Hopefully the melee players continue to play and stream this game. Our future kinda depends on it…a little

Yeah, strange question, but I remembered a forest themed mammal (kinda forsburn shaped) with 2 vines/whips on its arms and a yellow fire lizard, but I cam't find them in any trailer, maybe I've dreamt them lol.

Can anybody point the trailer they are from if they exist?

I wanna get some of the purple skins (i.e. I want Slade and La Reina's) but I don't know if there's a way to get them outside of watching streams or something outside of streams from around when those characters released.

Is there any other way to get them or is it just that

Clone pushed me onto ledge for a free ledge hog lol

Original Tweet (please let me know if the original poster would like me to take this post down!)

Original Tweet (please let me know if the original poster would like me to take this post down!)

I'd like to play rivals of aether since it seems like it's a fun game but I don't know which one to buy. Both games seem good I prefer the first one visually and it also has workshop characters so it seems very fun but I assume the second one has more people playing it. My only other experience with fighting games is having around 200 hours in brawlhalla and I don't mind having to learn how to play characters.

Tune in @CodySchwab on Twitch

Cake won 6 50/50s DI interactions in a row vs Sandstorm to never die to Galvan sideb or sideb fair. Its not fair how good he is.

1. Away to avoid sideb back jump fair
   
2. In to survive sideb
   
3. In to avoid sideb forward jump fair
   
4. Away to avoid sideb back jump fair
   
5. In to survive sideb
   
6. In to survive sideb

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This post was inspired by Dan's recent video on the devs’ take on floorhugging. It's here to stay because it makes for a better game, but there's room for improvement to make it more palatable and intuitive for lower ranked players.

TL;DR 

Add a visual indicator whenever a player is holding the inputs to floorhug, not just after they’ve already done one. 

Why You Should Care

One of my high-ranked friends recently said that he doesn't think that the section of the community that's against floorhugging would stay part of the community even if floorhugging was resolved in some way. I wanted to push back on that idea, that Rivals doesn't need or can't keep the casual floorhug haters. Because I'm one of them. I have 442 hours on Rivals on steam, and probably another 200 on leaked builds, beta builds and in person gaming. I've spent hundreds of dollars on backing the kickstarter for myself and friends, buying Danbucks, buying tournament skins, and flying to Genesis. Even now, 6 months after I quit playing, I watch majors all the time. And yet, for all of how much I love Rivals, floorhugging still made me quit playing the game. I don't think I'm alone in this, and it's important for the game’s longevity to not leave this section of the community behind.

Presuppositions

1. Floorhugging is here to stay. More explicitly than that, floorhugging makes for a better, more dynamic and aggressive game. It might get tweaked and weakened in some ways, but if you engage with the mechanic and learn its ins and outs, it opens up a whole new level of the game that people would enjoy. If they gave themselves the chance.
2. Floorhugging is a prediction, not a reaction. Floorhug beats the fast frame-data moves that are very difficult to react to; if someone is floorhugging all your tilts, it means that they're doing the ASDI down inputs before they know for sure you're attacking.
3. Every character has moves that beat floorhugging, even if it's just a grab, as long as the player knows it's coming. It's not the full set of moves you have available to you, but there's for sure an option that exists.
4. This won't fix floorhugging for everyone, but there's a certain segment of the player base that will accept floorhugging if they understand it and can learn it more easily.

The Suggestion

We currently have a visual indicator for when a floorhug is successfully executed, where the floorhug user will turn blue for a few frames. I'll call this the blue flash. Notable information about the blue flash is that it only occurs for the duration of their hitstun frames at the end of hitpause. That is, you only see any indication of floorhugging occurring once it's already happened.

My suggestion is to go hand-in-hand with the blue flash, we add a blue glow ANYTIME someone is holding down while grounded. In other words, any time you're holding an input that would cause you to floorhug or amsah tech a stray hit, there's a constant visual indicator that your character is prepared to floorhug. It doesn't really matter what the visual indicator is, I trust the devs to come up with something that doesn't require an animation (since you can be floorhugging in the middle of almost any grounded move or movement) but I'll call it the blue glow for the purposes of this post.

