[2021] Hey there r/RocketLeague! We're some of the folks who make up Psyonix, the studio behind Rocket League. Ask Us Anything!

Hey, thanks for the question!

The Drops obtained from completing challenges or gaining levels in the Free track of the Rocket Pass are very similar to the Golden Item system that would appear in our events from time to time. So, the Golden Item system is somewhat built into the DNA of the Challenge system and Rocket Pass. Those systems are available year round. That is one of the reasons that repeatable XP challenges are available during the event; to help players progress through Rocket Pass and obtain those Drops. However, it's clear they are important to players and we will be bringing back Golden Gifts for Frosty Fest!

Hey! Thanks for the question, you are my first :)

A new Hoops map is something we've been long considering! As far as a new Dropshot map goes, that map was a pretty big undertaking and while we aren't completely closing the door on one, it isn't currently in our future plans

Yes.

How do you feel as developers when a new mechanic is discovered by the community? Is it sort of horrifying to see people make use of unintended glitches in some cases? (Wall chain dash) or is it something that amazes you? How do you improve gameplay in a sport with fixed physics without hurting the existing user base?

We love it when the skill ceiling is raised! It still blows us away a bit when something that changes the skill meta appears. With that in mind, we always examine these new techniques to make sure it's fair to use. With wall chain dashing, the mechanic itself is fine, but we're keeping an eye on how it's implemented. Doing it with a controller through muscle memory? Great! Doing it by binding to the mouse wheel? Not great.

Yes.

Yes

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

hello! will there be a "community made" series? e.g. goal explosions, wheels, arenas, etc.

Community-created cosmetics are something we have an interest in exploring in the future. There are a lot of talented designers within the community and we absolutely take note of players posting their beautiful concept art and renders to the subreddit.

This is something that's been on the esports team's wishlist for a very long time. Right now, though, we're making a lot of changes to our overall esports ecosystem to help streamline how the RLCS and all other leagues around it work.

Things like adding more regions and giving them their own Rocket League streams, refining the formats, adding more opportunities for teams in the Esports Shop, and upgrading our broadcasts are the pieces we're putting into place before diving deeper into expanded in-game features for esports. We need a solid foundation to build upon, and with the way our esport has been growing, the esports team feels like we're in a really solid place.

The developers at Psyonix are huge esports fans and they know how important these in-game features are for growing out the Rocket League esports fandom, but they also do have a million other things going on. Rest assured that it's on our radar and we'll continue working towards it but for now, we're focusing on perfecting all aspects of the esport itself 😊

Yes

Any update for the bug on PC when the controller stops working and you need to click the mouse?

We're going to take another look at this but for now, the culprits seem to be the Xbox Game Bar and/or Focus Assist settings in Windows 10.

Can you tell us about the public API?

We understand that the API is really important to both community developers and the players that use their creations. We're currently testing a new API endpoint with API token holders, and while plans beyond that are still TBD, please know that we're making progress.

Why am I stuck in Diamond after 2000 hours?

1,000 more and you'll taste C1 my friend.

How many people have you actually banned for smurfing & boosting? Don't have to be specific, ballpark number is fine.

Can't really get into specifics, but it is a lot, and we do it every day. :D

Hey thanks for the question. We use in game screenshots, but at a much higher resolution ( 4x desktop resolution ). We also use a combination of in-game green screen and post-editing. Green Screen was originally an internal tool but it was so useful we included it with Replay FX to empower players to make their own stellar shots.

Hey! Thanks for the question.

Detecting and combating smurfs is a difficult problem, but one we are constantly working on. We've seen other games opt for a more restrictive system to keep new accounts from interacting with certain areas of their games, and while that may work to a certain extent we don't feel that is the right system for Rocket League. Our goal is to make Rocket League as accessible as possible, so we have been putting in work to combat this issue is other ways. Forgive me for being a little vague here, but we don't want to make it easier for bad actors to circumvent our systems. But rest assured, it is an issue that we take seriously and we still have a lot of work to do in that area.

I love you <3

Thanks for playing and being a fan! I'm also trying to get better after playing for thousands of hours 😂. Good to hear that you're excited for the RLCS 2021-22 season and, honestly, our studio is stoked that we've finally kicked it all off today!

how, and from what sources, do you gather honest and critical feedback?

