News

Heat Wave 4 Wrap-Up

Season 6 of the Rivals Championship Series continued with the return of Heat Wave! After two years the biggest Rivals focused event in the world was back and better than ever with an amazing new venue and drastically upgraded production for this 102 entrant event. Rivals players across multiple continents converged to bring us the fiercest competition from start to finish that Rivals has ever seen.

VODS

As always we start with the VoDs in case you’ve managed to avoid spoilers so far. There are a lot to unpack between the two streams dedicated to Rivals and even side events such as Lethal League Blaze by Reptile Games. All Rivals VODs are now up on our Official YouTube channel, while all other games can be found on the AZ Rivals Youtube. The entire event was streamed on our Official Twitch and the AZ Rivals Twitch by Arizona’s own SAK Gaming and Frame Sync Media.

Rivals Singles

Rivals Doubles and Workshop

Windjammers / Slap City / Lethal League Blaze

Pre-Heat Wave Local: Rivals Singles

 

TOP 8 HIGHLIGHTS

If you’re interested in a quicker watch, check out our official highlight videos for Rivals Singles Top 8 and Workshop by LilFox15.

 

Photos

Three separate photo albums of the event are available to the public! Keep an eye out for a special video being put together by On The Rocks Productions in the coming weeks.

THE CHAMP

Top 8 of Heat Wave! Photo by Xenos.

Congratulations to the Heat Wave 4 Champion – CakeAssault! CakeAssault made a phenomenal run through losers bracket, with several Game 5 sets to grind his way to Grand Finals and secure the crown after a bracket reset.

SINGLES RESULTS


Full Standings >

WORKSHOP RESULTS


Full Standings >

DOUBLES RESULTS


Full Standings >

We hope you enjoyed the the return of Heat Wave! Make sure to sign up or join us on stream next weekend as well for the continuation of our monthly Online RCS. It’ll be the third online event of the season with a brand new skin reward: RCS Season 6 Fireworks.

Rivals Community Awards Nominations Open

The Rivals Community Awards nominations are officially open! Showcase your favorite creators and players in tons of categories spanning workshop, tournaments, and more. Get involved by writing in your top nominees on any category. Nominations run until Dec. 1st, 2021. Join us on December 8th as we celebrate our own in a live show hosted by the dev team and special guests.

Visit the Community Awards page >

Community Competitor Spotlight: CakeAssault

CakeAssault is pretty much a household name for the Rivals community at this point. His dominance at LAN events can be traced all the way back to Genesis 5, where his legendary Game 10 set with a seemingly untouchable FullStream went down to the wire and is widely considered to be the best set in Rivals history. CakeAssault seemed to lie dormant during our exclusively online RCS Season 5, appearing in Top 8s but ultimately losing his 1st place ranking on the annual Top 50 list.

A new wave of Rivals players were born during the COVID-19 pandemic, and many people, including CakeAssault himself, were questioning what the first offline RCS event in a over a year and a half would bring us. What we received did not disappoint. Riptide, our largest LAN event to date, saw Cakeassault and long time adversary, Penguin, play 14 intense games over the course of Winners Finals and Grand Finals, where CakeAssault finally regained his footing as champion (Check out the famous video of CakeAssault’s celebration by turndownforwalt).

We recently reached out to CakeAssault to learn more about him and his history as a Rivals competitor.

CakeAssault at Riptide 2021. Photo by Jules.

How did you first hear about Rivals and get into the scene as a competitor?

CakeAssault: When I was like 11 or 12, way back when I would come home from middle school to boot up Brawl and play Kirby against Meta Knight CPUs, I found this really cool and shitty game called Super Smash Land, a de-make of Super Smash Bros made to play like it was for the Game-boy. I bought a Bluetooth adapter for my equally shitty laptop that would run Minecraft at 22 fps, and connected 2 Wii remotes to my computer and played Megaman vs Mario with my friend in this absolutely horrendous platform fighter. Then, maybe 2 or 3 years later, I reminisced on the fun times I had playing Super Smash Land, and went back to the website. I found that the same developer was releasing a new game, Rivals of Aether, and I followed the development pretty closely. When it finally released, I played it as soon as I got home from school, and started beating up CPUs with Wrastor just like I used to when playing Brawl. Pretty soon after I started playing, I found tournaments being posted to the subreddit, joined the steam group for tournaments at the time, and started asking my mom to use up some of our data (internet was hard to come by) so I could enter the tournaments once a week.

 

How long have you been competing in events? What is your typical warm-up regimen going into a major?

CakeAssault: According to challonge, my first tournament was October 30th, 2015, just a month after the game’s release. I remember playing this at my friend Jason’s house, accidentally leaving my controller at my house, and scrambling to get his Xbox controller working on my laptop before conceding and trying to figure out how to use a keyboard to play. But that kind of “competing” is very different from something like my first real major, Super Smash Con 2016, where I take the tournament a lot more seriously. When warming up at a major, I’ll spend however long it takes before my sets just playing against level 7 CPUs with 8 stocks until I feel that my execution is exactly where it needs to be, swapping around my controllers if I feel that they might be the issue. Whenever I finally feel that my execution is there, I’ll play against whoever is around and good enough to practice against until my set is ready, listening to music the whole time to stay focused.

