» Category: Announcement

Season 8 RCS Top 50 – Introduction

At the end of each season we look back on the previous competitive year, and the players who influenced our scene, by creating a Top 50 Players list to honor and celebrate our greatest competitors.

Season 8 brought an exciting return of the community-ran Grassroots League (GRL). Both the RCS and the GRL circuits held their own unique ranking systems that rewarded players with vouchers to different events. The RCS brought the point leader and one player that had never been to Genesis to the RCS Finals at Genesis X, while the GRL circuit gave smaller vouchers to the highest performing players to attend the next event in the circuit before eventually inviting eight player to the Grassroots League Invitational after the Top 50 Ranking period concluded.

The season featured just one tier of RCS events but different tiers of GRL events. Only specific GRL events counted for Rankings as listed below in the article, while every RCS event qualified. Players were required to attend a minimum of four qualifying events, with at least two of them being part of the RCS.

RCS Season 8 was an exciting and bitter-sweet period for the community, and for our team here at Aether Studios. We made the announcement that the RCS would go on hiatus after Genesis X in order to focus on the final stretch of development on our sequel, Rivals 2. This news wasn’t easy to share, but we know that as long as players are willing to pick up a controller the game will still be there. The GRL and associated community events throughout the season were nothing short of inspiring for us to see, while the RCS brought some of the most hype moments in the history of the game. Season 8 brought us story-lines from across the community, while introducing the first ever razor-thin race for Rank 1 between not two, but three different players.

Everyone at Aether Studios would like to give a massive thank you to our tireless community leaders, our rockstar competitors, and every single person that made this season possible through competition, viewership, donations, or otherwise. We would not be here without you.

View more articles in the Season Eight NA Rankings Series:

As usual, events must meet a certain threshold of competition, attendance, and region diversity to count towards Top 50. In RCS Season 8 we ran seven separate RCS events that were guaranteed to count for rankings, while the greater community put together eleven “Showcase” events of their own as a part of Grassroots League (GRL) and one final event after the conclusion of GRL in December.

 

Season 8 RCS Ranking Events
RCS July
Hitfall 2
Riptide 2023
The Big House 10
Heat Wave 6
RCS December
Genesis X
Season 8 GRL & Community Ranking Events
Major Upset
Rivals Recess Major 3
GoTE4TheKids8
COST 2023
CREST 2
Get On My Level 2023
Super Sunnyshore
The Reef
Two Day War
Hurricane
TAPS 6
Santa Paws

Player Qualifications

Our goal for Season 8 was to keep the number of required events higher to match the community events that would count for the rankings this year. It was decided that four events would be required to qualify with at least two of them being RCS tournaments. These guidelines were strict, but the community once again rose to the task to bring their own events to the table, providing ten additional LAN and 2 additional online events to our Top 50 standards.

Methodology

This year we brought back the well established panel system from Seasons 3 – 7. Players were ranked based on each of their eligible events, including consideration for their wins and losses to land them at their results. Disqualifications from the losers bracket were considered as losses for the player that DQd, while not giving their opponent an artificial bump beyond their better placement.

Events carried the same weight potential between online and offline except for the RCS Finals, which was weighted heavier due to the high stakes and the fact that it was our grand finale. While the overall weight of the RCS events had the potential to be the same, it was clear that some events were strictly more competitively stacked than others and when considering two players of near identical skill, offline events would edge out online events. In addition, the community events landed in tiers of their own. The weight of events in order were largely used as tiebreakers when considering two players of similar skill and were not a major consideration other than if they were the Finals, RCS, or Community. The weight of events in order are as follows: Genesis X, Riptide 2023, Heat Wave 6, Hitfall2, The Big House 11, RCS July, RCS December, GoTE8/GOML 2023/TAPS 6, Super Sunnyshore/Major Upset/Two Day War, Rivals Recess Major 3/The Reef/Santa Paws/Hurricane/COST 2023/CREST 2. While events are considered in different weights, this was only a partial deciding factor. In general, the council favored consistency among events above individual peaks.

