» Category: Announcement

Announcing the Rivals Online Championship Series

In light of the recent COVID-19 pandemic forcing Stay-At-Home orders and event cancellations across the globe, the Rivals team is proud to present an online circuit to satisfy some of the competitive hunger this coming Spring and Summer! While we do plan on having some wonderful Season 5 RCS local events, we wanted to help fill the void many players find themselves in with locals being scarce to nonexistant for the foreseeable future.

The Rivals Online Championship Series (ROCS) will encompass six events over the course of two months, leading up to an epic finale on July 11th. In the past, online events have been supplemental to our greater RCS Seasons; this will be the first completely independent online circuit, complete with it’s own unique point system distributed to players in the Top 32 of each event.

Similar to previous RCS Online events, we are excited to unveil some new Champion Premium Skins to reward competitors for their participation and placements along the way. However, since the ROCS is going to be a circuit of it’s own, we figured we could spice up the incentives a bit more… check out our full breakdown below!

Circuit Point System for Qualifiers

Which Champion skins do you want to see next?

Rewards

• All first-time participants in any ROCS event will receive a brand new Champion Premium Skin.
  • Players must check in and complete their matches, simply registering is not enough!
• Top 8 of each ROCS event will receive a second brand new Champion Premium Skin.

• The Top 32 players of each event will receive points towards the Finals.
• The Top 32 players, by points, after the six qualifying events will be floated directly into the second wave of the Finals on July 11th.
• Players earning 125 or more points during the qualifiers will earn a unique badge and name color DLC for their in-game profiles.

• All participants in the ROCS finals will receive the second brand new Champion Premium Skin.
  • Once again, players must check in and complete their matches, simply registering is not enough!
• Top 8 of the ROCS Finals will receive a third brand new Champion Premium Skin.
• The ROCS Finals winner will receive a travel voucher to the RCS Season 5 Finals.
  • This would be converted into a cash payment in the event that the COVID-19 pandemic is still affecting events.

Rewards Update – 7/10/2020

As the Finals appear on the horizon, we wanted to give participants another chance to earn the upcoming badge and name color DLC. While this prize is meant to be difficult to obtain, it may have been slightly too elusive for some of our top talent. Because of this, we have decided to lower the point requirement from 125 to 100, and to allow the finals from each region to produce points as well! This will make the prize achievable for a few players who make a run in their final event. Good luck!

Full Event Schedule

Sign up for the next event on the league page: smash.gg/ROCS

• April 11th
• April 25th
• May 9th
• May 23rd
• June 6th
• June 20th
• Finals – July 11th

Registration is now OPEN for all events, good luck!

The Rivals Championship Series is Back!

Following an incredible Season 4 Finals, the Rivals team is more excited than ever to witness an exponentially evolving meta culminate this year. With the increasing amount of locally ran Regionals and Majors, we’re looking forward to the Official RCS schedule being bolstered by a beautiful uptick in community-run events in Season 5. We hope to highlight a few heavy hitting events this Summer that promise to represent the greater community better than ever!

Needless to say, 2020 has been a whirlwind of a year thus far, with the most recent global COVID-19 pandemic causing massive shutdowns around the world. The events we list here are unsurprisingly contingent on future travel restrictions and are therefore subject to change as the COVID-19 pandemic timeline becomes more clear. Without further adieu, here is the RCS Season 5 schedule:

Season 5 Schedule

Season 5 Reward Structure

As you can see, Season 5 is a bit more compact than previous years, with five fantastic events leading up to our unannounced Finals. As a result of our reduced schedule, we are shaking up our long standing point system in favor of something new.

We will be offering a travel voucher to each winner of our five Season 5 tournaments! That means winning any of our official events will automatically earn you a voucher. You will no longer have to constantly stay on top of an ever changing scoreboard to confirm your trip to the Finals!

• One voucher per player, in the event that a competitor would win multiple vouchers, the extra will go to the next highest placing competitor.
• Once again, Season 5 events and their subsequent vouchers are reliant on the future COVID-19 outlook. Should travel restrictions still be in place, we cannot guarantee this schedule will remain unchanged.

Season 5 Top 50 Considerations

The tail end of Season 3 and the subsequent Season 4 have shown outstanding growth on a local level. Different events across the country have begun to spring up at an astonishing rate, and while it was initially beyond our expectations, we have set up some guidelines for events to be counted for the Season 5 PR.

• The six Official RCS Season 5 events (including the ROCS Finals) will be weighted equally and heavier than other events. These events are special and we want to ensure that traveling competitors can guarantee that events they attend will carry appropriate weight.
• Grassroots League Season 2 events will all be counted towards the Season 5 Top 50. GRL events now have built in tiers and will be weighted appropriately. All GRL events are guaranteed to count in some manner in order to avoid the possibility of players traveling to events that do not get considered by the panel.
• Any local event with 50 or more entrants and five or more Season 4 Top 50 players (or notable wins) in attendance (DQs will not count) will be considered for the Season 5 Top 50.

Season 5 is sure to be one for the books, assuming a return to normalcy of course. In the meantime, check out our newly announced ROCS circuit to get your competitive Rivals fix!

Today we’re thrilled to welcome Stephen Sobansky (who you might know around the scene as SBS) to the Rivals Dev Team as Esports Manager! He’ll be working part-time with the team to keep Rivals Esports going strong in 2020.

We’ve got lots of exciting esports projects that he’ll be joining in on – from our Season 4 Top 50 list to upcoming events like Frostbite, CEO: Dreamland, and more still in store with the Definitive Edition on the horizon.

We first met Stephen back all the way back in 2016 when we were expanding Rivals Esports with the freshly announced Rivals Championship Series.

Since then it’s been almost four years of passion for him – cultivating his local scene, hosting the largest Rivals-only event for years on end, and even spearheading his own league project in partnership with grassroots organizers across the country.

We know he’ll do a fantastic job on official events and can’t wait to see competitive Rivals evolve this year. If you’d like to reach SBS, you can talk to him on twitter @SBSarizona or message @SBS on discord.