

• Mammoths don't seem statistically that overpowered at top end play, albeit it's noticeable that there's some relatively low-level dekcs with high winrates (i.e. it seems that the average winrate of all Mammoth players is driven partly by weaker players liking Mammoth, and some strong players achieving top winrates with it). I can understand if people feel they dominate and have too little comeback mechanics against them, so a turn rate nerf could make it a bit more viable to use tanks against it with good control (baiting shots with e.g. wheels while the turret turns, and hitting it with tanks in the meantime who move a bit away from the turning turret)
• Slingshot are in a statistically decent place. But if devs feel they are too oppressive against certain unit types, maybe turn rate could help here as well, making it slightly easier to 2v1 or flank the Slingshot.

Beyond that, I'd rather go with small buffs to long-time underused units such as the Rhino. I'd probably go with 3 vision (to make it an at least theoretically viable opener) as a small step. Would not increase Rhino usage much, but make it a bit fairer for the guys who use it.

Which share of decks has 0, 1, 2 .. from a certain unit type?

Another new data point I looked at is the average cost of decks, including commanders. The average is pretty stable (last 6 months: 48, 48, 47, 49, 51, 52). The decline to May was explained by the growing popularity of the very cheap anti-infantry options (Rifle, Militant, Wheel), and the growth in the last months by higher viability of tech and growth in "mid-range decks", i.e. decks that use e.g. Snipers over Rifles.

If you find the APC comeback strange, as the main Suzaku APC variant had been nerfed (Drones, Orca, Pitbull all got tangible nerfs); I can recommend this video to you:

Jump to the Nod version of this analysis.

The Risk to Lose Your Rivals Account

Piwi is a passionate Rivals player. He played thousands of games, and spent hundreds of dollars. He helps lead & organize a Top 10 alliance, so volunteers his time to make the game experience more fun for dozens of additional active players who together spent thousands of dollars on the game.

Piwi’s profile, showing his activity and unit levels (implying his spend)

Why do I tell you about Piwi? Because he lost access to his account. He tried to get it back by contacting the EA customer support. But no to avail so far.

The issue: Despite the account being clearly identified, and him being able to show payments data, EA claims they cannot reactivate the account for lack of the “PersonalId” that players can find in their Settings > About page in the app.

In my view, this is odd. With the combination of payments data and identification of the account, EA should be able to help a very valuable customer here. Maybe there’s some process or rule that prevents this. But maybe also, the Customer Support just didn’t try all yet. Anecdotal evidence for the latter is that Piwi’s experience with the EA support has not been great. 

This excerpt (click to enlarge) shows a part of the contact log Piwi had with EA. Always a new representant, back and forth between mail and phone. I can understand that it’s not easy for a Customer Rep working on all EA games to solve this case, but this doesn’t mean that the case is unsolvable.

Some words from Piwi about the interaction so far:

“I was supposed to upload the payment receipts, and then at least get compensation for that. But it didn’t happen. The last two calls I had were not documented. And the screenshots also show that EA didn’t manage to properly call me, or managed to interrupt the calls. I felt like they have been unable to cope with my case and just hang up.”

Why do I write this post?

1. I hope that EA will still be able to help Piwi. Their German Customer Support might have been run by vendors, or people unfamiliar with the Rivals game. I am confidentt hat EA can help Piwi without breaking any rules, as with Payment Receipts and the Account, there should be a perfect way to verify his identity and ownership of this account. After all, we talk about a Customer worth hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars. If you're from EA and reading this, you can reply here on the officials Rivals subreddit. Thanks!
2. To help fellow Rivals players prevent the same issue. The best way seems to be to write down your “PersonalId”, or just make a screenshot of the About page (see below). In EA’s current processes, it seems that you need this number to have a good shot at getting back your account.

This is the ID you should save / screenshot

If someone of you has a Twitter account, I’d be thankful if you could tweet this to EA so they might have a look at it. I’ll try the Rvals discord and Rivals Reddit as well.

August Balance Patch #2

Not even two weeks after the last balance patch, there's another one. Again without any in-app message to inform the normal casual players that don't read Reddit, follow Captain Benzie, or read my blog.

So, let me put this straight first: Dear Devs, it's not just highly unprofessional not to communicate your balance changes to the players. It's also highly disrespectful. You don't seem to care whether someone painfully learns about a nerf or buff whilst playing, costing her or him a frustrating loss. This is absolutely inexcusable, as it's a very low effort to post the existing patch notes into your in-app messaging system.

Now, to the balance changes:

Nerfs:

• Cyborg & Zone Trooper attack speed halved, damage doubled. This is a revert of a previous change from July. It's a nerf in practice despite nominal DPS staying constant, as especially against infantry (and GDI Drone Swarms), the higher attack speed is really useful.
• MLRS Infantry damage decreased by 34%. This is a significant nerf and surprises me, because even before this change, a single Missile or Laser Squad could walk up to an MLRS and easily kill it.
• MSV Reload boost time reduced by 50%. This is another MLRS nerf (there is no other vehicle with reload time). I am confident that it would have been better to just do this nerf. Without the MSV, I never heard anyone ever complain about the infantry damage of the MLRS.
• Shatterer speed reduced from fast to average. Significant nerf, as the key matchups against Grenadiers and Marauders are heavily dependent on defender's advantage, so getting into posiiton quickly is crucial for the shatterer
• Chem Buggy vehicle damage reduced by -25%.

If you read my blog, you know that I'm a big fan of Rivals and generally very positive about Rivals and the devs. But the non-communication around the recent patches really lets you doubt about the seriousness with which the development team approaches this game.