As you may have noticed previously, I'm quite the Rocket League enjoyer.
I've tried in the past to write up comprehensive preview or review posts about RLCS events but always find myself getting bogged down in the details of searching for stats to back up or disprove my ideas so they never get posted.
This is a shame imo so I'm going to do this one fairly off-the-cuff, focusing on predictions rather than describing the state of play (though I'll still contextualise where relevant).
My Prediction Format
I like to use a range prediction rather than doing power rankings - just saying "I think this team is 7th best" doesn't really give much flavour imo, because there are teams with low floors that are absolutely capable of winning an event (Spacestation???) that you always have to mark down because of those weaker on-the-day performances. This range prediction gives flexibility.
The rest of this post is largely based on this chart. (I'll try to come up with a more screen-reader friendly format for next time, this is just the image I used to talk ball with friends and this post is purposefully low effort).
One caveat for this chart is that I try to keep the number of "possible positions" down to less than 1/3 of the possible positions (9th-11th is one position) just to avoid spamming. That means I've kind of underestimated some of the upper and lower ranges vs what I actually believe.
EU Seems Strong
The big story of this season has been "can anyone beat KC" and the answer within Europe has been "yeah lol". They've lost to NiP, Geekay, and Dignitas in EU regional events this season, but unfortunately of those 3 only Dignitas qualified for this event. They've looked incredible against the rest of EU but in the last online open got 4-0'd in a classic "KC win it all" top 8 bracket. KC went 12-3 in that bracket, somehow only tied for their 3rd best event this season (and they lost the other 2).
So yeah KC and Dig can win it but I don't have massive confidence in Dig on LAN yet. Vitality are pretty much always a threat if they can get it together for a day so I always put the top of their range at 1st. Gentlemates are the only outlier here as the clearly weakest team in terms of past results, but to be honest they've been popping off lately and took 2 of KC's 3 lost games so who knows. EU's just strong right now.
NA Looks Alright
NRG are gonna NRG - they always look a little flat when the stakes are low, and they've been fully qualified for everything for a while now so I don't take recent results too seriously. Losing to Ultimates was basically fate so it doesn't count - they're the only team outside EU I give a reasonable chance of winning the Major at this point.
SSG are the team to watch though - a very young squad (15, 17, and 19 💀) with an exciting intuitive playstyle, they initially formed from the ashes of frosty getting kicked from NRG before they replaced him with kofyr in the 2nd half of the season and have looked exceptional. While I don't expect them to win it, there's no team I'd be more excited to see make the run. They play Rocket League like I think I'm gonna play Rocket League when I boot it up.
Ultimates look good but I don't have the faith in them, and Gen.G have been a delightful surprise since picking up jstn but they ain't winning a major.
Falcons Kinda Fell Off
It's hard to say a squad with 5/6 regional wins this year and a history of 2nd places is looking weak, but this seems the closest we're gonna get. After 5th in Major 1 I just don't have the faith that Falcons can win a non-Saudi international anymore, and looking closer at their recent results they're getting pushed to deciding games rather often by teams I'd expect them to be stomping. This could be MENA depth in action, but two of those teams are basically 2nd-rate EU import teams so idk.
Twisted Minds are one of those import teams, with their only MENA player being a kid who was so racist it destroyed the most well-liked org in the scene, so idk fuck those guys. They were shit at Major 1 and they'll be shit here.
A small note on SAM here as well - Furia look similar to Falcons with 5/6 opens, losing one due to a tech issue, but SAM just isn't as strong so I can't give them too much credit on that basis. I consider both teams equally strong without international comparisons, with Secret a classic filler team.
Nobody Else Makes Top 8 IMO
It's a hard time to be from a Minor region in Rocket League. If it's not dynastic dominance from Falcons and Furia, it's EU/NA import players booting you aside for a chance to go out 12-16th, or you're OCE and thus exist entirely to score one (1) upset then get eliminated in Swiss.
The smallest two regions (Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia-Pacific) have 1 local representative among their 6 players - sphinx is a really exciting and talented player for sure, but that just means he gets brought in on the exploitation rather than getting stuck watching import players take his money. sphinx's team got APAC's best ever result at the last international (9-11th) and I could not care less. I suppose it's impressive that a couple of washed Major region pensioners were able to win 2 matches, but they were against two OCE squads who couldn't even manage their one (1) Psyonix mandated upset.
For real, fuck these colonisers. I will never give them the grace of predicting them above last place.
