We released RIVALS 4.0!

RIVALS 4.0 Patch Notes

Motivation:

Jumping up a version number isn’t something we take lightly at META Games. Each version was game changing, and 4.0 carries that torch when it comes to knowing what decisions you need to make for your team to be successful. It was clear since the release of version 3.0 that people had difficulties understanding the strengths of their or the opponent teams and how to build around it.

Key information was disconnected from each other by layers of abstraction and the details were scattered across different screens and tool tips. Once the details were found, they were buried in walls of text and had to be made sense of with excel tables. The Community Champonions made brilliant work of the system, but new players would stop playing within 7 days out of frustration. We needed to find a way to make RIVALS easier to learn, give coaches more information about their team and how they compare to the competition. After putting our heads together, we identified 2 components that were key to achieving our goal:

• Streamline the match and stats mechanics while keeping the flexibility of creative team builds and strategies.

• Create a new setup screen that puts all the team building and match preparation options in one place, plus new tools for competitive analysis and to gain insights on your team.

It’s funny how two simple looking sentences can result in a jump from version 3.3 to 4.0 – read on and you’ll understand exactly what that implies!

(if you are not a fan of reading long patch notes, go to the bottom of the page and watch Xave Valor's videos!)

Meet the new setup hub:

Esports is all about precision and speed. Coaches need to be able to have readily available and intuitively displayed data so that they can make important decisions under pressure. The new setup hub was designed to meet coaches’ needs, whether they are looking on ways to improve their own team or scout an opponent to find their weakness.

The setup screen isn't the only thing that's new, it's also packed with brand new tools:

• Skill Radar to see team build and player strengths on a glance
• Ban filter to optimize precisely target your ban strategy
• All details about champions and plays directly in the app
• Updated icons and quick links between screens were added
• Added tons of easy to find info boxes with a revamped look to highlight what can be tapped. By now you’re probably wonder what all of those words around the skill radar are referencing. drum roll Welcome to the brave new word of….

Aspects:

Since the theme of this release was streamlining, a logical part of the game to iron out was the unnecessary complexity of the attributes and tactics. Unless you had spent a lot of time playing RIVALS, it just wasn't very clear which player attributes aligned with which plays and via that with which champion. Every time you wanted to train your player, you had to do a lot of mental gymnastics or even use spreadsheets in order to understand which attributes would be beneficial, and their naming scheme didn't always help with that.

That's why we condensed 8 player attributes down into 5 "skill aspects". We also adjusted the names of the tactics to make it more in line with the new naming convention, as seen in the chart below.

Everything in the game aligns with this now, which totally streamlines the process of understanding the strengths and weaknesses of not only your team, but the rival team as well:

• The skill radar, displayed on the setup screen as well as other areas of the game, displays how well trained your team is in each Aspect.
• Team Power represents the combined Aspects of all players in an active lineup.
• Each Champion is skilled in one Aspect of the game and will use that Aspect when attempting any of its plays.
• Each Champion can be countered by 2 different Aspects during the game.
• Each tactic boosts one of the aspects individually – you can decide if you want to fortify your strengths, shore up your weakness or boost yourself to attack an opponent's weakness

This makes it much easier to match patterns and create make nice team combination. This becomes even more interesting when you consider picks and bans. We currently have 4-6 champions per Aspect, and a lot of those can be banned out in a match. So think of a good strategy and train your players to be flexible enough to overcome your opponent’s ban strategy, and focus your power on their weaknesses to deliver the killing blow.

We’re upgrading your team too:

If you were worried that we would be leaving your old team in the dust by the changes, you can breath a sigh of relief now! We’ve got you covered:

• All players receive the 5th Aspect and with it more Skill and 25% more Potential
• Comfort pick champions that don’t fit to the role of a player will be replaced with new comfort picks that fit. If the comfort pick was already fitting, it will not be changed to keep some of your player's identity alive.
• Existing Gear now boost the 5 aspects instead of the old attributes. This can lead to some items improving the same aspect twice, which will be unified into one stat.
• Existing Training plans are converted into the new plans which boosts aspects. Nothing gets lost here, even if it looks a bit different now.

Now go forth and conquer, there is loot to be won!

Show and tell:

Who doesn’t like to show off their accomplishments? We know almost all of you do, because it was one of the most common requests you had for us. That’s why we designed a long list of accomplishments, a whole heap of items for you to earn, and a brand new place to show them all off in!

Check out the new showcase:

• Gather trophies from achievements and decoration elements from events.
• Customize your showcase in the updated branding window.
• Your showcase will be shown to all opponents and you can inspect opponent’s showcase before your next match or in the team detail screen.

But wait, there’s more!

Good on you for staying with us so far, because you’re about to be rewarded with some very detailed information on key game mechanics changes. Remember how we said the main focus of 4.0 was streamlining the game so it’s easier to understand? Thanks to your feedback on Discord and in the reviews, we realized the confusion required more than a UI fix. Here are some of the common difficulties people faced:

• Basic plays came from tactics, but finding the tactic details was confusing as you had to dive through multiple screens just to get to the descriptions, making the whole process very cumbersome.

