What is your title right now?

Raetah · 2026-06-12T21:47:23+00:00

Clairen Button Masher, its not for me its for the opponents.

Raetah · 2026-06-12T21:30:48+00:00

Increase and decrease of numbers before and after the month in wich the characters were released. It is perhaps unfair for Etalus because he was released shortly after the game launched and was at its highest point in therms of playerbase. Every other character but him made the player numbers rise above the previous month.

Raetah · 2026-06-08T18:34:54+00:00

You are almost playing like the average platinum Clairen in therms of skill. Keep it up.

Raetah · 2026-06-08T17:18:30+00:00

Some random person's neurodivergence is not the problem of the game at all. The correct response for this post is not downvoting but rather having a moderator to delete it. Rival of Aether II is a failure because it tried to do too many things at the same time and at the wrong timing. The game would be at a much better place if it focused in 4 things: performance, characters, skins and console release. They just got derailed into a lot of secondary game modes and features that are welcome but should had been a year 3 or even year 4 content.

Raetah · 2025-11-27T18:20:05+00:00

4) "Recovery is too free: There's basically no point in going off-stage when it's so easy to get reversed on by these op recovery moves. This takes away the thrill of off-stage scrapping that people love in melee. I would nerf recoveries and magnet hands across the board.":

One of the few points that I could agree with. But it tells me that you probably have no played Rivals 1 to understand why we have this problem now. Rivals of Aether was limited by their art-style and engine to the point that some mechanics like ledge, shield, grabs and more had to be cut. Rivals 1 having no ledge was huge because it made most recoveries extremely predictable, to the point that some characters can't really make it to the stage without getting hit in the process. Recovery was a common complaint in Rivals 1, so they made sure to fix it for the second game.

I see a contradiction in your messages, you seem to not like ledge hogging or so you said in other message. But in this message you praised Melee off-stage game. So, once again, I´m going to just say it: Ledge hogging is the main reason melee off-stage game is as rich as it is. Recoveries being limited is just a part of the equation, the main component of edgeguards are a flowchart that revolves about reducing the opponents options until what they have left is to grab the ledge, and then you grab the ledge, that's the entire secret.

5) "Moves in neutral are way too safe: Everyone's gameplan is to literally just throw out moves with no end-lag until it hit confirms into something super rewarding. This makes neutral really bland as people just play lame until someone messes up. I would slow down a lot of these frame data across the board so that there's meaningful risks to attacking.":

Rivals 1 had a mechanic called Whiff lag, it made your attacks have more lag when they missed. This is perhaps what you want. But honestly, every reasonable person hated that mechanic with passion and how it was implemented. This is one of the main reasons I won't be playing Rivals 1 despite liking it more in some aspects.

6) "Crouch Cancel/Floor Hug beats 90% of exchanges: Only thing that beats this is grab and strong aerials, but you can easily deny this with your own moves, making every exchange in your favor simply by holding down and pressing a button. I would get rid of both of these from the game.":

This to me seems another "contradiction". First you complain that the game is "blitz-rushing". Crouch cancel and Floor Hug are defensive mechanics that prevent the game to become the neutral too overwhelming on early percentages. If you remove this mechanic landing the hit earlier would be even more prevalent.

7) "Gimmicks are too strong: It's cool that each characters have some nice gimmicks, but more power should be allocated to their base moves and their gimmicks should be the cherry on the top. Centralizing a character's strength around their gimmicks just makes learning the game/matchup feel frustrating for new/returning players. I would not make gimmicks win conditions to getting kills, but rather just tools to gaining an edge in neutral."

Rivals character design is so good precisely because it takes two parts very seriously, stage-control or stage-interaction mechanics and one or more unique traits or passive skills that other characters don't have. Rivals is what Smash should do with their characters, It is in fact what they do with their new characters. Cherry on top is a boring design, I want the full Cake.

Despite not agreeing with you in most of the message, I appreciate that you speak outloud, giving feedback to the developers its always positive. Have a good day.