Once this ranking system was completed, the panel made additional adjustments to the order based on head-to-head results and other data. This group consisted of players and tournament organizers from across the country in order to accurately represent the various regions of North America: CyberHex, Jack Ryan, MSB, Nbad, Protagify, SBS, and Sparx21. Additional data was provided by Menace13, who had no input regarding final placements of the Top 50.

We’d like to thank all of our panelists for dedicating their time to putting this together for the community, as well as KELLZ for our brand new Season 8 player cards.

Hidden Bosses

Players given the title of Hidden Boss were recognized by the panel as major threats to tournaments this season that just didn’t quite meet the requirements to be ranked. Each player listed placed Top 8 at a RCS event or Top 12 at the RCS Finals.

Hakis, Liam, Seggo, Starbos, Tapscott.

Genesis X Workshop Roster

This year we’re doing something new for the workshop roster at Genesis X! We’re taking as many of the characters submitted for the Rivals Workshop Character Creation contest as we can, and having players battle it out with only these brand new community creations. This decision was made as a way to show off the countless hours of work put in by creators across the community for the contest, giving them their own event to celebrate crossing the finish line.

Download the collection of characters right here and start practicing for Genesis today:

With the help of workshop community leaders, we worked through the 100+ characters submitted in order to get an understanding of each character’s potential power levels, whether or not they have game breaking bugs, and if they have been completed to a playable standard. We would like to emphasize that any characters not in the collection for the above reasons are not disqualified from the Character Contest itself, they have just been removed from the playable Genesis X roster. We have also worked with Workshop Community leaders to allow custom stages related to their creations as an option for players to go to – both players must agree to play on Workshop stages in order to play on them in bracket. The Workshop stages eligible for competition at Genesis X are included in the Official Collection. If you have questions regarding the list, please contact us via Twitter and we would be happy to answer.

This collection includes a healthy variety of characters and stages that competitors will be able to use throughout the bracket. Given that this character list is a showcase of developer contest submissions, a lot of these characters were recently released to the public and may not have every detail ironed out. With that in mind we are banning any infinite combos and infinite stalls that may be found leading up to the event. Should any players break these rules, they will be automatically given a game loss on a first infraction, then a set loss on a second infraction.

Genesis X is just on the horizon and aims to be a celebration of the Workshop Community’s dedication to creation. We hope you’ll join us either in person or at home as the entire workshop bracket will be streamed on February 16th!

European Rivals Championship Series – S8

RCS Season 8 Comes to Europe

Launching along the RCS Season 8 Compendium today is the European region of the Rivals Championship Series! We’re excited to announce a mix of LAN and online events alongside a new scaling goal for EU in the compendium with additional bonuses. Read on for more details:

This is where champions are born!

Format and Schedule

After Season 7’s return to form, we’re continuing the hybrid nature of online and LAN events across the region! We have worked directly with community leaders from the EU scene to tailor a season balancing several different countries for LAN events beginning in July, and maintaining two to four regular season online events starting in September. Be sure to check out the stream for Rivals Rave this weekend (previously announced) in Deutschland. Additional events will be added as the season continues. Here is our official schedule:

Event Date Region
Rivals Rave July 30th Düren, Deutschland
Rivals Odyssey Summer 2023 August 12th Gent, Belgium
EU RCS Online – September September 17th Online
EU RCS Online – October October 8th Online
+ Additional Fall/Winter Expansion Events TBA TBA
EU RCS Finals – January TBA Online

European Season 8 Stacking Shop Goals and Rewards

As seen above, the official lineup of events for the EU RCS starts out with two LAN and two online events. More events are on the way through tournament organizers in Europe and money raised in the EU RCS goal on the RCS Season 8 Compendium.

