So, first things first. What is Rivals Mode exactly? We touched on it briefly in July, but essentially it's a Crew-based asynchronous multiplayer mode, based around weekly challenges. Band together with up to 10 friends to compete against Rival Crews.
To get started, when Rock Band Rivals launches in October, you'll join a crew, either by creating one yourself or joining an existing one. If you choose to create one, you pick a name and an icon, and invite people to join. You can promote friends so they can accept/deny/issue invites as well, so you don't need to shoulder all of the work. You'll want to get a good spread of talent/abilities in your Crew for reasons that will soon become clear.
Every weekly challenge will have a theme, like songs with the word "Love" in their title, or songs that start with the letter "A," or songs from the 80s. Within your library, you'll notice songs that qualify for the weekly challenge will have a 'W' icon next to them (As you can see at ~12secs in the video above). Within this challenge, we'll pick three specific songs every week as Spotlight Songs, which I'll detail in a minute (Also noted in the library with a Spotlight icon next to them).
Your Crew's performance in the Weekly Challenge is based on two aspects, weighted equally:
1) Total Crew XP earned -- Every time anyone in your Crew plays a song within the Weekly Challenge theme, you'll earn XP for your Crew. XP is based on what difficulty you play on, and how many stars you earn. There are also bonuses for getting a Full Combo, or playing that song for the first time that week. Note that you can play qualifying songs multiple times and continue to rack up XP, so less-skilled players can still make meaningful contributions if they're willing to play a bunch of songs within the challenge for your Crew.
2) Total Spotlight score -- As I mentioned above, each Weekly Challenge will have three specific Spotlight Songs that fit into that week's theme. Your Crew's goal is to post the highest score on each instrument for each song. (Pro drum scores are condensed to standard drum scores, and harmonies do not qualify) No matter how many times your Crew plays these songs, only the top score for each instrument and song will count. These 12 scores will be added together as your Total Spotlight score. (As you can probably gather, having a good spread of talent across all instruments is vital)
Okay, so your crew's been racking up XP across all songs, and you've posted some crazy-good scores on the three Spotlight songs... what now? Well, if you're good enough, you'll get promoted to a higher tier. Everyone starts in the Bronze tier, but tiers continue to Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, and the elusive top Bloodstone tier, reserved for only the best crews. Once you're above Bronze, if you don't perform well enough in a given week, you'll get demoted to a lower tier. If you manage to make it to Bloodstone tier (Less than 0.3% of Crews can be there at a time), you've got to continue putting on a stellar performance, or you'll get knocked back down to Diamond.
You'll know whether you're at risk of demotion, safe to stay at your tier, or likely to get promoted, based on the Tier Status meter, which you can see briefly at ~27 secs in the video above. Your percentile score on Spotlight Songs is averaged with the percentile of your weekly Crew XP, which results in your Rivals Score for the week. If the bubble with that score is in the red when the challenge ends, you're getting demoted. If you're in the blue, you're staying at the same tier. If you're in the green, you're getting promoted.
A challenge ends, Crews get promoted/demoted as necessary, and another challenge begins, giving you another chance to show your skills/devotion to Rock Band.
There are some other stats we're introducing as a part of Rivals, like individual XP (earned across all songs, regardless of the challenge) and a stat called Skill, which will be a number from 0 - 1000 that represents your skill on a given instrument (Which will make it easy to search out people to join your Crew, if you don't know 10 people that play the game).
On top of all of this, we're bringing Rock Band's first companion app to the game, which will help you follow the Rivals competition, chat with your Crew, etc. More details on that to come later.
As a reminder, Rivals Mode will only be available to those that have Rock Band Rivals.