 

How often do you practice the game and what do you focus on in a standard practice session?

CakeAssault: When I wasn’t swamped with school, I would play anything from 2-6 hours per day, especially when there were offline majors to prepare for. My playtime takes a steep decline whenever college picks up, but the things I focus on when practicing are always the same. The #1 thing I focus on is my execution when practicing, because if I’m flubbing inputs that I should be hitting all the time then I can’t really be improving. When I’m consistently practicing, this isn’t much of an issue, but is more of something that I need to focus on for 10-20 minutes when I start each session. When I’m out of practice, it becomes a real problem that I need to fix before anything else. Past that, I focus on innovating wherever I can with my game-play and experimenting with things that I would otherwise not do in bracket. The best way to stay on top is to keep finding new things to add to my game-play.

 

You’ve been the most dominant offline player since your incredible run at Genesis 5 in 2018. What do you see as your X factor in keeping that crown, and how do you stay ahead of some of the relentless newcomers making their mark on the scene?

CakeAssault: Nobody does it like me.

But actually I perform much better than others do when under pressure, especially with a crowd. When I’m playing hot, the adrenaline I get from playing in top 8 fuels my game-play, usually for the better. This is also one of the main things that helps keep me ahead of some of the new players, since most of them are new to competing on stage or in front of crowds at majors. Other than that, it’s a lot of the same stuff I do anyway. Consistently practicing the game, doing VoD review of my opponents, and finding counter-play to anything new they bring to the meta through trial and error.

What has been your proudest moment throughout your career?

CakeAssault: It’s definitely between winning Genesis 5 and Riptide. Genesis 5 was the first major win that started my win streak, and was one of the few wins I’ve made as the underdog going into the tournament. Being able to win a tournament from losers side always feels amazing, and doing it over the #1 player at the time was one of the greatest feelings. As for Riptide, it felt like I was proving that I didn’t fall off over the past year and a half when COVID forced tournaments to come to a halt. After enough 7th and 5th place finishes online, it was hard to convince myself that I was still as good as I used to be. It also reminded me of the feeling that comes with competing in person at a huge tournament like that, and why I love playing this game so much. Nothing feels as good as competing at a tournament like that.

 

As Season 6 progresses, what goals have you set for yourself to achieve?

CakeAssault: Continue being the best offline player and not catch COVID while doing it.

 

Do you have any personal hobbies or interests outside of Rivals that you’re focusing on this season?

CakeAssault: I’ve been practicing a lot of melee since Slippi came out and I wanna see how good I can get at Melee without falling off in Rivals. Plus school & actuary exams have been kicking my [butt] lately so those are a huge priority.

Is there anything you would like to say to the Rivals community reading this feature?

CakeAssault:Follow me on twitter

Also I’m a free agent rn hit me up frfr I don’t bite.

Creatures of Aether October Patch Preview

October is the first month where we’ve diverged from our usual new Rival card release for the battlepass. However instead of new cards this month, we have two big additions coming to the game to get excited about – a brand new mode called Dungeoneers and tons of new Puzzle Challenges.

Read on for a preview of what’s coming later this month to Creatures of Aether, as well as a quick look at the top of the ladder from September’s season.

Shop Rotation

As there’s no new Rival this month, the shop has rotated back to our very first Rival card and features Zetterburn. Since Zetterburn originally came out in beta, this means October is the first time that he has an accompanying Rival Pass, complete with his own dungeon and emote.

Season 15 Ladder Recap

We hope you enjoyed blowing up the ladder with Mollo last month. Here’s a peek at the top players and their decks from last season if you’d like to try them out yourself:

New Mode – Dungeoneers

Dungeoneers is a brand new game mode coming to Creatures of Aether! This mode is a single-player deckbuilding mode with abilities that combine and scale as you play. We showed off multiple playthroughs of it with developers Dan and Tom last week. If you missed it you can check out the full gameplay video on twitch. For those wanting the short version, here’s the basics:

At the start of a Dungeoneers run, you can pick one Rival from a group of 4. Each Rival has a unique rune that grants them special benefits. These are usually tied to their element as well, with each focusing on a particular strength.

You’ll enter a battle with your chosen Rival and add more cards to your deck as you go. After each match, you can purchase new cards for your deck at the shop. You earn currency for the shop by winning matches or selling cards, and can even upgrade the shop to have a larger selection and more powerful cards.

If you see a card you like but can’t purchase, you can freeze the cards and they’ll stay until you come back from your next match. You can also see your CPU opponent’s progress before the match on this screen to size them up. Even though this is a single player mode, the bots will use decks that real players built and played in their previous runs. So you might recognize some names and decks as you battle.