I'd even go so far as to say that it's possible - with a terrible Swiss draw - that we have only EU/NA teams in top 8 this time.
I Don't Think That Means It'll Be Boring
I might sound kind of down on Rocket League Esports at the moment but I'm more down on the organisational structures - the players are still doing great stuff and pushing the meta, and more and more we're seeing teams prove that with exposure to greatness they can learn from it - I just need Psyonix to impose real protections on minor region players, or we're going to lose those whole ecosystems.
The team that wins this Major will be very, very good at Rocket League.
Myself and some workmates are big enough fans of the game to go see it live - it's a great time, I get to hang out with a group of people who live hundreds of miles away and take part in what is undeniably a fantastic crowd experience.
It was going to be my third RLCS LAN (after the RLCS S5 Finals in 2018 and the London Major in 2024) and my second with this group, but unfortunately trains in the UK are absolute dogshit these days.
This is the second cross-border trip I've planned in the last year that has been killed within 50 miles of my house. Hell, last time I didn't even make it to the train station a 5 minute walk from home before my (only possible) train got cancelled.
This one was weird though - I was checking trains all morning, everything was fine - I had a 30 minute transfer in Edinburgh which seemed reasonable, got a bite of lunch and a coffee and sat down to learn my train to Birmingham was 45 minutes late. This is annoying but workable, so I eat my meal-deal and watch some of the RLCS matches happening, get myself in the mood for the 6 hours of travel ahead of me.
Then I get a notification telling me that part of my trip has been cancelled - part of it? It's a train journey, how does part of it get cancelled? Turns out they decided to skip a handful of stops (to make up time? idk it'd let them skip Birmingham entirely) including the one I needed. I could harp on for ages about the logistics here (and I did in a previous draft, before even I was rolling my eyes at myself) but in the end I decided not to go, and headed back home for a long weekend watching the Rocket League.
It might seem like a rash, tantrum-y decision but I had one really good reason - my stop was the fucking Airport station. If they're cancelling the airport station on a long-distance train, something's fucked and that 45 minutes is just the beginning of the delays. Add to that a generally knocked confidence in the trains today, and I just didn't fancy being stranded somewhere in the west midlands without dinner.
I was vindicated in the end, the train is running 90 minutes behind, and I'd be getting into Birmingham way too late to get any kind of food or drink where I'd be staying.
This is kind of a strange post for me - really just a rant about a bad public transport experience, the most common rant imaginable. But there was a time not that long ago that this degree of failure felt anomolous, worthy of comment. I used to rely heavily on these London-Scotland trains multiple times a year, and I had only 1 event remotely comparable to this - and that one still got me where I was going within a couple hours of scheduled, I just had to stand for the 5 hour trip.
God I miss being young enough that standing for 5 hours was a minor compromise.
It feels like trains have purposely been made worse to justify shitting on them as a mode of transport. They feel actively hampered by their status as the obvious way to go from city-to-city, this politically convenient demonstration of the failure of public services (while being run by private companies, mind you) that everyone agrees are dogshit and need optimised.
I still believe trains are the best way to travel any significant distance within the UK, but for my next trip beyond York I'm going to have to consider flying as a much more serious option than I currently do - and I hate flying.
Oh, and insult to injury - the 45 minute train back home cost £11.20??? Daylight robbery I tell you.
Oh, it's been a while hasn't it. Not really weekly any more! That's fine, rather than try to fill in the 6-week gap, here's what I've done in the week of the 11th of November.
We can pretend that I saw this whole thing coming before I went to the roof, just between us. Really disappointed I didn't get the bump at the end, but the threat was enough.
Flip Resets have been getting a bit more automatic for me lately, but this is easily the cleanest I've scored. Perfectly over the defender and under the bar - it actually contributed to the shot.
One thing about playing against the same people every day is that they sort of know what you can do - playing against random opponents, they really struggle against my weirder habits, like this wavedash dribble.
I'm the only player on the pitch not involved in this one - a crossbar, a pinch, a whiff, a save off the post, a team-dunk, and a panicked owngoal - poetry.
Onto week 2! This covers 2024-09-30 to 2024-10-06. Been a strange week of RL for me - not really been feeling like my play is all that controlled, but there have definitely been moments of brilliance. Part of that is that I didn't play much ranked until the weekend, I think.
