My crew and I have a lot of fun teasing one another over our mains, and recently it's come to my attention that none of them know much about how Forsburn works. I took this as an excuse to make some cheeky but high effort content to educate them, and we've all been having fun with it. Some folks have stumbled upon the series randomly on YouTube and encouraged me to share it more broadly, so here's to hoping some here get a kick out of it too!

Brewmeister Snake Venom is a fortified Scottish beer produced by Brewmeister in Moray, Scotland, and is widely recognized as one of the world's strongest beers.

I haven’t seen a ton of opinions on the shark after the recent update and was curious how people are feeling.

I like the changes overall but I do slightly question whether the nerfs to shuriken were necessary, particularly not being able to spawn one with no money. My main thinking is just that his recovery was already one of the worst in the game and limiting it further feels a little unnecessary. Also the buffs to his gold gain are mostly cancelled out by the extra cost of getting back to the stage.

I’ll say again I am happy with the changes in general but I do think there’s some discussion to be had.

I cant get my gcc adapter to be recognized in rivals 2. Dolphin and slippi work great. Im on a steam machine with steam os and i was wondering if there is a way to get it to pick up. Ive seen different methods via Linux but there seems to be additional limitations within the steam os. Its also hard because I am an absolute linux noob lol. Any amount of help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Hey, just wanted to share my thoughts and maybe see what you think. I play the game off and on, I've had a good habit of getting on most days to get the daily XP bonus, and at the moment I have this massive desire to play the game. I have been researching more about my characters' knockdown percents, ironing out a few specific issues with my gameplay, trying to get better at improving than just trying to force out games hoping I'll learn something. And I've played 20 hours in the last two weeks!

And I've only gotten worse online. Last season, I was 1200. This season, I'm ~1080 this season and today my low was 1030. I understand that when you add more to your mental stack, such as new knowledge, it can tend to worsen your gameplay for a bit. I think it's much more than that. The grab range changes have ruined my intuition on when I can grab (I've been playing since beta). The constant weight/hitstun gravity changes have made my intuition on combos and death percents worse, and it doesn't matter if I play a heavy because if I DI wrong once I die at 80-90% even before that update so I don't understand the changes. I feel frustrated because it feels like the gameplay has devolved into spammers vs. campers and I can't find my niche anymore.

And on top of this, the engine changes seem to have caused some instability with my machine, as I get frequent enough crashes to be a constant fear. I am likely to get 1 crash per day, but today I got 2 crashes within an hour, and in both cases I forfeited ranked sets as a result. All I wanted to do was follow through on the massive amount of drive I have to play this game rather than the 4-5 games that I have active goals in... and yet I feel like I've hit a wall at every turn. I want to keep playing the game so bad right now but I'm sorry to say I'm just not having any fun with R2 anymore, which is funny because even 2 days ago I felt like I was having enough fun to make up for it.

I know the classic response: this is burnout and I should take a break. But I don't feel burnt out. I want to enjoy playing the game, but when I try to I just don't get anything out of it. Idk maybe I just am just a smasher at heart but I don't like what the modern games seem to reward over what I enjoy. I never seem to really, actually improve in the ways I want to...

And yes, I've played the workshop. But my deep, ingrained sense of how to play the smash characters kind of sidesteps the whole issue. And I want to get good with the main cast, as thats something I can actually track progress with rather than "does X mod have a good matchup against X mod".

Been a huge smash fans for decades. Rivals 1 was easily my favorite platform fighter of all time (I peaked in low diamond).

I’m honestly really tired for the balancing philosophy around this game. I get why Dan says he wants to balance everyone around zetter and says zetter being top tier is healthy but come on. We are 2 years deep into this game and at all levels of play no other character feels like zetter.

Between this and feeling like I’m being punished for hitting people I’m just tired of what this game is.

Loved the original due to the switch up in pace compared to all other platform fighters, but adding both ledges and shields feels like rivals lost alot of its identity that brought me here originally in the first place.

This was kind of word vomit I realize, and a bit of a salt post admittedly, but I just needed to speak something into the void.

Disclaimer: this is a great game, it’s a much more nuanced game than I am portraying here and a lot of my issues can boil down to “get gud”. I really hope this game succeeds and becomes huge, unfortunately this just isn’t why I came to rivals.

I need to vent and I'll try to be concise. I'm really upset with how a Patreon campaign was created for this game just recently with its sole purpose of providing ongoing financial support. Oh! Did you know by the way that they have a Patreon before I go too deep into this? I didn't know about it until one random Reddit post on this Subreddit mentioned it. Why isn't there a heading on the main page of the game when you boot it up to click on the Patreon? Why isn't there a message from the devs on the main menu explaining how they need our financial support because of these harsh realities the team is facing? Why isn't there a dollar value of what the game needs to progress to the next major update of the game or a yearly goal of financial support? If it's that dire right now then the game needs something upfront and centre that explains what the game needs to be supported with. Plain. Clear. Concise.