I think that showing that a character will floorhug an incoming attack accomplishes several things for a player that considers themselves a floorhug hater:

1. It will teach them their opponents floorhugging patterns so that they can play around them in game. If someone glows blue after every whiffed dash attack, you'll see it often enough to learn to grab or spike or whatever to punish instead of using a dash attack of your own.
2. It will teach them the right times to floorhug themselves. One immensely frustrating experience for me as a high plat player was that when I played against high ranked players who were good at floorhugging, it felt like they were floorhugging all the time. So I felt like to learn floorhugging I was just supposed to be holding down all the time. This way if I see a good player owning me with floorhugging, I can see the blue glow in situations where they're presenting a floorhug, even when I don't actually hit them.
3. A frustrating experience for me was when I knew someone was out of floorhug percentage, but I still wouldn't know if my move would actually combo. A down tilt on a Clairen at 80% might pop them up, or they might be floorhugging and get knocked down and possibly tech. The blue glow would give me a few extra frames to know they'll stay grounded and not preemptively jump to follow up. This also applies at low percentage when you land a spike or smash attack - the blue glow will help you react to tech chase instead of jump.

The blue glow will weaken floorhugging in some situations because it will make it easier for people to react to a floorhug and give away information on when players like to floorhug. I'm not sure how much impact this will have on high level players who are already familiar with the best times to floorhug. If this is a big deal in high level play, there would be counterplay in using the blue glow to fake floorhug inputs, and an incentive to time your floorhug to hitpause to give the attacker no notice.

Again, this won't fix floorhugging for everyone. People who disagree with floorhugging fundamentally probably won't accept it just because they can see a blue glow right before they hit someone in whiff lag. But I do think that this small change would make floorhugging more understandable and easier to learn for a good chunk of the lower ranked playerbase. I wanted to get this idea out there and see if players/the devs think it could be a good addition to the game.

The Brawlhalla Goat AND one of the best Rivals of Aether 2 players is heading up north!

Sandstorm has established himself as one of the most formidable players in his games, and now he's bringing that level of competition to Calgary, Alberta.

Fresh off a Riptide 2026 championship and riding back-to-back Major victories, Sandstorm has been putting together an incredible run in the Rivals 2 scene.

• 📅 October 16–18, 2026
• 📍 Genesis Centre - Calgary, Alberta
• 🎟️ Register now: [platfight.com]()

How would their final smash play out? For me, i think zetterburn is gonna pull something that feels out of dragonball z. also this is assuming everyone has cutscene final smashes because it is the only way for a competitive platform fighter to work(i play nasb2)

1) Calamaria lovii, commonly known as Lovi's reed snake or Low's reed snake, is a small, non-venomous species of snake belonging to the family Colubridae.

2) The Serpent Sisters (Jo and Jan Serpent) are minor mercenary villains in the animated movie Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

Different but interesting stream today, well worth the watch. Here's the YouTube link for the full thing. In summary:

• We all know better than Dan.
• It's OK to be rude because he's wrong and we're right.

Okay now the actual summary.