Just ignore that I whiffed the first touch on this one. Genuinely confused how they both kept the ball out of the net, they were both starting well in front of the line - fair play.
I've been practicing recovering from a flip with good aerial positioning so I can follow the ball more, and this is kind of the fruit of that labour. Angry comms from the orange team on this one, but I was honestly hoping for something better than a pass off the backboard.
I always love these sorts of plays when I see pros do them, and this seemed a perfect use for it when my teammate was positioned for the bump. I didn't really want the last aerial touch - it made the ball too close to the defender - but it worked out nicely in the end. Just a play built on taking my time.
Another of those 2v3 games, with the best player in the lobby as my teammate on the 2. Before this game, we agreed it'd be full ball-chase - don't play careful, just chase the ball down and win challenges. It works well when both players are on form, and this play (especially the tiny half-volley to beat the 2nd defender) exemplifies that.
What I love about my lunchtime Rocket League games at work is that I have half a dozen players with whom I play differently, and we mix up the teams every game. Over time we learn how to play off of one another really well, and you get moments like this that can only work when you really understand your teammate and your opponents - it's a very stupid play, but the correct one for the situation.
Ever since putting together my Recent Rocket League Clips page, I've felt there was a better way to do it. I like that it's kind of a "Now" page, not notifying RSS feeds and whatnot when it updates, but it lacks any commentary, and isn't a format well-suited to that.
I'm going to try this new format - a round-up of my favourite clips from the week (or so). This first one will be for last week (2024-09-23 - 2024-09-29) while I find my feet with it. I don't expect this to have particularly broad appeal, but it's the sort of regular post I always appreciate in my feed.
It's a real shame this clip broke on the goal explosion. I play an extremely agressive game, double so in these regular games with colleagues. I really wanted to be on the backboard for some kind of silly pass, but this was good enough.
A general rule I follow is that I want to offer my teammates the option to pass forward, but if they choose to dribble I will facilitate. Bumps are one of my favourite parts of Rocket League, and that this one put me in perfect position to steal the goal? Even better.
Pretty much everything in Rocket League boils down to getting a better outcome from a situation than your opponents, and this dribble exemplifies that. I lose control of the bounce almost immediately, but by recognising I'd done enough to beat the first defender, I could focus on getting one good touch past the last person. It looks flashier than it actually is, with the slight bump while upside-down - I wonder in hindsight if that gave me a flip-reset.
There's no getting around it - I spin too much. I enjoy doing it, and even though it means I'll probably never be World Champion, I don't plan to stop any time soon. This ball is probably a very simple tap-in once the defender whiffs near the ceiling, but I can't help myself - this is one of the rare occasions where it didn't ruin my aim, bamboozling the returning defender into thinking it was wide of goal.
I get a lot of joy making these vertical reads, but this was a big stretch on 36 Boost - I honestly thought it would be more of a pass than a shot when I couldn't get over it, but the light contact let it sneak under the bar. Just kinda pretty.
Part of playing a very aggressive, forward position is that if I don't swivel the camera, I tend to cut off my teammates. Worked out this time, we both got a touch, and it went in at around 140kph.
This one is 100% about when not to rotate back to 3rd position - common wisdom is to go to the back of the play when you stop attacking the ball, but in this case I see that both my teammates are in goal, and the ball is crossing the field - I can grab the opposite mid-boost and re-evaluate the play. In this case, it works beautifully and we catch their last man napping (the same one I got the ball past at the very start of the clip).
Full context: like most of these clips, this is from a casual private lobby played with friends from work. At 3-0 up, less than 10s left, shenanigans are the name of the game. Even so this one's a bit brutal - a full stretch spinning tap-in from near the ceiling, cutting off one of the opposing players going for the same shot (you can hear him jump just behind me, you can't here him telling me to fuck off after I hit it).
I recently put together a little gallery page for Rocket League clips, and figuring out how as a completely incapable web-dev person was enjoyable! I'm writing it up here to share the hacks and probably so I can laugh at it later.
The page in question is here: Some Recent Rocket League Clips(be warned, it's a bunch of iframes holding a 720p video each, it's not trivial to render.)
I got most of the solutions to my problem through googling, but the solution can be broken up into the 3 usual webdev parts - HTML, CSS, JS. I could have skipped the JS part easily if I was happy with updating this page being a pain, but I'm not! So the bulk of this code is JS, I'm afraid.
We make a div that we're going to style later with CSS, and put a list in it with a specific ID. Through-out this I'm calling things gyg-*, this is just because the Rocket League clip provider I'm using is called GYG.