Why am I upset about this? For a game that has an extensive and active in-game purchase shop since inception why isn't that enough to support the game ongoing? What terrible business decisions happened to get to this point where I'm hearing that Dan Forance (the head developer and creator of Rivals) is saying the Patreon was mainly created so that he can pay his staff? That is ludicrous!

I have paid at least $140 in cosmetics to this game to date plus the price of game at launch so ~$170 CAN. That includes tournament skins to support the pro scene. What this Patreon campaign says to me is that I as a customer and enjoyer of this game isn't doing enough to support it. I feel guilty for this and I shouldn't. What independent game do you play that receives this much money or more? Slay the Spire? I paid $20 and got hundreds of hours out of it. Rivals is different from that game in that it is live service in which there are expenses to keep it running for online play; however, what was the goal from the beginning of this game financially? Rivals is a niche, Steam only game that will attract only so many people. With layoffs earlier and now a Patreon needed clearly something isn't working. Does the publisher and dev team realistically expect that most players will buy cosmetics continuously? For me, I paid a lot already for this game. Are they hoping their fan base will whale for them and buy everything? There has to be a worst case scenario in the business plan to assume that people will buy the game and maybe one or two cosmetics or bundles only.

Let's look at what makes money for this game other than buying the game itself. The shop. Why in the hell hasn't there been a major shop UI update? Not just UI but updates to the bundles and all the cosmetics. The shop is a convoluted mess for any new person looking at buying cosmetics. There are dozens of bundles of high quality and amazing cosmetics but it's all laid out in a giant pile. Where are the categories for bundles? Year one bundle? Where's pick your favourite character and here's a list of all the bundles associated with them. It needs to be fine tuned to make it less overwhelming for new players to decide what to put their money into. And why isn't there sales for these? We had one bundles sale back when Slade came out with the casual content update. One! Why isn't there a discounted Year One bundle? Year Two? What about a rotating theme super bundle like all of the Mecha cosmetics for a reduced price? What about the purple Twitch palettes that get requested for repeatedly? Why isn't there a bundle for those to be bought for? Why isn't there a starter bundle of cosmetics? There is the actual starter bundle mainly for the 20% coin discount but where are curated "Welcome to Rivals Starter Bundle" at?

The shop is what makes money so make the shop as easy and readable as possible. Sales should be implemented on a regular basis. If a new player sees a sale they'll likely buy the bundle. And yes, a bundle is discounted already of the individual items but if the bundle stays the same price since inception it doesn't generate interest.

I feel this game caters too much to the hardcore audience. You can make a point that the core audience is what is keeping this game afloat and thus deserves the most attention; however, a Patreon campaign is likely a short term solution. You will likely have the most Patreon subscribers during the first month going forward. Once the buzz of it fades who's going to keep paying for it month after month besides the pro scene, family and friends? Also just on the Patreon benefits, it furthers my point of catering to the hardcore audience with rewards like special Discord access and requests. Like really? Who here uses their Discord? I don't. So the first tier of the Patreon means nothing to me other then to just support the team. The second tier is the gold skin cosmetics which in my view is the most important. What do people want? Special cosmetics. So why isn't there more cosmetic choices to entice people to buy? I'm thinking emotes, respawn platforms, death animations, taunts, etc. Maybe that's down the pipeline but it furthers my point of focusing too much on the hardcore crowd with Discord stuff. If you're going to make a Patreon to begin with, have the things people want from the get go. Cosmetics should be first and the priority and not giving Dan a whisper that you want Lox to do less damage, for example. What about having a special VX effect on a Zetterburn fire ball like Path of Exile style as another example?

I love this game. I have almost 1000 hours into it but that doesn't mean I should be buying things constantly to feel less guilty of playing it. There needs to be something to change the direction of this game to get more people to play. The biggest thing I can think of is sponsorship. Get the content creator Ludwig (who is the owner of the publisher btw) to push the game further with tournaments and collaborations on Twitch and YouTube. Sponsor Smash, Brawlhalla and other platformer pros to promote the game. How about non-platform fighter content creators? Imagine getting someone like Tyler1 who was a great asset for Street Fighter 6 in promoting it to non-fighting game fans. Maybe that Patreon money can go to sponsorship!

I've said a lot and I hope my message is clear: Rivals needs a serious plan for sustainable financial income to keep the game going. The golden egg of being released on Switch 2 to get more people playing is a long ways away if it ever happens. A Patreon campaign is short term thus the in game store needs to be focused on to keep money flowing. If anything, maybe some serious business decisions like not doing elaborate YouTube videos on cosmetic bundles, music videos or character releases needs to stop so that more resources can be put into getting more characters, stages and such out. That would be unfortunate but if I'm hearing dire news about the future where is the urgency so that non-hardcore Discord players know that this game needs their financial support?

What are your thoughts on what path or vision Rivals needs to be on being financially stable going forward?