The RCS shop this year provides several new rewards for the EU scene as money is raised for the EU RCS Finals event in January 2024. At $600, two more online events will be added to the RCS providing funding for Readek to produce more high quality streams. At $1200, new player spotlights with current and former EU players will be created to highlight the EU scene. Finally, at $1800, a brand new combo video will be created and played before Top 8 of the EU RCS Finals. Brand new items launched throughout the year with all profits going back to the community will be available to help reach these new goals.

We’re also excited to round out the remaining Champion Skins once again this year, with Champion Pomme and Champion Hodan DLC skins coming as participation rewards to the various online events EU has to offer. Players who enter either the RCS September or RCS October Online events will receive Champion Pomme. More information on Champion Hodan will be revealed as Season 8 progresses!

EU Season 8 Finals

The EU RCS Finals have become a staple since RCS Season 5, and we aim to end RCS Season 8 with a bang in January 2024. The EU RCS Finals date will be announced later this year, with special rewards mentioned in the above section helping contribute to the experience and the prize pool itself.

Players entering RCS events can expect their achievements to be rewarded as the EU Power Rankings Panel will be evaluating data throughout the course of Season 8 as they lead up to their newest Top Player Rankings.

Links!

We are aware that this post has a lot of information to digest, so please refer to all relevant links in this one convenient spot!

Rivals Championship Series Season 8 Announcement

Get ready for RCS Season 8!

This year we’re excited to introduce the eighth season of the Rivals Championship Series. Eight years is a long time running for any esports league, and certainly a long time for a small indie game that had big competitive goals. This season has us feeling a bit sentimental as we look back on past years, while at the same time our studio is working on the future of the Aether franchise with Rivals 2. We want to take this opportunity to thank all of the players, fans, and tournament organizers that have taken part in the past or supported the RCS in any way. Attending events, viewing streams, grabbing skins that help fund events, or even just talking about the RCS online has helped it come to life. As we gear up for season 8, here are the details for how everything will look:

Events

RCS Season 8 has seven unique tournaments ranging coast to coast and traversing the world wide web. This season we’ll be following a similar format to previous years, focusing on one event per month spanning from July 2023 to our Finals in January 2024. We’ll be kicking off Season 8 with 3 events this summer – an online event, a massive community-ran sequel, and the return of a Goliath.

Registration for RCS July and Riptide are live now!

The Season 8 kickoff is shaping up to be a diverse representation of the North American competitive scene while the second leg is largely composed of events yet to be announced. Let’s take a look at our full schedule as it stands:

Event Registration Date Region
July Online Major July 29th Online
Hitfall 2 August 19th – 20th Laurel, MD
Riptide 2023 September 8th – 10th Sandusky, OH
The Big House 11 October 20th-22nd Detroit, MI
Heat Wave 6 November 11th-12th Phoenix, AZ
December Online Major December 16th Online
RCS Finals at Genesis X February 16th-18th San Jose, CA

Developer Support

As always, the RCS will see a healthy injection of developer support including the completion of our Champion skin line, paid DLC skins with profits going directly to prize pools, and travel vouchers to our January Finals. This season we’re looking to release Champion Skins for Pomme and Hodan at the first and last online events respectively, while aiming to unveil all new paid skins for characters such as Olympia, Kragg, and more to pump up pot bonuses across the board. Our RCS Season 8 shop will be kicking off soon, but for now you can sign up for the July Online Major and get the Pomme Champion skin for free by simply competing.

Travel vouchers this year will look a bit different than the previous seasons, reserving just one spot for the top player on our leaderboards and a second wildcard voucher for the highest standing points-holder that has never attended an in-person Finals before. Competition for these vouchers is expected to be stiff as our previous King of Rivals, CakeAssault, has shown some rare vulnerability to some familiar faces at GoTE 8 this past weekend. Gear up and get ready for a fight!

While our news today is entirely concerning the North American region, community members from EU and World regions should stay tuned for more news as we are get closer to Season 8’s kickoff.