We tend to gather feedback from a variety of sources including social media channels, Reddit, steam, and discord to name a few.

Each platform has its own tendencies and nuances. For example, we find that Reddit, in general, tends to have more of an emphasis on the PC community. Usually, when gathering feedback, the way we weigh sources is variable and will largely depend on the quality of the feedback itself.

I'm afraid I'm not allowed to crack this egg specifically. Being UE3 Based, we still use the UE3 Material Editor to create our materials/shaders. http://waylon-art.com/LearningUnreal/UE3-11-MaterialBasics.htm

That's the plan! We've made a lot of changes to the Esports Shop and how to introduce new teams, and the idea is we're able to accommodate all the regions in the RLCS in the future. Obviously this is all dependent on a bunch of things, like internal bandwidth, but we're pushing towards that direction and we hear you loud and clear!

Great question! This was a super fun project that the esports team got to work on with so many other awesome peeps at Psyonix AND so many awesome teams/designers in the community.

Trying to create a custom decal while going back and forth with teams and then integrating them into the game was extremely hard and extremely time-consuming, thus limiting the number of teams we could realistically include in the shop. So, we went to the drawing board and came up with a brand new templatized method to create a ton of awesome decals.

Long story short, we sent over design files for the Octane, Dominus, and Fennec to the teams and gave them very specific guidelines. The goal was trying to make team "jerseys", which is why you'll see somewhat strict guidelines in terms of where the logo should be placed. We had some other small guidelines as well, like making sure the designs aren't too detailed (there are some intricate visual constraints that we have to consider, like designs getting blurry if the lines are too thin). Plus, since this is the first time we've ever done something like this, we wanted to err on the side of caution to make sure we could accomplish the super ambitious goals we had for this project (34 teams is... a lot).

Now that we've done this, our plan for future seasons is opening up the design process a bit more and giving teams more freedom to have fun with their designs. We also hear you - we want to encourage teams to look at other colors and not just stick to the conventional black/white cars every single time.

All in all, this was an awesome project and an awesome learning experience for us, and now that we've opened the floodgates here, we're super excited to continue improving this process and seeing what the teams can do in future seasons!

Hey great suggestion. Eventually there's an upper bound where you're going to have duplicates no matter what, but we'll see what we can do here in the future and keep an eye on community suggestions like these.

Thanks for the question. Social is a major focus of ours going forward. We can't share details yet, but Clubs, how to find other players, and things to do with others in your community are high on our list. But, to temper expectations, UE3 is one of our constraints right now, so we'll to see what fits short term, but expect much more in the future.

Roman Colosseum would be cool! We actually took a bit of inspiration from the Colosseum when we made Utopia.

I would love to see something medieval or something like an old timey circus/carnival - would also be a blast to work on.

Hey there! Thanks for the question.

The main reason we combine tournament skill has to do with the rewards system. Players are rewarded differently based on the skill in which they compete. We didn’t want to build in extra incentives when playing one mode over another. When we examined the data, we also found that in general the delta in 'level of play' between Doubles and Standard games wasn’t so great that it warranted separating them.

Introducing new RLCS regions is always something where we have to strike a delicate balance, because we always want to make sure when we do introduce new regions that they have enough depth in order to maintain competitiveness over the long term. So, every time we do add regions, we've looked at tons of stuff like player populations, competitive data, grassroots tournaments, and more before we make the decision to add a RLCS region.

In terms of big challenges, it's always a bit scary launching new regions. From straightforward stuff such as potential language barriers to making sure we choose the right administrators, talent, and support staff, it's a very intensive process.

Each RLCS region has its own unique challenges when managing them, and new issues and problems are bound to happen throughout the season, so we try to make sure we can help tackle those effectively as they arise.

And lastly, I, personally, think our biggest opportunity lies in making our esport a truly global sports league. Rocket League is a game that brings people together in the spirit of competition and keeping our esport growing across the globe, especially with the game going free-to-play, is huge.

Having Regional Events become LANs in the future is totally possible, although as you mentioned dependent on how the global pandemic unfolds.

Covid hit the esport hard last season, causing us to cancel all live events for the entire year, and that was super tough to deal with. One of our biggest focuses for the 2021-22 season was making sure we could stand up live events, and do so in the safest way possible.

