Rivals Characters by Popularity (and Friendliness!)
Heya Rivals reddit! There were a couple of posts commenting on character popularity/how nice people are online, so with the season ending in a few days (and also because I just finally broke diamond) I figured this would be as good a time as any to share some stats I've been collecting for a while now, since Dan still won't give me the data I CRAVE (love ya Dan <3).
I started recording info about players back around the time Olympia released, wanting to take some notes about the people I kept running into and not adapting to in time (shoutouts to a Zetterburn that took several sets off of me with basically exclusively fullhop -> dj fakeout -> dair), and it turned into a whole little side project so here ya go!
Methodology:
Data was collected entirely from ranked matches in Northeastern US (Newark, Ashburn, Toronto, and to a lesser extent Chicago), centered around my elo as I climbed through plat. Every individual player tag matches to a list of mains and a "Joy" score, ranging from -3 to +3. For the Joy score it's a bit soft but I tried to keep a consistent rubric -- I always opened the match with a "Hello!" and responded with "Good luck!" and "Good game!" if they kept up the conversation. The scoring then went like so:
+3: Using lots of messages to keep up the vibe/hype up my plays, adding me after the match to congratulate/ask to practice
+2: Saying hi and good luck without prompting, tossing out a GG after a loss
+1: Saying hi back, then just getting to into the game
+0: No response of any kind
-1: Taunting after an SD/every win, occasional t-bagging
-2: Actively hostile play (large portions of the game running away/camping top plats orunder the stage while down at least a stock), constant t-bagging
-3: Aggressively spamming rude/salty messages, adding me after the match to flame
Takeaways:
There's definitely a "big 3" of characters you run into -- big 5 if you count Lox, and La Reina's absolutely meteoric rise since release. Beyond that, a pretty solid spread but with a relatively steep dropoff, which made some of the characters at the bottom feel like a very rare sighting. And holy moly the bears are extinct in the northeast, we gotta do something about those icecaps
As for joy -- contrary to what you might hear online, Rivals players are in fact overall quite friendly! Yes, even the Clairen mains. With a weighted average Joy score of .74, every single character was well above breaking even, which I think is awesome. I also rarely experienced people playing even moderately campy or hostile. I suspect that has a lot to do with just opening up the match with a simple friendly hello, so I definitely recommend you guys all try vibing with your opponents a bit while you play -- it may not take much to have a better time! And if being nice even slightly decreases the chance of someone playing Evil Rivals into you, isn't that worth it?
Anyways cheers to all my fellow ranked grinders, and good luck in the last few days of the season!