Rankings

Each season brings new structure, and with that comes new guidelines to qualify for our annual Top 50 Rankings. RCS Season 8 has seen the magnificent return of the community circuit, the Grassroots League, which aims to connect the North American community and eventually carry the torch through events across the region by utilizing the power and resources of the dedicated and talented individuals responsible for some of the most influential community-ran events in the scene. We love to see that passion and have a system this year dedicated to ensuring their Showcase Events count for the Rivals Top 50 Rankings.

Our Top 50 Ranking requirements and event weight are as follows:

  • A minimum of four total events, two of which MUST be RCS (meaning two can be either RCS or GRL Showcase).
  • RCS events will carry the highest weight, with the Finals weighing the heaviest and the others being based on attendance size and strength.
  • GRL Showcase events will be considered anywhere between high to low weight, with their individual strengths and weaknesses being evaluated by our Top 50 panel.
  • GRL Opt-In events will NOT count for rankings, though they do provide GRL points for their own league’s leaderboard, so check them out if you can!

Rivals esports has proven to be a cornerstone of our community, bringing out passions, rivalries, and every emotion imaginable over the course of seven years. Since Season 1 and our emergence into the competitive world, we’ve seen the eras of Ralph, FullStream, CakeAssault, Xaro, and CakeAssault’s return in his current unrelenting reign. Over the years we’ve spanned continents, built up to share stages with the greatest Smash legends in the world, and have repeatedly broken our own attendance records with what we consider to be the best gaming community in the world (no bias).

If you’re shooting to aim high on the rankings for season 8, make sure to sign up for RCS events here. Grassroots League has already ran three Showcase Events and has plenty more on the docket so be sure to check out their page here for qualifying events as well. We can’t wait to kick off another amazing season of Rivals esports!

Mollo, Hodan, Pomme, and Olympia Workshop Skin Templates Are Here!

In 2020 along with the addition of Steam Workshop to Rivals of Aether, we also included a Workshop feature called “skins”. Skins are fairly self-explanatory if you’re familiar with the term already; they’re cosmetics that can potentially replace all of a characters’ sprites and sounds while keeping gameplay pretty much the same. Instead of having to make a Workshop character from scratch, this feature let creators use our original characters as templates to do everything from re-sprite to re-code our fighters in new and exciting ways.

Up until today only our first 14 characters had this feature. Today we’re back with skin templates for all four of our newest members of the Rivals cast – it’s only fitting that characters originating in workshop are given back to the community!

For those not familiar with Steam Workshop, it is essentially a community hub for creations and modifications that allow you to create you own characters, stages, buddies, game modes, and skins. You can check out the Steam Workshop for Rivals of Aether right here. If you’re interested in creating your own characters, be sure to check out the Intruduction page in our Steam Workshop Modding Manual for all of the information you need to get started.

New Templates

The following templates for every character contain all of the sprites they use, as well as scripts with every animation-related variable you can change and attack scripts for all of their attack properties.

Here are the brand new templates for Mollo, Hodan, Pomme, and Olympia:

For anyone just finding out about the wonderful world of skin modding, here are the templates we released in 2020, along with everything you need to know to get started! If you’re new to Workshop skins read on for a look at what you can do below, or download some of these examples to enjoy.

Basic skins

Basic skins are meant to be purely cosmetic; changes are restricted to things that don’t affect actual gameplay, and can generally be safer to use in tournaments and a more competitive setting. This modding option is perfect for artists and people that simply just want a new look to their favorite Rival. Since 2020, there have been some great basic skins of characters, ranging from partial re-sprites to complete overhauls of entire characters.

Here are just a few fantastic examples of what our community has already accomplished with basic skins:

Advanced skins

An advanced skin allows you to essentially create variants of the character with edited moves and properties. Advanced skins mean that your imagination, spritework, and coding can create pretty much anything you want! Over the past few years, the community has created everything from hilarious to experimental and everything in-between.

Here are some great examples of what our community has created since 2020: