Rocket League

If anyone is interested they are showing the Midwest championships on NBC sports right now for those in the US. These guys are even better than @Otagan

I’m first to admit that I’m not actually that good at the game, especially compared to the kind of unbelievable forethought that the highest echelons are capable of. I get automatched against them a lot and get beat into the dirt.

Theoretically yes, but I personally would hate to even think about trying to play it like that.

You can certainly use keyboard and mouse, but as a staunch kb&m player myself in most everything you really will want to eventually invest in a gamepad for this. And a good gamepad as well. I was previously using an inexpensive Logitech F15(?) pad, and while it was decent I recently switched to a true MS XBox 360 (wired/Windows) gamepad and my gameplay markedly improved - which granted isn’t saying much.

Also - don’t be quick to go mucking around with camera settings. Turns out what I thought felt right was seriously hampering my ability. I had the camera set too far back and elevated above the car so that I was having trouble judging the distance between myself and the ball. I reset back to defaults and while it initially still felt wrong, but ability to actually make contact with the ball when and where I expected to increased significantly.

And woe be to us of Otagan is complaining about people above his skill level. I’m quite happy down in my baby league section.

Thanks! I’ve got an XBox 360 controller on the way.

Any of you guys want to play some rocket league tonight? @mono @lordkosc @Daagar @triggercut @Otagan @mrcjhicks @Jack_Howitzer and anybody else who wants to join?

Maybe around 9PM EST?

I could be interrupted for an extended time at any point in the next three hours, so I can’t firmly commit.

Anyone who wants feel free to drop in. You can just spectate to see how bad we are if you want.

I’ll create a private server: QT3 p/word: sarahpalin

Wish I could, working the weekend.

I can jump on for a bit. Can’t mic up as the gf is here beside me and wants to play this new hellblade thing together (we don’t see each other a lot during the week due to work schedules) but I can play a bit of RL in the background :)

We’ll sort out another time, gone to bed now

Sorry, my preexisting “will need to bail at any time” condition hit about 30 seconds before you needed to change server settings.

Sorry I missed it. On summer weekends 9-10:30PM = struggling to get my kids to go to sleep time. :)

Any of you guys available tomorrow night?

Tomorrow night has a chance for me.

I play a bit in the Rocket League, I have a Veteran rank. I get different skins, hats, but I have never won any crate or key to crate (Of course I only play in multiplayer mode). What am I doing wrong? Can you help me? I buy Rocket League Crates Xbox, if you need Crates you can buy crates here: https://odealo.com/games/rocket-league/xbox

I got this a week ago and it’s a lot of fun, but wow does the matchmaking suck. I keep getting put into games with players who are so far out of my league that there’s no use even trying. Am I supposed to just keep quitting out of games until I find one that’s balanced? That’s what everyone else seems to be doing.

Part of the trouble with casual matchmaking is that so many people have played the game for so long by this point that there aren’t consistently enough people A) in low skill brackets B) with low enough ping to be playable C) searching for games at the exact same time you are. Since that’s the case, it doesn’t have much choice but to dump you into the best game it can find, and that’s all too often going to be a game chock full of people in the middle skill brackets. Fortunately, casual doesn’t penalize you for leaving a game early, but it does still have an annoying propensity to throw you straight back into the server you just left which kinda defeats the whole point.

Also, rank is by no means a reliable indicator of skill, as many smurfs will run rookie or semi-pro accounts despite having hundreds of hours in the game on another account or platform (or someone will just be kinda bad at the game with hundreds of hours, getting promoted into the higher ranks by sheer dogged persistence). Ranked tends to have a better matchmaker from what I’ve heard but I just play Rumble most of the time and so I don’t mess with anything formally competitive.

So, I know I just wrote a whole lot that doesn’t really fix anything, but it’s just a quirk of the matchmaking functionality when the game isn’t on sale (with an associated influx of newbies all at the same time) or a free weekend (bigger influx, only temporary).

Honestly, playing on a server with people better than you is the best path to getting better - even if you’re on the less capable team. If I get a good team, I can top the scoreboard. On a lesser team, I’m one of the worst players - I certainly can’t carry a team. This doesn’t say much for my ability, granted, but I’m a much better player than I was simply because of being on a few ‘good’ teams.

That said, I’m not talking about crazy teams that can do all sorts of dribbling/aerial shots. That’s just silliness, and I’m too horrible to ever get matched up with them.

Okay, that makes sense. Hopefully I can get good enough to at least compete in most matches.

The best piece of advice I can give when starting out is to spend a few hours (not in one sitting) going through all the various practice courses that come with the game. The aerial ones in particular give you plenty of opportunity to practice some relatively tame aerial shots, and those will give you a better understanding of car maneuverability than damn near anything else you might try. The payoff for getting even slightly decent at those scenarios is massive.

There’s user-created stuff out there too, but those tend to be obscenely difficult and should only be used much, much later unless you really want to try something different.