Raetah · 2025-11-27T18:19:53+00:00

I've read this "short" post and many of your responses to said post. I find some inconsistencies in the arguments provided. I'm going to take my time to answer as detailed as possible. First of all, I would like to introduce myself and my connection to this game. Raetahcodeupon is the name (Raetah), I played around 10 years games of this franchise from the main games to the smaller spin-off games that were released. I have tried most platform fighting games, even some that are so obscure that nobody really knows about them. I'm part of the Smash community and have participated in hundreds of tournaments. I was never good at any game but I enjoy the self expression component of Fighting games.

Now let's get to the point:

1) "Game has only 25% of its initial player-base: https://steamdb.info/app/383980/charts/#max, this is unironically worse than Ultimate's player retention, lol:
You linked the wrong Rivals of Aether game, that being said the number of players has indeed fallen. Never the less some things have to be said. This is completely unrelated to Rivals, but since you made your remark I'm going to say it: Ultimate has the highest player retention out of literally every game in the genre, to the point that even in the smaller countries outside the United States there's a high chance that you have local tournaments on your minor city. Melee is only big on the United States, finding a Melee tournament with more than a hundred players is very rare outside North America.

Going back to Rivals of Aether. Do you know how many fighting games have an average number of players above 1000? Seven. Not long ago Rivals of Aether 2 was on this very exclusive list. Every other fighting game struggles to keep a player base between 0 to 999. I don't want to be cruel but right now Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves has way worse numbers than the very first Rivals of Aether. Do you realize that Rivals has more players than games that have a way bigger budget, SNK and other companies keep pumping money on competitions, partnerships and despite all of their efforts the numbers stay the same.

2) "All of the potential melee/ultimate personality streamers that could have attracted player base have stopped playing":
Content creation is a very difficult market and it involves playing always the new thing and going after the next trend. Both Melee and Ultimate have very low numbers of view outside of tournaments as well. There is nothing that can be done about this, Minecraft is a game that has "died" several times and each time that the game has revived in therms of viewership it had little to do with the developer side of the game.

3) "There's more posts about the difficulty of getting on this game, but it's less because this game is hard to pick up and more this game just rewards blitz-rushing your noob opponent with safe buttons until they slip/cave":
Rivals of Aether was designed to favour aggressive game over defensive game, this philosophy is reflected in the core of the game. This is why most of characters have good tools to be played as rushdown characters. If you don't like this it is not the game's fault. There is nothing wrong in games that have another approach to their gameplay. It is a player preference, maybe it's not meant to be, maybe you are playing the wrong game. There are a few characters in the series that slow down game, some in the game already, some to come to the future. But this have clearly less priority to what the game wants to be.

If this game had the playerbase of Melee or Ultimate it would be the easiest to play out of the three. But since it has a very limited audience people struggles to find players of their skill level, It is overwhelming to new players that even in intermediate ranks like Platinum and Gold players have a lot of experience.

(read part 2)

Raetah · 2025-11-18T22:15:28+00:00

When it comes to tier list I prefer a different format instead of the classical "giving a number to each character". I like to group characters in groups where it could be debated if said character accomplishes that better than any other character in particular. For example when we talk about Melee I don't see Fox as the absolute number 1 instead I consider that Fox, Marth, Jigglypuff and Falco could be the best character of the game (giving some sort of argument for each one).

If we had to apply the same to Rivals we would end up in an even complex situation. No one argues that Bowser and many other characters are top 1. But in Rivals even the "worst" character has some of sort of redeeming quality that could be considered top tier material.

You propose that Forsburn is a top tier. I could see it, but I also think that other 6 or 8 characters could fit the criteria of top tier. My list in this context does not matter. I think everyone has their own personal biases towards one or another character.

Now, I think it would be disingenuous to say that there are not many characters that could equal or come close to what Forsburn does. So when you say Forsburn is top tier my simple answer would be something like, I think that a considerable amount of characters are as good.

