Well, there is a good community out there also playing on PC. Not my idea of gaming - but that said - the discord crowd are a very supportive community. Worth introducing yourself and you never know who may crop up that can help.
They have PC specific threads, and general gear and loot trading.
Bring your wallet 
A military harvester, lv 4, just dropped my first exp shotty. Had the area on lv. 16 during that run.
Edit: I got one region to lv. 20 - what is the maxed out stat in this case? I’m not even farming right now.
Hello, what platform are you playing on? I play ps4 pro and don’t know where to find such a community, I am from Belarus
Hello Nikolai - here’s your best bet…it’s the PS4 specific channel in the official discord. Happy hunting.
You don’t need to let the rival kill you to level it up, I may be staying the obvious, but just killing other machines and avoiding rivals is the quickest and easiest way to get rivals to level up and spawn
It was quite helpfull
Quite so
This is a simple and banal way to upgrade the player, but effectiv one
Is the 2 hour cool down only active when playing the game, or does it count down when you’re not playing the game as well?
This. All cool downs in game count only when you’re playing the game. Including loot containers restock, which is 4 gameplay hours.
Though, do note that Rival cool down is region specific.
For example: lets say you just spawned new Rival in Farmlands. You don’t have to play the game for 2 hours to spawn new Rival in different region. You can just cross the region border and work there to spawn a Rival in e.g Forest region.
In my game i’ve done a round trip spawning Rivals. E.g: starting from South Coast, spawn Rival there, move to Farmlands, spawn rival there, then Forest, then North Coast, then Marshlands then Mountains and by the time i get back to South Coast, 2 gameplay hours have easily passed and i can spawn another Rival in South Coast.
There is one crucial element, that you have to keep in mind, if you want to get harvs/tanks as a rival.
Rival is selected from the normal machines within the region. And if you go around the region, killing off all harvs/tanks (to get the most score towards region level), then do note that you don’t have any harvs/tanks left to become a rival, hence why you get hunters as rivals.
So, if you want harvs/tanks as rivals, don’t kill any of them in the region you’re working in. Since when new rival should spawn, chances are good, it will be harv or tank.
By keeping the above in mind, i have managed to spawn loads of rival tanks in my game.
Archipelago
Farmlands
Forest
South Coast
Mountains
Marshlands
North Coast
Himfjäll
Semi-related question to seasoned players (obscure topic, but maybe someone knows):
I recently decided to give old-school GZ (April 2020) another round. Ran through Alpine Unrest, got some rivals etc. Any chance to get a exp KVM59 in the vanilla game, or was it event-only? I can’t quite remember if the thing was in the regular loot pool back then…
Back in that update it was event only then added during FNIX Rising update i believe.
@Indominus-J , @Snipergirl - thanks for the advice. I’m liable to give it another shot, even if it’s futile. I already got my fave loadout, and the old version prevents online play, so no more trading. I mainly wanted to try the KVM as I already got 5* attachments for it, but the best I found up until now was a 4* variant of the gun itself…
I believe they got it from the rival page I made. The wording may not be technically correct but it works the same way.
This page can be used to get a decent overview of what rivals are and their place in the game.
Do the points get any higher for apoc? Same question with drop rates too.
Of you mean for points lost from destroying the rival then yes it gets larger, same with killing a normal apoc machine, it has around 30 more points gained per apoc machine kill compared to the FNIX but does vary a lot depending on the machine itself. For drop rates i believe the Apoc machines have the highest drop chance of EXP weapons, excluding the reaper.
Machines can turn into rivals when a certain level of damage is done in that region by the player. Not if the player get killed by a machine.
In fact it is possible!
Once I got killed in a very hard battle, a runner became a personal rival.
But as far as I remember it was the only personal rival I got in hundreds of hours.
Yeah I heard the stories, that people say to get rivals you have to let them kill you. Not saying it’s not true… I just don’t believe it. But you do have to kill a lot of machines. And imo rivals just appear because you did enough damage. Probably the algoritme counts damage to the FNIX forces in stead of kills. So that runner has taken damage and that was enough total damage to get a rival without killing it.
Just try to spawn a rival by never killing any machine. Just let yourself get killed over and over.
