Summer has officially begun in the world of Aether! Time to get those swimsuits on and join us for the return of our Summer theme - Pool Party Splashback. Our latest bundle includes 2 new Pool Party skins: Pool Party Slade, and Pool Party Orcane with their own icons to match, plus coins and bucks. Check out the trailer right here:
Players equipping any of the new event skins, or any of the following skins will receive 20% Bonus XP on the event track: Pool Party Loxodont, Pool Party Clairen, Pool Party Ranno, Pool Party Absa, and Pool Party Forsburn.
New Event Track Rotation
With the launch of this year’s Pool Party event, we’re also adjusting how our event schedule works. Events will now last 3 months, and have expanded content and rewards to match the extra length.
Moving to this schedule allows us to give a similar amount of rewards for time played compared to the old event lengths, while freeing up some of our dev time that used to be spent on new themes each month for larger impact features.
With this summer’s free event track you can unlock the Pool Party Olympia Skin, the Pool Party Platform, Pool Party Slade emote, and the Pool Party Surfsplosion death effect just like a typical monthly event. The new expanded event track now ALSO includes even more like…
Two returning skins.
Two new palettes for each returning skin.
Two new palettes for the new Pool Party Olympia Skin
Two new Pool Party Icons
Two new prefix titles
Two new suffix titles
A new Pool Party Critical Hit
And even more Aether Bucks and Aether Coins!
Introducing the Announcer
We’re excited today to add a highly requested feature - Rivals 2 now has an announcer! Christopher Maher brings tons of energy and extra oomph to menus and gameplay. You may recognize his voice as well from many of our monthly event trailers.
If you prefer things quieter, you can always disable this new feature in your audio settings. We plan to offer other types of announcers in the future as well as a way to switch between them, so let us know what options you want to hear.
New Cosmetic Type - Titles & Nameplates
Players can now customize a two-word combination title that appears alongside their name. Some you unlock will be prefixes, and other suffixes, so you can mix and match your favorites to add some fun flair to your tag.These will be available through in-game events, the coin & buck shop, and even sometimes from live Rivals events.
Behind each title is a colored nameplate that’s customizable as well. You’ll unlock one this month in the new event track. We thought these would also be a great way to celebrate Pride month, so we’ve added a free nameplate bundle to the shop (just like our free icon bundle last year) featuring tons of Pride themed nameplates.
New Shop Items
Palettes
Cool Blue Galvan is finally available!
Icons
These new icons are available:
Sparkfang Icon
Ridgehorn Icon
Stingstream Icon
Cobbleclaw Icon
Chillchomp Icon
Stonedra Icon
New Ranked Shop Items
Champion Slade has been added to the Ranked Shop! This includes a skin, two emotes, and two new icons for The Swagger of the Sea.
Audio Updates
Announcer feature added (as well as the announcer setting in the menu).
Pool Party Orcane has a custom win jingle + deflating sounds when he gets KO'ed.
Slade's Up Special sound timing has been fixed.
In an earlier patch, when adding Wrastor's new voice-lines, we removed the lines "Go With The Flow!" and "Too Easy!" from his taunts 1 and 2 respectively. Some players requested we bring them back, so were-added a chance to play both of them together with the new ones.
Gameplay Updates
MATCHMAKING IMPROVEMENTS
Ranked Matchmaking now has an additional constraint that tries to keep matches within a 200 Elo difference. The goal with this change is to avoid really lopsided matches and let matchmaking work a little longer to find a balanced game, especially within the most active & populated skill range.
Ultimately it’s a balance between matchmaking time, and finding ideal matches. We think this will improve things and not increase matchmaking time too badly on average, but we will be keeping a close eye on it!
How it works: This rule limits you to 200 away from an adjusted version of your Elo. To account for varying player counts depending on where you are in the skill curve this rule applies primarily within the Elos of 650 and 1350, and outside that range your adjusted Elo is clamped into it. What this means is if 200 away from your Elo hits one of these bounds, then it includes the full breadth of players in that direction, and then lets our existing matchmaking rules decide if it’s a valid match (limited to a max of 1 Rank away and a gradually increasing Elo difference). This allows the rule to be relatively strict for players near the median of our skill curve, where the most players are, without being overly restrictive as you move outwards into ranges with fewer players and wider Elo gaps.
Ie. If you are 1000 Elo: you would have a range of 800-1200 for opponents that the constraint would try to enforce.
If you are 1200 Elo: you would have a minimum bound of 1000, but your upper limit hits that 1350 limit, so our normal rules that constrain you to a max of 1 Rank away would apply instead, leaving you with a range of 1000 to 1499 (after expanding fully).
GENERAL
Added an announcer!
Grounded knockback velocity decay will now use the character's default ground friction value.
Previously, it would decay by the character's current ground friction value (which could be zero if they used an attack with no ground friction), leading to some weird behavior, especially near ledges.
Players in parry stun can now be pushed by other players after 5 frames
Parry stun is now rooted after 5 frames
This allows players to space their moves normally without worrying about overshooting a stunned player due to the lack of pushback, while still preventing them from pushing the stunned player off a ledge.
Performing a wall tech will now prevent grabbing the ledge for 30 frames unless you start an attack
Previously, this would only apply after the wall tech state naturally ended, so canceling it with an action that can instantly grab ledge (such as the early frames of Absa's double jump) would allow characters to grab ledge after a wall tech much faster than intended.
Fixed a bug that randomized the RNG seed at the start of each match in Arcade mode.
ITEMS
Bee Hive: Reduced maximum duration when passed to another character.
Previously, the Bee Hive would reset its duration every time it was passed. This could lead to Bee Hives staying active for long periods of time, which some players found frustrating. Now, the duration will be set to the maximum of its current duration or 3 seconds, instead of resetting to 12 seconds on every pass. The initial duration of 12 seconds is unchanged.
Proximity Mine: Final explosion hitpause adjusted to match the animation better.
Forward Special will now only automatically perform the tail swipe on contact with opponents if you are holding the Special button.
Previously, opponents could stop Orcane from recovering with this move by getting near it and then dodging the tail swipe. Now Orcane can release Special to disable the auto-swipe, allowing him to continue through an opponent.
Forward Special knockback angle: 50 > 55
The non-empowered version of this move was KOing a bit too early offstage, especially with all the ways Orcane can combo into it.
During Forward Special's leap, Orcane can now only absorb a puddle while rising.
This prevents situations where Orcane would end the leap right above the puddle and get the empowered version of the move. Now Orcane will need to leap into the puddle from below if he wants to absorb it in motion.
Back Air hit 1 active frames: 3 > 4
Back Air frames between hits: 1 > 0
This prevents some odd situations where Back Air could whiff on nearby opponents where it looked like it should hit them.
La Reina can now only spawn one chair per airtime.
This change does not apply if the chair was spawned before La Reina became airborne, so she can always spawn a chair while recovering as long as it's not on cooldown. Landing on her offstage platform does not refresh this resource.
This change applies to both Neutral Special and Down Special, and is intended to prevent her from constantly refreshing her resources while being edgeguarded. While these extended chair recoveries had plenty of counterplay at the top level of gameplay, they gave La Reina too many chances to recover (with high reversal potential) at the level of play where the La Reina players are able to do them but the opponents aren't doing the optimal edgeguards. In general, we've been gradually trying to address excessive rinse-repeat edgeguards by adding diminishing returns to recovery moves or limiting recovery resources, and this was an extreme outlier on a character whose recovery is intended to be a weakness.
Bomb will no longer spawn with its hitbox interpolated.
This prevents a rare situation where the bomb would detect an opponent, but then the explosion would miss them and only hit Slade's hand.