That's why this first event in December in Sweden will not have fans. However, we know that fans are a integral part of Rocket League esports events. We recently put on an announcement livestream with some more granular details of our thinking, but the short of it is: we will bring back fans to the RLCS as soon as we feel it is safe to do so. There are a ton of logistical and health & safety concerns to consider here, so we're closely monitoring not only how other sports/esports events are doing it, but the global health situation in general.

We'll have more news to share on this at a later date, so definitely stay tuned.

Any updates on SideSwipe?

We don’t have anything to share on Sideswipe just yet, but you’ll definitely be hearing from us before the end of the year.

We 1000% want to do this, it's simply been a significant tech lift in the past. We're getting close to having something here, but unfortunately we can't say much more just yet on the when and exactly what form this will take in its first iteration.

Thanks for the question. It's a bit of a tricky problem to solve because we want to make sure casual remains a quick experience, and we don't want to create loopholes for potential abuse of the bans system. That said, we know this is an issue and we're looking for ways to address it in the future.

Thank you so much for being a fan! This is a great question 😄. We put a lot of thought towards this, but the main goal for us is introducing all of these new things in the cleanest and simplest way possible. Traditionally, NA and EU have always lived on the main channel, so we didn't want to change that for now.

In the future we may consider creating new regional handles, but we'll keep looking at how each region's growth goes and our own data to see the best way to divvy up regional channels!

We've been exploring a transition to a newer version of Unreal for quite some time, but the team was quite small until this year.

We're not ready to share timelines yet about the overall project, but we have goals to start testing next year. Obviously we'll need a lot of feedback from players (and pros!) to ensure a complete rebuild of Rocket League feels right.

Our general intent is that UE5 will replace the current Rocket League. I can't say for certain today if it will be a new application or a major patch - there are too many dependencies and details around how each platform works, content ownership, etc.

Your inventory in Rocket League will carry forward and be supported and respected in the UE5 edition.

There are people who have been at Psyonix way longer than I have, but as someone who started in the esports community running tournaments in my bedroom... the growth is absolutely insane to see. Especially with how professional the players are now, seeing the meta constantly grow and evolve each season, and just the awesome fanbase of the esport getting larger - it's awesome to see, and extremely humbling. I love this game and esport and can't wait for things to keep getting bigger and better!

<3

Thanks for the suggestions. We're interested in moving to a queue estimation timer in the future, but there's a chunk of work in online systems to be done here first before this is even an option.

For multi-queue, this is a frequent discussion internally. Unfortunately at the moment I can't give you a better answer beyond we're keeping an eye on it both from an analytics and player feedback perspective.

Combating toxicity is an industry-wide issue that we spend a lot of time focusing on. Unfortunately, we see toxic behaviors appear anywhere anonymity is at play, and Rocket League is not exempt from this. With that in mind we try to spend time creating systems for the community to notify us of bad actors, so the appropriate actions can be taken. While we're on the topic, we have some updates coming with Season 5 to make the report system clearer and accessible in more areas of the game.

RL excluded, right now I play a lot of Warzone, Back 4 Blood, and Red Dead Redemption. Offline I recently ran through Quake Remastered on Nightmare, and I did a barb run through Diablo II Resurrected. I still need to check out Deathloop, New World, and I'm excited for Halo Infinite and Battlefield 2042!

Excluding Rocket League: Valorant, Sea of Thieves, Divinity 2, Final Fantasy XIV, Minecraft, Back 4 Blood, Forza Horizon, Stardew Valley. Just finished Deathloop.

It’s definitely something we are interested in exploring in the future, but Free Play was intended to be an offline mode that allows a single player to train or ‘stay warm’ in between matches. In order to make that system work online, there are significant changes that would need to be made around the user interface and additional server infrastructure. There are also things like handling ball resetting or the newly implemented “Freeplay Ball Control” features that require some creative solutions to make them function correctly with multiple players.

Lately, I have been playing a TON of Diablo 2 Resurrected..

Diablo 2 is far and away the most played game of my entire life, so I was stupidly excited when this was announced/released.

Other than that, I've been playing Far Cry 6.

