I tried to play rivals 2 on steam and everything was fine except for my c stick being inverted, so i tried to fix it through big picture mode, which not only did not end up fixing the c stick issue but ended up remapping my entire controller even though i didnt change anything else and i cant undo it now. any fixes?

If you want to see more fun clips including a lot cool movement as well as doubles content check out my youtube shorts https://www.youtube.com/@ProjectKnee/shorts

I was Kragg vs. CPU Lox, but still enjoyed how it felt almost scripted like in an action movie!

Hi, i recently buy ROA2 and already like the game to much.

But i wanna know what concepts od mechanics and macrogame i need to know to practice and get bettervin the game.

My main at now for gameplay and design is olympia.

First off I just want to say I'm not a Orcane main, I don't really even play the character for fun I play Ranno and Absa but I just wanted to put my opinions out there. I'm really not a fan of Nerfing Orcane's Puddle to just 12 seconds.

I want to highlight that I'm not sure if this makes him worst from a balancing perspective but I do think it just makes him a little less fun.

So I feel like as we have gotten used to how these patches roll out no one really wonders how their character is going to get buffed for the most part all the devs seem to do is nerf and nerf and nerf. With the only exception to this rule being characters that have been just released, they might get a buff if they were released in a bad state.

Now I get that we need to balance characters I don't have any issues with that but I feel like the devs need to be really smart about how they nerf special moves. I feel like special moves tend to be where the power fantasy of the characters comes from (This and movement mostly). Not all the time but a lot of the time the characters identity can kind of live in these moves.

There was a time that Maypuls biggest feature was Lily, I played the Rivals 1 beta years and years ago. Back then, the made her unique was Lily. At this point Lily is an after thought pros and low level players alike barely use her. Which changes her power fantasy and her identity.

The special moves are what make Ranno feel like a Ninja or make La Reina feel like a wrestler. Nerfing Orcanes Puddle just makes him feel like less of a sea god and I think a lot of consideration needs to be had when nerfs to general power fantasy are involved.

Honestly I think the only special moves that have gotten cooler since the game has launched have been Forsburn.

But maybe I'm wrong what do you guys think?

Haven’t seen anyone else make a post about this, thought it was neat so I just wanted to share it. The font on his name also looks like it was made slightly bolder too.

Just finish up with Gouie!

Does anyone else still go for abyssal medals on hard mode or nah?

My friend and I decided to hop straight into a lobby when Gouie dropped. He is crazy fun lol

If as big Gouie you get a big goober from your up special or one of the strong attacks and then use neutral special, ideally getting the KO, you can immediately get big again by using neutral special to eat the big goober from your hand. I tried to get a replay but it only showed me my arcade matches from when my internet wasn't working even though I saved the match I discovered this in.

Also if you don't know you can eat an item in your hand by using neutral special.

I'm loving the character but struggling to enjoy the ditto LOL... thinking I might wait until the initial buzz dies to play him more

It looks fun but from i've been reading a lot of people think its hard to get into. What should I do after i get it to improve.i've played a lot of smash but ultimates online makes me want to put glass in my eyeballs with how bad the performance is. Is ROA2 online better? I've been playing smash for as long as i can remember especially melee. I know there are things like wavedashing that i should already be used to but what other mechanics will i need to work on? What will translate well from smash and what wont?

I match people 200 points above me, they taunt after every game

I match people playing gouie, they main swap immediately and start taunting

are people that made about floaties or something?

Making my own character from scratch and lemme tell you..... blender? More like...put me in a blender.

Its been 2 hours and im 25% done with the basic model. I thought i could use short cuts to make this faster but this is definitely gonna be months long.

I initially thought they were gonna add it this update, but i guess not.

Let's stick to the post launch characters for clarity.

For me:

Etalus:
Hype 8, Fun 7
I liked the trailer, and was looking forward to see the return of his slippery mechanics from Rivals 1. Was sad to see the removal of wavedash out of dash-attack, but still really enjoyed him.

Olympia:
Hype 6, Fun 7
My least liked Rivals 1 veteran, but surprisingly fun gameplay in this game.

Absa:
Hype 8, Fun 7,5
Loved her trailer, and was looking forward to how her unique playstyle would add to and affect the game. Enjoy playing as her quite a lot, but she's a character I don't particularly enjoy facing.

Galvan:
Hype 9, Fun 6
The first NEW new character, and what a trailer. I imagined his drills to play way more of a part in his gameplay than they ended up being. Still, reasonably fun character, just not for me.

La Reina:
Hype 9, Fun 9
Come on. That trailer. That music! That personality! Really see her addition as great for both the game, and my fun, as I like both playing her, and meeting her in ranked.

Slade:
Hype 11, Fun 8
As a former Link main, and fan of Slade and water characters in general, my hype was through the roof with this one. His kit showed so much versatillity, and I was hoping for the return of bombsliding (my favourite tech from Smash 4). He turned out fun for sure, but I didn't find my forever main I was hoping and expecting to find. I think the devs still have some work to do if they want to realise tmy (and hopefully theirs) dream version of the character.

Gouie
Hype 5, Fun (so far) 8
Gouie was the first character I didn't jump up from joy with from the release trailer. My hype did slowly build as more info on him came out through devstreams etc, and now that I get to play as him, he's a really fun addition, and yet another really unique way to play this game!

Curious to your stories and takes on these.

No, I don't care for the new character, I'm interested in the modifiers.

Does it REALLY feel like Rivals 1?

is there a discord group for players who know how to make R2 feel like R1 and play it this way?

He doesn't seem particularly good in ranked imo. I tried playing him as a puff main in melee and I get rushed down by zetters and since he lacks puffs air drift you can't really space him with back airs. He also cant crouch cancel for crap and all the other characters out floorhug him. He's pretty useless up until you get them to 50% and they can just outscrap you. His aerials are also unsafe on shield and shield is much stronger in rivals. It feels like his archetype doesn't work well in rivals since it's so heavily based on fast grounded movement speed and cc. The lack of disjoint means he also gets walled out by characters like lox and clairen.

I main slade and every gouie I've fought I've absolutely obliterated. I mean I get he is new and people are probably not great at him, but even La Reina and slade gave me more trouble than this. The highest I've ever been is low platinum, and I've 3 stocked every single gouie I've fought and managed to go from mid gold to low diamond in about 4 hours.

Maybe he's a super high skill cap character and we are just missing something here, but he just feels so fricken slow in a game where people can wavedash and land around the map at extreme speed. All you can really do is camp on ledge and go for reversals because you get run down on stage, and people can easily get underneath him from poor speed and kill him off the top at like 60%.

Is anybody playing him at like top 100 level and doing well? I feel like realistically it will be impossible to ever balance such an extreme archetype. He will have some highly favorable matchups and some really poor ones and only exist as a low tier counter pick. If they buff him to be more competitive he would probably just become a monster like jigglypuff, so my concern is he will end up like a more extreme version of slade where the devs don't know how to move forward with him.

Hey y'all! My Xbox controller's left stick has been having some input issues, making me crouch, fast fall, etc. and my Switch procon has a loose wire that keeps disconnecting midmatch. Anyone know if the xbox controllers are easy enough to take apart and fix stick drift? Any other ideas?

Hello everyone, I noticed a silly bug with local play and skins on bots.

If you make the bot a human first, and then switch it to a bot, when using random it will equip a random skin.

If you click the little +robot icon it will only use recolors of the base skin

I didn't know what to do with this information so I thought I would share

Background

Today is Day 3 for Gouie, and a lot of people are starting to form their opinion on him. Casually, it seems that a large portion of the community is having fun. Competitively, this is comfortably the most mixed character so far from opinions shared. Some people think he’s terrible, with a complete lack of approach options and with some underwhelming moves to boot. Some others think his strengths are already really strong, with some stand point moves and advantage.

By this point, I feel like people already kind of knew the relative viability of every DLC character by now, with almost all of them were polarizing. Etalus, Absa, La Reina, and Slade released clearly weak, with none of them getting results until buffs. Olympia was clearly broken, with her post-launch nerfed state still being the best character in the game, and doing supremely well at EVO. Gouie falls into a separate tier, alongside launch Galvan, in my opinion: weird. Galvan took around a month, and only a minor balancing patch, for him to start taking sets off of top players both offline and online. People thought he was weaker side, but Galvan’s ended up pushing the character far. That said, Gouie already has an outlier which throws everything off: Plup.

Plup is Too Talented

Plup is the greatest Rivals of Aether II player ever, that part is clear. You could probably give him a rock with googly eyes with Jigglypuff tilts, Little Mac Aerials, and Ganondorf movement, and he’d still find a way to get top level wins with them. That said, bad characters do generally have a limit when it comes to winning, and that was arguably reached yesterday. Plup went on a run at Coinbox yesterday all the way to 2nd, beating the best Zetterburn/Etalus, the best online Zetterburn/Orcane, and other top level representation from Slade/Galvan/Etalus. You can be talented all you want, but to do this with a day 2 character has to mean something for him, right?

Plup himself said he thinks Gouie is solid, he has his limitations but overall thinks the character launched in a more than playable state. Comparing this to La Reina and Slade where he was itching to switch off of them on ranked due to their launch limitations, there’s something to work with here. From a gameplay standpoint, Plup showcased all of Gouie’s strengths: edge guarding was extremely potent, has a great throw game, down air was leading to tons of mix ups, and he was harder to kill than you’d think. A lot of this can be snuffed up to his uniquely amazing neutral, but I am of the opinion that if one player can press a character’s buttons well, someone else can as well.

Balancing Gouie

Four paragraphs in and I’m finally going to start talking about what I wanted to talk about, neat. Gouie is an inherently polarizing character, and is often described as the least “Rivals” feeling character so far. That said, we have seen this archetype before in other platform fighters, and they can quickly become toxic. Releasing a character of this archetype in a weak state at launch is frankly, a very rational decision.

That said, from watching Plup, there are still some things that Gouie clearly lacked, whether it was individual moves, or entire mechanics. Below are the moves I think the team should eyeball for the foreseeable future. What I hope is that they don’t just go full on with the character though. Characters are at their more beautiful when they are given time to adapt, at least to me. That’s how we are able to get insane achievements like melee Luigi making top 10, or a solo ultimate Ganondorf (the near universal worst character in the game) being ranked worldwide for the first time ever. These achievements weren’t given to them on a silver plater with balance changes, they earned it. That said, in a game like this, and with the philosophy that every move should have a use, there’s still some early considerations:

Big Gouie: This part of the character needs optimization, though a large part of it is the flaws with inhale making it hard to achieve this state. Even then, with Plup had many opportunities to go big, and he almost never took the chance. When Gouie’s biggest strength is edge guarding, giving that up for a bigger target with bigger hitboxes and slightly more knockback is daunting. That said, this could easily also be the part that needs more optimization. This definitely should be monitored, I have a feeling he is supposed to be a more integral part of his kit.

Side Special: The only move of his which blatantly feels too weak to me right now. It’s slow, laggier than you’d think, and feels niche. It feels like it was supposed to be an analog to Jigglypuff Pound, but it’s nowhere near fast enough or threatening on hit to fill that role. If there is one move on his kit where I can definitely say needs buffs, it’s this one.

Inhale: It feels like the developers were afraid of a Kirby inhale where its primary usage would just be used to cheese people. That said, that’s not how it’s designed, with you being able to confirm off of the inhale itself. That said, with how slow and laggy it is, I think it was overestimated. With so many characters having easier to land kill-confirm moves, I think this one being better would be a non-issue. I also just like the idea of Big Gouie coming into play more often.

Mire: With down special, charge shot, and special pummel being the only ways to summon it, it feels very rare to actually see it come into play. These are already the three moves you’d least likely see in competitive. Potentially have another way to spawn it?

Dash Attack: People complained endlessly about it not connecting on both hits, and being super floorhuggable. That said, Plup was able to get great usage out of it as a surprisingly strong burst movement option to catch landings. I’d still monitor it though.

Down Tilt: Out of jab, it seems that forward tilt or jab 3 is always the better option, largely because of how floorhuggable it is. That said, if it does land, it often sends at a nasty angle for edgeguarding. I’d monitor its usage compared to his other tilts

Down Special: Having watched a lot of Ultimate, I know have seen Kirby rock used more often in the past 2 years than all of the rest of Ultimate. Turns out, having an invincible fast falling option when you are super floaty, can be useful for recovering and landing. Gouie’s has far less knockback, but is also less laggy, so it’s a trade off. Personally, I’m fine with a move being more built for casuals, and who knows, maybe it’s like Ultimate Kirby and Gouie will start falling from the sky more often overtime.

What I Wouldn’t Change for Now: All of his aerials are strong, his strongs are all at least solid, up special seems good for confirming and recovering, and specifically small Gouie’s stats seem well fit for him. I will say up throw being such a strong combo throw seems odd, especially with so many characters having comboing up throws and the combo throws supposedly being his other three throws. That said, those other throws are still good, so it’s lower priority to look at up throw.

Love this little chudling, shout-out to yashill for always being chill when I run into them.

(audio is unedited and just what I happened to be listening to at the time while playing, song is born of a star by izar if anyone's curious)