r/RivalsOfAether

As a new player coming from Smash, I wanted to get a feel for the game by playing some casual matches before jumping into ranked. Needless to say, I got completely destroyed.

Out of frustration, I checked Reddit to see if others had similar experiences. The overwhelming answer seems to be yes. Most people have experienced this.
I think this could seriously hurt the longevity of the game, which sucks because the very few balanced matches i had were a lot of fun.

I don't think the developers can fix this alone, I think it's more about player behavior, If you are an experienced player and need an ego-boost all you need to do is queue unranked and destroy some poor newbie.

I have read through a few posts on here and what i have noticed is that experiences like this this are basically universal, happening at almost every level of play.

I personally think that unranked should be a place for new players to learn the game. And for that to happen the mindset of many players needs to shift. What do you guys think?

Maybe the playerbase is just too small to support having ranked at all, but in its current state it's not playable.

TL;DR: New player experience sucks. Widen the range of ranks.

For reference, I'm a newer player. I've played plenty of smash since melee, but never competitively. My skill level is likely below average. My combos rarely chain more than 3 hits, I whiff and fail my recovery occasionally, I can't wavedash or perform any advanced movement techniques consistently, I only DI correctly sometimes, and I often use unsafe abilities in neutral.

Rivals is a fun game that turns into an abysmal experience when you face an opponent who is far more skilled. Playing unranked means your opponent can be any skill level, which is wildly inconsistent. Ranked _should_ be a great place to find opponents within your skill range. However, my experience has been so abysmal that I'm no longer willing to play the game at all with random opponents. I've queued into opponents who wavedash into wild combo chains and leave minimal, if any, openings as low as rank 400. I suspect there are a handful of sweaty smurf accounts that do this deliberately, but there are definitely a plethora of players who are not accurately ranked. On top of this, I'll often queue against opponents who are up to 300 ranks higher. Rivals is highly skill based and offers no feasible way for the lower skilled player to win. I'm the kind of masochist that will happily lose 100 fights in a row to get it right, but not when my chance to win is basically 0%. I'm not the kind of player who is going to spend time practicing movement mechanics and combos and edge guarding in the training ground every day. I just want to play the game.

With the complaining out of the way, let's talk about fixes. Why is this happening? First off, you should definitely be able to limit the types of opponents you face. I don't want to play against gold players when I'm at the bottom of silver. If we cannot do anything else, at least allow me to force a 100 rank range. I'd rather wait in a practice lobby for a fair match than jump into the first available game.

Second, players should NOT be starting at silver or have full rank resets. All players should start at a lower rank and be unable to drop once you pass a threshold. When a player hits silver, they should never again be bronze. When the ranks reset, drop players back to a "checkpoint." Once a player has hit gold, they have no reason to go back to silver. The only way that should happen is if the player misses entire seasons. If it's too difficult, simply have each player drop to the beginning of the previous rank at the end of each season.

Finally, we need to open up the range of rank. It shouldn't be just a few wins to go from silver to gold. Most games create sub-ranks, which greatly improves skill categorization. I can't speak for the higher ranks, but silver to gold should not be achievable with a handful of wins. Everyone hits a dry spell or gets a win streak here and there. That should not allow players to jump entire ranks.

I recognize that the biggest issue Rivals has with regards to balance is that there aren't enough players. But we need to do SOMETHING or else new players like me will continue to drop out after a couple of weeks.

one of the few worst marches i had is when the opponents just kept infinite combo on me over and over and over again without letting me recover during a match. trust me, i can tell when they're being a try hard. the others are when the internet speed is different than the opponent's and off set my timing a bit. in casual/unranked mode, i can just quit when i noticed. but in ranked. i can't just keep quitting the matches cause i don't want to lose some of my points, which mean i had to suck it up and play it and occasionally got win, but other times i don't.

Western WA is back with more sick combos set to sick music~ Our grinders from 2025 have made their mark on the PR pulling ever closer to the crown-wearers of our region. Check 'em all out!

Also, PLEASE OTHER REGIONS MAKE VIDEOS LIKE THIS! Show off what y'all can do~

Back when the input system change happened for rivals 2 a big thing that was discussed as part of why the change occurred was the fact that it would pave the way for Linux support to improve for the GameCube controller and adapter.

and it's getting real heated

I don't know if someone shared this already, but I learned that the best way to earn coins it to do a local abyss vs, select olympia and use her j rune, and set the other three characters to human, it doesn't matter what rival they are. Set stocks to none, hit one of them off the edge so you have a +1 score, then just crystal them and let them sit for however long you want. this method gave me about 25,000 coins in one hour, or about 416 coins per minute

https://preview.redd.it/zscixupnecwg1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=2dae8d8b375f4b998607f7e4a8f24a0440e5cf28