In my case, what was weird is that for some reason my Rivals were ejected from Archipelago and North Coast region and concentrate in Farmlands.
But after some playtime I noticed, that they start slowly populate region with player.
And again, after todays update - Rivals are all over the place 
Notised that too, I think they have again rotated the usuall spawnpoint for the machines. For example, I had a lev 4 apoc tank rival by the relaybeacon just northeast of Ruskele(A apoctank usuallt spawned there from time to time). He moved just southwest of the airport so Ill guess that will be a good spot for apoctanks now…(edit, spelling)
Hallo Generation Zero,
Platform: PC
Description: I have played for over 800 hours and have over 45,000 killed robots and it has made me have / had max rivals on the map. Now to the bug, I have talked to a lot of people about how many rivals you can have in one zone, and everyone is sad that you can only have 8 per zone.
4 days ago I broke that rule and had 12 rivals on Farmland only, after destroying 2 because I thought it was strange behavior of the game so I took a picture when I have 10, see picture.
How it all happened was like this: I had max rivals on the whole map without reaper. For a long time I wanted a reaper on farmland but did not think about what I had for score or level so I ran around and destroyed robots only. After playing for a few hours, I checked the map and saw that I had more than 8 rivals on Farmland. thought this was strange. And it was strange, Farmland took other rivals from other zones to farmland and who had lvl 4, did not even get a message that more rivals came to the zone they were just there. When I then checked other zones it was a chaos, suddenly every other zone had less score and level even though I had several rivals there.
Steps To Reproduce:
I reinstalled the game because the game stopped working when the game started, but got the game started after reinstallation. But it did not help. still had 10 rivals on Farmland. So I had to destroy all the rivals on the map except on farmland and on himfjäl. So now I’m running a theory Test to see how many rivals I can get in a zone.Have run several theories since the game came out, on the game/ in the game play.
Images / Videos:
Host or Client:
Single player
Players in your game:
0
Specifications:
Win10 Pro, Cpu: 3.2 4 core, Memory: 16gb, Geforce 970GTX 4 GB, SSD hdd 250gb, 100/100 Fiber.
Sorry for writing so much, this is my first time and want to do it as well as possible. Hope you understand, have a nice day.
Flappy
The Rivals can wander around, and after an update are often scattered across all of your areas. There was one update that had my Rivals from Himfjäll roaming the Marshlands.
The number of Rivals in an area (confusingly) isn’t necessarily the number of Rivals actually on the map in that area. They can be (and often are) in entirely different areas. If you click on a Rival to bring up it’s profile you can see what area it is “assigned to / from” and often it’s not the area that they’re located in.
I suspect what happened is that you had Rivals that had originally been spawned in other areas roaming the Farmlands region. There’s no limit to the number of Rivals wandering around in an area, just a limit to them spawning in that area.
I hope that makes some kind of sense.
1 Like
So the 8 number of rivals in 1 zone is not true?
It is correct, however - the rivals can move sporadically around the map.
Just be sure to look at the rival profile
oki thx for your help 
I’ve merged this report with one that already covered the issue back in November, last year.
Although it seems like the matter of Rivals moving about is intended, I’m going to poke
the powers that be and see if we can get an official explanation.
//Mod
What bugs me about the rivals moving around is that they are assigned to a certain region. Why can a rival from the Northland be found in the Southcoast region? To me this doesn’t make sense since they are some sort of revenger or mini boss. This region assignment and intention of introduction seems more logical when they are found in their region.
The funny thing about the actual implementation seems that they wander into the Farmlands most of the time making this region an accumulator of rivals.
Hello everyone 
We have a ticket for tracking this issue. We have yet to get to the bottom of it, but there are speculations that this might only be an issue with “old” rivals created before a certain patch, and that newly spawned rivals shouldn’t have this issue. It has yet to be confirmed but it is a theory.
Any information you could provide to shed more light on this would be most appreciated, e.g. if you kill off the affected rivals, do you still see this issue with newly spawned/created rivals?
Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for reporting! 
Happy to tag in on this one on the Xbox side.
Currently have only 7 Rivals, and 1 Reaper in the Farmlands.
Rebuilding Himfjall this week - if they jump from the farmlands out of region across the map I’ll flag it.
Alias
1 Like
That is 100% correct.
3 Likes
4 Himfjall Rivals, 4 North Coast all spawned last night.
No shift in game through different characters
No shift in game after dash quit and restart
No shift after hard reset.
+1 on new Rivals being no issue
OK, I have a serious question: Will this happen after EVERY game update?
1 Like
Same here, nearly all of my Rivals are shuffeld all over the map. This time there’s even a north coast Hunter over at Himfjäll… 
i have a south cost rival on himjfall and a marshlands in the south how?
I have the same. Even had one from Himfjall in the forest region.
Issue with the Landfall update I guess. I went and took out the wandering ones and bought balance back to Ostertorn
Not only with the Landfall update It was like this after each of the last updates, rivals shuffled all over the map. That also includes regions having more than 8 Rivals or the odd xx-region Rival on Himfjäll… 
Would be nice if the devs could address that but I think it’s only a minor annoyance
Rivals can wonder around the map. If you destroy a rival, the region it was spawned from loses region level and points, not the region you destroy it in. This is the way it has been since the beginning of the game. All the machines can free range and cross region borders. Non rival machines can be lured across the borders and points given to the region they are destroyed in, not spawned in.
When pruning a region of too many rivals, it is best to check the rival’s profile before destroying it so you get the correct rival from the region you want to lower the rival count in. My forest region has ZERO rivals that have spawned in it but there are 5 rivals in the region. Because I am leveling up the region without rivals, I chase down and destroy it when one spawns in that region.
This is why some hosts with a lot of rivals will not let other players join the map and start randomly destroying rivals. If you are just hunting rivals for better loot then this feature of the game is not something you will notice, and no one cared until the reaper was introduced.
EDIT: How could this be a bug? You can lure machines, rivals or not from one region to another. Angaras Church/ safe house is at the edge of the boundaries of South Coast and Mountains region, machines from the Mountains Region cross over to the South Coast Region regularly, with or without an update. Get in a fire fight with rivals and they to will cross over the boundaries too because they will follow you. Only difference with rivals is the region they are from, the origin region, suffers level drop when destroyed. Machines destroyed add points to the region the player is in.
I have even had a reaper spawn in this area, I closed my map, came back 24 hours later and the reaper appeared in the arena in the Marshlands. Is it expected the reapers should also stay in the region they spawned?
Before the reaper was introduced, the rivals were only used for better loot, very few cared about where they were from and just destroyed them. Now, those of us that prune out rivals due to over population of them have to be selective of which rivals are destroyed, can’t just go after a rival because it’s in the region you are pruning. Have to analyze if a rival needs to be destroyed and what effects it will have on the region. Can’t just recklessly destroy rivals if you want to maintain a region level or reduce a region level.
Removing /fixing this FEATURE, I feel would ruin a major part of game play after all missions are done. When rivals of different regions gather in one area, they come to the aid of each other, fight a reaper and near by rivals and machines come to it’s aid. This increases the level of game playability and adds to the risk of just fighting one machine. Get in a fire fight to close to a border and machines close to the bordering region do nothing?