Season 2 of the Rivals Championship Series kicks off this weekend with the Road to Shine, a free online tournament that can net you a trip to Shine 2017. Before the monthlies get into full swing however, we thought it would be nice to look back at past events and players in our scene. That’s why all this week we’ll be putting out an article each day as we countdown the top 50 Rivals players – ending on Friday with #1!
Articles in the Series
Methodology
When taking an in-depth look at our players for this article series, we recognized that we have a lot of good players. Many of them have never played each other locally which makes this a tough exercise. Past the very top players, many players are also separated by razor thin margins. To that end, we tried to employ a methodology that would rank the players in as fair a way as possible:
Player Results
Tournament results (as long as the events meet the right criteria) are one of the best indicators of player skill. Overall standings and set count data is useful, though it’s still hard to find events where all of the top players are competing at once in Rivals. To this end, I separated events from the past year into tiers. Events in higher tiers were considered more heavily when determining a player’s rankings, and events were ranked this way due to amount of top players in attendance, total attendees, amount of rounds, etc.
Tier 1
- RCS Online Events
- Genesis 4
Tier 2
- NCS Online Events
- CEO Dreamland
- Super Smash Con 2016
Tier 3
- EVO 2016
- PAX West 2016
- Garden of the Gods
Tier 4
- Twitchcon 2016
- Rewired 2016
- GUTS 4
- Shine 2016
- Smash Summit 3
Panelists
In addition to looking at player results, a panel of 20 players was created and surveyed for additional insight. This panel consisted mainly of top players, as well as a few other community members who are in a position to fairly judge player skill (e.g. TOs intimate with player results). These players ranked a list of over 110 players that qualified past on event placements.
Panelists were instructed to rate players from 1 – 10 based on, “… times you’ve played against [players on the list], past tournament results you’re aware of, and how you perceive their general skill level at this current time.” The main goal was to capture rankings based on their experience playing their peers and NOT for the panelists to do in-depth research.
Community Impact
On occasion, players were weighted by a third factor of community impact. Though this was never a large portion of a player’s total score, it did help separate players due to the very thin margins I mentioned earlier.
Final Notes
In some cases we were missing data (e.g. players are not active enough, limited bracket interactions) so certain players may not be listed even though they are generally accepted as being high tier. Other times even if a player was inactive, the panelists vouched so strongly for a player’s skill that they were included with less recent results.
We recognize arguments can be made for many players to make this list. If you’re interested in competitive Rivals of Aether, make sure you play in premiere events to test your skills against the best. You can check out the new monthly schedule for our free online RCS tournaments here: Rivals Championship Series – Season 2. Stay tuned for the first installment in the top 50 coming later today!