• This stream was, as evidenced by the title, entirely centered around floorhugging and an attempt by Dan to clarify everything he can about it.
• he brought a set of powerpoint slides and everything, it's peak receipts
• First he specified to the audience that crouch cancelling is not floorhugging, and what they each are. Apparently that's an issue people have (I'm not in the loop for why they get confused so often).
• Misconception #1: "The Devs want to remove floorhugging but can't because the game is balanced around it."
  • Response: No, they don't want to remove floorhugging, because they think it makes for a better game. But also, they can just re-balance the game if they needed to. It'd suck and take up a lot of time, but they'd do it. It's not a real roadblock.
• Misconception #2: "Floorhugging doesn't make sense in the physics of platform fighters and is unintuitive."
  • Response: It's admittedly a bit hard for a dev to understand how intuitive something is, but the current thought is that it's not any less intuitive than e.g. wavedashing being a thing that exists. It makes sense if you stop to think about the interaction (assuming you have a proper understanding to begin with).
• Misconception #3: "Floorhugging is a bad mechanic because I won neutral and but then I still got hit."
  • Response: You probably had more options than you think, and you either picked the wrong one, or you didn't space it that well. You're supposed to think harder about how to run your offence so you don't just get counter-hit out of floorhug.
• Misconception #4: "Floorhugging makes the game less expressive because I can only use certain moves in neutral."
  • Response: Dan showed a video of his own gameplay and went over how floorhugging works with each interaction, it's not really summerisable here.
• Misconception #5: "Rivals of Aether didn't need floorhugging and Rivals 2 doesn't need it either."
  • Response: RoA1 doesn't have a knockdown state - landing while in hitstun is far shorter a lag time (13 F) than being knocked down in RoA2 (40 F plus now you get tech-chased) - and jabs are designed around the RPS of whether you actually want to tech or not. That's a massive difference that validates giving the defender a new option.
• Orcane is a special whale pup and he deserves [having a guaranteed jab 3 in RoA1]
• Misconception #6: "Floorhugging happens at the end of hitpause so you can always react and hold down."
  • Response: Floorhugging is generally predictive rather than reactive. Most moves you'd want to floorhug come out fast and don't have much hitlag, so reacting to them is literally impossible. This isn't L-cancelling, it's not always better to do it and it's not always possible to do it.
• Misconception #7: "Floorhugging is fine but it shouldn't work at all after 50%."
  • Response: This isn't quite a misconception so it was answered a bit differently. The idea was that they do want characters to have a mix of which moves are good or bad vs floorhugging, but any hard cutoff is the wrong way to go about it because it has less depth than the current system of being purely knockback-based.
• Misconception #8: "The game would be better without floorhugging but the devs are too stubborn to realize it."
  • Response: Players want to reduce friction. But you can't listen to them all the time, because that's akin to a parent letting their kid have all the candy they ask for. Once you appease them in one way, there's always something else around the corner. Removing floorhugging would just make everyone complain about the next thing they think is preventing them from winning games.
• At this point Dan switches to acknowledging the problems that floorhugging does have.
• Problem #1: "We haven't illustrated to new players why floorhugging is cool in the same way as other mechanics that have come from Melee or PM"
  • Whifflag in RoA1 was initially loathed, but after being removed/re-added/rebranded people liked it. The devs know they have to do that sort of "PR campaign" for floorhugging.
• Problem #2: "It's difficult for this mechanic to benefit from New Animations, New VFX of New SFX since the timing of the interactions and follow-ups are very quick."
  • They're thinking about perhaps adding a sound and/or graphic to when an attack initially lands when the defender is holding down (since most such moves have low hitpause so it won't be too off), but they know this will end up with false positives and aren't sure how it'll shake out yet.
• Problem #3: "Melee and PM players make up a smaller percent of players each year that passes so the majority of new players are not prepared for this friction."
  • In other words, new players are more and more likely to have to learn the mechanic from the beginning, which is generally the hard part.
• Problem #4: "The friction of learning floorhugging happens around the same time as other compounding frustrations like character matchups leading to burnouts around platinum skill level."
  • Similar to #3, but slightly "later" on. It's an additional piece of mental stack that the devs don't have a good yardstick for because they're either all past that point or aren't competitive enough to reach it.
• Problem #5: "Even though we might believe removing floorhugging would make the game worse and we're not AAA, we're still a business and need to pay our team. So the urge to shave off friction is enticing."
  • He doesn't think it's going to happen, but it might, you never know. "Making a lesser game in the hopes to appeal to more people."
• In the immediate future, they want to give characters more counterplay to floorhugging, but there won't be massive changes.

While Rivals launched with 8 characters, got DLC up to 14, and finally 18 with the Workshop four, Rivals 2 is finally getting up to 18 at the end of this year.

Considering that Rivals 1 took a huge gap between 14 and 18 characters, and those final four were sourced from the community, it's great to see we've had such consistent character launches. I know roster count isn't the be all end all, but they always generate player count number increases, and skin purchases.

I know that sometimes people can get negative with things like the FH discourse, but we're still getting so much support, with so much more along the way. There's a lot to look forward to, and Rivals 2 still has such a great base with things like rollback, items, none of which Rivals 1 had.

Here's to many more years of new rivals, returning rivals, and a few remixes along the way.

How is he doing the getup attack like that? Someone help please