• Most coaches struggled to understand how and when combo plays were triggered. The logic and transparency was opaque at best (e.g. you could select lane swap on the top lane, but a fight would be triggered at the bottom lane and it wouldn’t be clear why that happened).

• The pick logic was anything but transparent. The community made several hilarious memes were made out of it.

• Key information was disconnected from each other by layers of abstraction and the details were scattered across different screens and tool tips. Once the details were found, they were burred in walls of text and had to be made sense of with excel tables. The Community Champonions made brilliant work of the system, but new players would stop playing within 7 days out of frustration.

• Lastly, there were several complex match bug that we needed to fix and combo plays made balancing more work than it was worth.

Combo plays and basic plays were sources of frustration for everyone involved, it was obvious that something had to change. After careful consideration, we ended up replacing them with an entirely new system.

Introducing champion plays:

Just as before, each champion has their own set of plays. However, each champion will now attempt to carry out a play in each phase. Players on a team will need training int the champion in order to unlock the full potential of a given champion.

• Each champion has a number of plays they can execute, depending on what role they play in at the moment (Top, Jungler, Support, etc)
• In each phase, each champion will add one play into the Game Plan, for a total of 10 plays. Only 8 of these 10 plays will actually get executed in a phase.
• The order of plays in the Game Plan depends only on Initiative now. Instead of the more obscure mechanisms (order by team scaling e.g.), different things can now impact the Initiative of your plays: For example, if a champion dies, its play gets an Initiative penalty. The team that has higher scaling at the start of a phase gets a small Initiative bonus.
• Plays don't get canceled anymore. If a play cannot be executed when it would be next line, e.g. because its play maker or target is not alive, it gets postponed instead by adding to its Initiative.
• You will see the changes in Initiative and the reordering of the Game Plan as the match plays out.
• Power Plays are stronger plays that you can only trigger if your Player is proficient in the Champion, and the Champion currently has its Power Spike (e.g. an early scaling champion can do its Power Play in Early1 or Early2, but not in Mid1).
• Each champion can execute its power play only once per match.
• If your Player picks a Champion that he doesn't even have Class proficiency for, the champion will only be able to execute Weak Plays, which are worse than the Standard Plays they would otherwise do. You might be thinking, "Hold on a minute there are 10 champions total yet there are only 8 plays possible in a phase. Which factors now determine which plays are being shown on the play bar?"

It all comes down to Initiative – play initiative:

The play bar represents a constant fight of play initiative and you are guaranteed to have at least 3 plays in a phase. The two plays with the highest initiative will not be added to the play list unless conditions change and a slot opens up for them to be played (e.g. if another champion dies and their plays drop to a higher initiative). Initiative works similarly to how 3.0 worked, but now we make it very transparent by displaying the values directly on the play bar (before it was more of a black box in the background).

The refined system behind Champion Plays allowed to to cut out combo plays and basic plays completely, streamlining the coaching experience while still allowing for the same level of decision making and strategy that was introduced in version 3.0

Additional changes:

We were able to work in a few more of your common requests and more this release!

• Level 10 upgrades for Gaming House room do not require League Level 6 anymore. It now unlocks after reaching a certain fame level.
• Added a collect all button for messages.
• The Scrim Match rewards were upgraded to work with version 4.0.
• New Emblems, Colors, Jerseys and more can now be unlocked via Events.
• When winning events in game, you will now get trophies associated with them that you can show off in your Showcase for everyone to see!

Major bug fixes:

• Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash during the tutorial when playing in the Turkish language. To all of our Turkish speaking coaches,Sabrınız için teşekkürler.

Known issues:

There are a few bugs in this version which will be fixed very soon. If you find a bug that is not on this list, please report it to us on Discord so that we can work it on it as soon as possible.

• A lot of the text for the new features is currently available in English only. We're just waiting for the translations to come back so we can implement them, rest assured that supported languages will continue to receive translations.
• player rarity info box shows too much information.
• recreation animation missing.
• upon reaching level 7 the weekly task with "reach power 800" starts with 340 team power regardless of the teams actual power.
• circular power vs potential bar for players overshoots
• language selection broken when phone set to English (player cannot change language in-game if the phone is set to English)
• Lines to the different parts of the screen (team play, Condition etc.) overlap with potential.

If a picture speaks a thousand words, video is king:

Xave Valor, one of our top players who maticulously beta tested this verson, made two videos which take a deeper dive into the new features. He's one of the leading authorities on RIVALS knowlesge, so don't you dare miss out on them!

• Welcome to 4.0: Match Changes

• Welcome to 4.0: Setting Up and Showing Off

  Special Thanks:

Our community has been key to helping us realize what changes were needed, but some members went the extra mile to help us test this new version so that you can have the best game possible. Thank you to the following people for all your hard work and communication!

4.0 community testers:

Shahondin#5762

Xave Valor#7054

Broadside#0709

Geri#3857

moonliiiqhte#4686

senpai#5429

Daivik#0001

L4W#1692

manaoming#9049

nickk#5829

If you made it this far, thank you for reading! We look forward to hearing your response and are excited to bring this new version to the world. Last but not least, have fun – that’s why RIVALS was created to begin with.

We have many more exciting features planned, so stay tuned to our Discord server to get the inside scoop!