CSS
The CSS is also pretty simple, but I absolutely had to steal it from elsewhere.
gyg-embed and gyg-iframe just steal the style portion of the embed HTML provided by this iframe helper website. All this is doing is setting some positional parameters, and I didn't see the point in messing with them.
gyg-gallery ul and gyg-gallery li are stolen from the fantastic add-ons put together by Robert Birming for his Bear theme Bearming, and tweaked to manage the gallery layout I want. This really does a ton of work in very little code, and cleans things up beautifully.
Similar to how I would add his gallery to my blog, I added this CSS to my Theme at https://bearblog.dev/[account]/dashboard/styles/ exactly as written in the codeblock.
Originally I was going to implement this the quick and dirty way by just hand-making every single <li> each time, or god forbid do it in Excel, but then I saw this post by Ruby that got my terrible little script-kiddy brain ticking over.
All of this is just because I'd like to be able to copy-paste in a list of new ids with minimum faff. It's a pretty quick bit of formatting to get the ids out manually, bash them about in notepad++, then paste them in. I'd like to smooth this process out a bit more in future though.
We then grab our empty gyg-list from the page so we can tinker with it.
We loop over the list of GYG ids, paste each together with the GYG embed link, and get started on the ugly stuff. We make an iframe (basically a window into another webpage), and set some attributes:
"src" - the url we want, the src_string we made earlier.
"class" - this corresponds to the CSS styling we made, so we want "gyg-iframe"
A bunch of other attributes also taken directly from the embed link I nabbed - I have no idea how much of this is necessary, I haven't tested it.
This gives us the iframe object, but if we just jammed it in the list it'd be... horrific. Lovecraftian in how it'd encompass the page. We want to trap it in a div - as far as I understand, in HTML that's the crutch that lets you do cool things easily. It just means "a contained bit of the page", and the styling on this div will help set bounds on our iframes.
We make our div with document.createElement("div"), set it as a "gyg-embed" class, put the iframe in it, then use target_ul.appendChild(makediv) to add it to the end of the list we're displaying on the page.
The CSS takes care of the rest and we're... Kind of done?
The Finished Item
You can just go over to the page and look, but in case it breaks here's what it's supposed to look like:
I'm pretty satisfied with the look of it, so won't be looking to improve that at all in the future.
Improvements
There are a few things that are obvious stumbling blocks here:
The JS is all embedded in the page - it'd be nice to host it elsewhere, just maintain the one file if I use this multiple times. I'm fairly sure I can set this up, but it's another thing to learn so I'm not there yet.
Getting ids together is still a manual process - I've asked the GYG people if I can get an export of all my clip IDs, but it doesn't seem like that'll happen. I might have to do some more script-kiddy shit to get them, but it'd be super tidy as an end-product - I could also then host that set of ids externally (like the script itself) and maintain the list as I make clips, without human intervention.
I should definitely do some testing to see how much I actually need those attributes in the JS.
It looks pretty bad on mobile - I think I'd be able to do some reactive formatting? To have a single column below some screen-width or something. Another thing that's probably simple, but I don't know it!
I know it's cringe to enjoy things with sincerity, but the pacing and arrangement of these clips works extremely well, made me genuinely emotional having so many classic early RLCS goals where I knew the exact movements ahead of time, against the utterly disgusting mechanics of the modern game.
Garrett's fake while Fireburner gets the demo, I did a little hop in my seat right as Garrett does the double jump - it was just a move to make sure the ball stayed clear of his teammate, but it's a genuinely iconic button-press embedded in my psyche.
Really recommend the whole thing even if you're not wild about RL, it's a great video.
Rocket League started a new season recently, and Psyonix included an update to the ranking system that, put simply, attempted to redress the ranking drift that had happened over the last few years leading to inflated and deflated ranks in 2v2 and 1v1 respectively. It's well explained by NorthstarUK here.
It's been a controversial move, but I put together some plots from the published data from Psyonix around rank distributions in different modes (reddit post here), and they pretty clearly show how imbalanced the ranks have got over, with D1+ ballooning in 2v2 recently, and collapsing in 1v1.
It feels terrible to suddenly be 2 ranks lower than you were last season when you feel like you're playing well, and Pysonix clearly needed to communicate this better (it was only mentioned after the fact in patch notes), but I hope this shows how necessary something like this was.