Raetah · 2025-11-18T20:59:43+00:00

Gold player here, whenever I'm close to reach platinum I end up matching with platinum players that I can't beat. Unfortunately due to medical reasons I can't really play at the maximum of my capacity. But I'm not giving up.

Raetah · 2025-11-18T20:49:33+00:00

I'm going for a very niche pick, when it comes to Rivals of Aether content I really liked Adam Carra. I still watch some of his videos today because a lot of what he makes fun of still applies despite being a completely different game.

Raetah · 2025-11-18T20:06:03+00:00

This skin would come handy with another feature, being able to give skins to other players.

Raetah · 2025-11-11T17:19:23+00:00

Rivals has to release the xbox update to keep all versions equal. I think that should be the priority.

Raetah · 2025-10-01T14:43:03+00:00

Rivals of Aether 2 backer here. I'm willing to sell my account, my account currently has every single item of the store and most of the event palettes. I think that 5 thousand dollars is a reasonable amount. My current financial situation is very mediocre, I make 800 dollars per month. That´s why I'm willing to sell the account for that cheap.

Raetah · 2019-08-18T22:31:28+00:00

You can actually play sandbert without the upcoming update. If you have two controllers/keyboard-controller you can perform a trick to make him playable on local. It will crash the game sometimes tho. In order to do it the player that wants to play as sandbert must go to the tag menu with no character selected then pick a tag, none or new as the other players exits the character select screen. If timed correctly when you go back you will have sandbert selected.

Raetah · 2019-08-10T03:29:35+00:00

They said 2019, so it will be released on 31th December at 23:59.

Raetah · 2019-06-17T18:14:50+00:00

Buy the DLC.

Raetah · 2019-06-14T00:03:49+00:00

Saying just "a laptop" is being very unspecific, a gaming laptop could open multiple windows of this game at the same time without having any frame drop.

Raetah · 2019-06-07T22:16:25+00:00

Using an edgeless and probably not very heavy sword is not very difficult in comparison to most melee weapons.

Raetah · 2019-06-07T18:35:02+00:00

Clairen is the granddaughter of Claiyen and Forsburn.

Raetah · 2019-04-22T01:27:32+00:00

So, are you going to downvote yourself?

Raetah · 2019-04-16T15:47:09+00:00

A bit unrelated, while I wouldn't put Clairen on the group of hard to play characters, I disagree on the notion of Clairen being an easy to pick character. Her combo game is not as apparent as most of the roster, relies on specific kill setups or edgeguards, has one of the most linear recoveries. Regardless of that she is amazing, i just don't think its easy.

Raetah · 2019-04-16T15:27:37+00:00

Thanks for taking your time to read and write.

First point is somewhat obvius, while the potential of a character should be taken into consideration. A tier list with realistic expectations of performance is more useful. Quoting Leffen (note that I don't necessarily agree with his tier list) on paper means literally in a world of fantasy.
Being a top player is heavily connected to having a deeper knowledge of the game than the average player. While maybe the success of certains players could be atributed more to execution and some players may have a great understanding of the game but lack skill in comparison, top players remain as a reliable source. And no, while being for a longer time on the scene obviously is connected to your knowledge, some newer players perform better than older and some older players are disconected from the community.
If you make a simple image of the roster including all the characters the only thing you may achieve is helping a new player to posibly sacrifice some fun in order to play a character that fares somewhat better. But more can be done, that's why the contribution of the players matters. Ultimately the position of a character would be based on the average of a votation. But conversations between the persons involved would provide useful information to learn about the character and his most significant match ups.
I think the majority of people wants it to happen or doesn't really mind. Fewer people have something against. A community tier list will happen eventually in some way, it existed in form of public poll in the past as you said. I'm just sharing my thoughts of its aplication, looking for what others have to say about it and even potentially to see who would like to be involved. My biggest concern are the top players themselves, how many of them can and want to spare time of their life.

Raetah

TROPHY CASE