You can upgrade a card by getting it to level 4 or using the forge. The forge is a special area you find 3 times throughout the run. You can either instantly upgrade a card there, or obtain an additional powerful rune. Upgraded cards have more powerful abilities and shop spells.

That’s the basics of dungeoneering! To start delving yourself keep an eye out for the release later this month.

New Additions – Puzzle Challenges

Some challenging puzzles are in the works outside of the standard character and gameplay mechanic categories. Fifteen new puzzles are coming later this month and should be some fun brain teasers for players who want to ponder.

These puzzles will also grant more rewards when completed for the first time. We’re also excited to share that many of the boards were designed or co-designed by our own community members.

A new puzzle board designed by community tester Ridlay.

Additionally Slade, Guadua, and Mollo all have their Rival challenges and challenge matches added to the game. Now these are complete for every Rival!

That wraps up the patch preview for October. We’ve also got a few standard bugfixes and small QoL changes coming. These will be released with the first half of the content update in October, beginning with the updates to Puzzle Challenges with Dungeoneers following afterward.

Rollback Netcode Open Beta Available on Steam

Rollback netcode in Rivals of Aether has been a long time coming, and it’s proven to be quite the struggle to rebuild our original 1v1 netcode into something more modern. Today we are finally pleased to share that we have reached a point where we are ready to open our Rollback Netcode Beta to the public. Though this is only an open beta phase, it is the culmination of years of work from our team including YellowAfterlife, newcomer Yosi, and contributions from Zach Reedy and Juju.

If the phrase “rollback netcode” leaves you feeling a little lost, the short explanation is that this feature will massively improve online Rivals matches for laggy connections. Once rollback is fully polished up and on the live Steam branch, you can look forward to silky smooth matches with opponents far and wide. Check out this article on why it’s a great system for online games, especially fighting games, if you’d like to get more into the nuts and bolts.

A rollback JUKE from Menace13.

Please note that while this beta is functional, there are still some known quirks that we are working on internally related to one-sided rollback issues. We are also aware of a possible crash on match start, but are looking for more data to help debug this one. We expect to polish our rollback implementation over several months with the help of this beta.

Remember the more reports we get from players during this phase, the faster we can roll out fixes and get rollback into the live branch! With all that out of the way – here’s how to get started:

How do I get it?

The Rollback Open Beta can only be accessed via Steam. First find Rivals of Aether in your Steam Library. From there:

  • (1). Right click Rivals of Aether in your Steam library to bring up the options menu.
  • (2). Select Properties. Once that opens, select the Betas Tab on the left of the properties window that opened up.
  • (3). Open the Dropdown menu, scroll down, and select “rollback – Rollback Open Beta”.
  • (4). Once selected, you can close the menu.
  • (5). After you select this branch, you should see that Rivals has an update queued. If you do not see that, then close Steam and reopen it until Rivals of Aether has an update. When you open the game, you will know you are on the right branch if you see the Rollback Netcode Open Beta Loading Screen.

Important: You can only queue against other players that are also using this branch of the game. You’ll need to have no betas selected to find your opponents in official tournaments and events, which you can easily switch back to by following these instructions again and selecting “None” in the dropdown menu.

Access Betas on Steam with the instructions above.

Improving the Beta

To get rollback netcode out of beta and into the Definitive Edition, we’ll need your help! You can start by joining the Official Rivals of Aether Discord. Once you join, you’ll want to navigate to the #rollback-general channel. From there you can discuss the beta with other players, find players to play with and against, or submit bug/desync reports.

If you run into bugs or desyncs, you’ll want to navigate to the appropriate bug submission channel. There you can easily submit reports following the directions as pinned in the channel. This information is extremely valuable to our team and the more reports we get, the easier it is to find and fix issues. If you are participating in the open beta we highly encourage you to submit reports.

For desync issues that happen during testing we’ll want some extra information that you can provide like this. It’s important to send us both the desync data from yourself AND your opponent:

  • (1). Open the Run app by typing “Run” in your Windows search bar.
  • (2). Paste “%localappdata%/rivalsofaether/desyncs” into the search field and click “Ok”.
  • (3). Find the folder with the appropriate date and time for the desync you encountered. If you just desynced and went to report, it will be the most recent one! Organizing the view by “Date Modified” makes this easier.
  • (4). Zip the folder by right clicking on it, selecting “Send to”, and clicking “Compressed (zipped) folder”. Leaving the name as the time stamp is fine.
  • (5). Submit the folder. Give us everything from that time stamp and we can sort out the important information from there. Please have your opponent follow these same steps if possible. The more data we have, the better.

Navigating to your Rivals desyncs folder.

Future Features + Switch and Workshop

Right now, rollback is only confirmed for Steam and does not support Workshop characters or other modes outside of 1v1 online play. As we make progress in this open beta we’ll test it on other platforms like the Nintendo Switch to see if it’s feasible for consoles performance-wise.

We have no plans currently (or ability) to support Workshop due to how rollback needs a very controlled game state. For modes like teams, FFA, and spectating our goal is to eventually have those all working with rollback.