I guess most of the people who are reading this article already know Rivals of Aether, but if you don't then here is a little summer: The words "most" and "underrated" are used way to extensively but it does the job rather well, now you want to know exactly why it is underrated. I will get straight to the point:
Short introducton
Rivals of Aether is a brawler type game, like Super Smash bros. and Brawlhalla. Two players (local or over the internet) are fighting against each other for 3 rounds and until someone won 2 matches. There are eleven characters you can choose from, 3 of them are from paid DLCs, since its an indiegame-company I can understand that and 10 Bucks for 3 new characters is quite the nice deal! A new character is announced and will be added in the near future.
Rivals of Aether the most underrated Brawler!
Rivals doesn't have a lot of online players. There are some people online at any given point of the day, but not many. It is really hard to find an opponent in a ranked game or in "Casual" play who is in your league. It's not like the game isn't fun to play, (fun is something subjective, but if you like the beat'm'up/ brawler genre, then it is a fun game to play)the ingame-mechanics are good too, in my opinion, the mechanics are a lot like the one in Super Smash Bros. Brawl , which is a good game too! Also, RoA was recently played on a big beat'm'up tournament called Genesis 5 which had over 17.000 viewers when RoA was streamed and it seemed like everyone liked the game.
So why aren't there more online players you ask? I would say the reason is following:
Because there are so few people online, it is really hard for new players to enjoy playing against the advanced players, who are going to crush you if you aren't familiar with brawlers. So some people are just playing locally with there friends, instead online.
The game isn't bad, it looks good, every character has its own touch and feel to it, but the community doesn't grow, instead, the player base decreases.
The biggest problem of them all!
Now I want to talk about the biggest Problem in the game right now! This needs to be fixed asap.
The Servers! Because there are none... the online feature is "Peer to Peer". In other words, it is the connection between your and the "enemy's" PC.In my opinion, this is the most devastating problem in the entire game. If you are lucky or paying quite the fortune for your internet connection, then one side of this "dice of problems" is gone, but since the other player has to have a good internet connection too, it is really difficult to have a game without any lags at some point in the game! Some of you would say:
" But so many countries in Europe & states in America already have a good internet connection! Fiberglass for the win!"
You might be right about that, but since there are so few people online, you are guaranteed to play against someone from another continent at some point! So here is my solution to this situation. Even if it hurts to buy some servers to play on for a small player base, it will be worth it in the long run. The marketing apartment needs to promote the game a lot more so more people get to know about the game. And please, if the game will make it to a bigger audience, don't start making any loot boxes/crates (whatever you want to call it) for skins or some other crap!
My name is Soldierriko and I hopefully will see you in the comments of my next post or stream at [Dlive](https://www.dlive.io/#/user/soldierriko)
Have a nice day :)