New World is super fun right now. Aside from that, I've been working through Disco Elysium. I just beat the Ghost of Tsushima expansion recently, and I've promised myself that I'll complete Deathloop sometime soon :)

Rocket League excluded. I play a ton of Destiny 2 these days. Also really enjoy New World, Splitgate, Back 4 Blood, GTA V, Pokemon Go, Assassin's Creed - Valhalla.

Really stoked to jump into Battlefield 2042/Portal soon!

While we do receive negative feedback, there are many players in the community who express their passion for the game by offering constructive, actionable feedback.

I understand that toxicity in-game can be a detriment to some players. A regular topic of conversation for us is the mitigation of in-game toxicity to improve the overall gameplay experience

Ahoy! Thanks for the question.

Maps take a lot of time and resources to make! There are multiple factors that go into map creation than just coming up with a cool idea and making it.

Every new map starts with a concept pass, which alone, takes a bit of time, and from there the concept art goes through an approval process - all of that happens before we even start arting out a new map. We spend time balancing gameplay aspects, ensuring visual quality levels, adding features like invistek, optimization passes to ensure the map runs well, etc.

We do see all the awesome map ideas and fan art people post about and take those all into consideration!

For technical reasons removing DX9 was necessary to improve stability and performance with newer hardware. DX9 held us back from being able to do optimizations and make new content consistent with what we can do on consoles. There is more widespread support for DX11 and the render pipeline is closer to how it works on consoles so the bug fixing process is easier.

No current plans to change Rumble as of now. That said, I'd love to hear what change(s) you (and the rest of the community) would like to see with that mode.

Oh no! One day they will understand, just give them time..

We have a wide range of skill levels at the office, but I think Stormsnacks (aka Jason) is our best player..

I personally didn't work on UT2004, but my brother, Ben, who also works at Psyonix, worked along side Dave Hagewood on Onslaught for UT2004.

Did you play any UT2004 mods back in the day?

A jungle map would be awesome! Community map ideas don't go unnoticed - definitely something we will take into consideration down the road.

Thanks!

We totally get why people liked the surprise element of random Pro Tier Rewards. We had to remove them previously because they're purchasable and we no longer do randomized purchases.

We want to take a broader look at how Rocket Pass content unlocks work. I can't say how soon this will happen, but we will definitely consider the interest in surprise rewards heavily when we do that

This is an interesting suggestion. The general thinking is that having a fairly regular schedule is important so that players can plan ahead accordingly. Consistency and simplicity is key when trying to get your team online to win these tourneys. Adding rotation to the mode without changing the time slot would remove some of that simplicity, but is worth consideration as it would add a little more flexibility for players like yourself.

Addressed this in this comment! https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/q8qlbd/hey_there_rrocketleague_were_some_of_the_folks/hgrmugz/

I think technically it's Jason or Zeke on our video team... but since Dirkened, Conebone and I are the reigning Psyonix Champions. I'm going to say us ;)

I personally enjoy the map making process the most, but lately I've had a blast making wheels.

Being an EDM head, Neon Fields was my favorite to optimize.

Why have you not fixed

this?

Well, now that you asked, we have to delay the fix by another six months.

The importance of field markings is something that has become more and more apparent to us over the years. It is something we review closely any time we are adding new arenas into the game. That said, we also think that the field variety is an important part of Rocket League’s identity. So long story short, there are no current plans to completely standardize field markings, but we want to ensure that any arenas that make their way into the game have the elements that players use to identify critical gameplay mechanics, like boost pickups.

This is something we've talked about on the esports team, but for now we're keeping it to RLCS only. The focus is continuing to improve the Esports Shop and eventually we'll be in a better spot to potentially expand it to other leagues!

We are definitely looking at ways to help players navigate their inventory for the items they want more easily. We hear you on how cumbersome it can be to find the exact item that you are looking for. It’s on our radar and we have plans to add features to help with this in the future.

I'm not super deep into it, but so far so good!

Brother and I play co-op games more than any other kinda game and Far Cry has easily been one of the best in that department (other than Primal - still a solid game though)

Ubisoft does co-op right! Wish more games had it.

Anyone in the office a big Dark Souls fan? If so, what is their favourite boss of the games?!

Artorias. 100%.