[polyvisual]

I've been playing different styles and genres of video games ever since Wolfenstein 3D and I consider myself pretty adept at playing them.

However, Rocket League is one game that I just can't master. I've tried, really really tried, but I just can't play it with any amount of skill.

It's a shame, as it looks really fun and I hear my son and his mates having a ball when they play.

[richrichardsson]

I basically suck at Rocket League (can't get beyond Plat.III in any mode), but I still enjoy playing it daily.

Turn off ALL chat except tactical team quick chats, otherwise it's a toxic quagmire.

[splwjs]

I think online matchmaking has absolutely destroyed people's ability to feel like they're good at any game.

Like you'll never be a big fish in a small pond. If you played as much as you currently do but could only play with people local to you, you'd be the best person you know at this thing. And that's a really good feeling. But you'll never get that feeling, because you should really be grinding past whatever plat 3 is in order to not suck.

[ThatPlayer]

Conversely you'll never be a small fish in a big pond. If you could only play with people local to you and they all played much more than you, you'd be the worse person you know at this thing. And that's a really bad feeling. That gets people to quit games.

The big fish eat all the small fish until the big fish are the only ones left.

[Retr0id]

> can't get beyond Plat.III

I have a triple-digit-hour play time and I could barely get out of Bronze. I can't really explain why, but my brain just doesn't mesh with it, skill-wise. It's still a lot of fun though (otherwise I wouldn't have spent so long playing it!). In fact, being so bad at it somehow made it more enjoyable - it's not often I allow myself to be bad at something.

I'd rank myself as "unusually good" at Mario Kart, which is obviously a very different game, but it surprises me that I have such a wide skill gap between the two games.

[aliasxneo]

I'm decent at Rocket League and sit between Plat III and Diamond I. It seems our metrics are slightly different :) I've found these ranks are the natural breaking point between what I could classify as "sweaty" players and "casuals." I've never been interested in going much further.

[mh-]

It's very weird seeing RL discussed on HN - worlds are colliding! But, yes, this is good advice. Also consider playing 1v1. I'm Diamond I-II there. It's a lot of fun, and probably the only mode where turning off the chat doesn't put you at a disadvantage.

[amenhotep]

What a save! What a save! What a save! What a save!

[bigstrat2003]

Calculated.

[vonunov]

Centering! Take the shot! Take the shot! Take the shot! Wow! Wow! Nice shot! Thanks!

  vote to forfeit 1/2

[harryvederci]

Thanks! Thanks! Thanks! Thanks! Thanks!

This is rocket league!

[bil7]

plat 3 is really not that bad - how many hours have you played the game for?

[richrichardsson]

Too many! Not actually sure, but I started around 2019 and probably play on average 1 hour a day.

[walr000s]

I heard Comm, a pro, once say that he wished he had his 14 year old fingers back...think he was 17 at a time. To me, a 40 year old playing with KBM, I feel like I just can't bend my brain around all of the 3d possibilities. I just don't have any intuition for rolling my car while it accelerates towards the front...and then you add in the complexity of the camera and, yeah, I suck.

[vonunov]

Part of the problem is rolling vs. yawing. Most players have something along the lines of LB mapped to powerslide + air roll. So when flying, they have to think (actively or otherwise) about when to roll vs. when to release LB so that the left stick X axis will yaw instead. This is, in my experience, very difficult to actually do.

There's a control config I tried and greatly enjoyed that addresses this. I want to get back into it but I haven't yet felt like dealing with the adjustment period again. This works best if you have a controller with mappable paddles.

  Left stick X: Ground steer and air steer (yaw)  
  Left stick Y: Pitch
  Right stick X: Air roll
  Right stick Y: Ground throttle

And then jump/boost/powerslide go on triggers/bumpers/paddles as desired.

Being able to simultaneously yaw and roll feels quite nice once you get used to it and allows for some surprisingly intuitive recoveries, wall jumps, etc. "Tornado spinning" is now as simple as pushing the sticks in opposite directions. Other interesting results can be had from the various other combinations of stick directions.

This does require you to no longer use the button pad for anything, so if you use ballcam toggle while playing, or need to peek at the scoreboard a lot, or need a thumb free for real-time quickchats, or whatever, then I hope you have a lot of extra paddles

[walr000s]

Another reason to envy controller players. I just can't get used to it.

[mh-]

I've only just started trying to do aerials, really, and I find myself getting vertigo from it haha. I'm also 40. It's so disorienting. None of the camera settings feel "right".

[vonunov]

It takes some playing around with and is highly subjective. Best method I found was to just try camera configs used by pros or recommended by others and see what feels good. My current:

  Shake: off
  FOV: 110
  Distance: 280
  Height: 110
  Angle: -3.00
  Stiffness: 0.75
  

The rest aren't relevant for me because swivel speed is about looking with the right stick and transition speed is about switching to/from ball cam, and I leave ball cam on.

Of these, I believe the most important (by which I mean tangibly relevant to control quality/feel) are distance, stiffness, and, to some degree, height+angle. Shake and FOV are also important, but those are the only good values for those settings.

I used to play with max distance because it felt better for visibility, but I found some people saying 270/280 works much better for them for precise ball control and accurate strikes, and that does seem to be the case. Stiffness is the other setting that will make the most difference in feel: Lower values let the camera's distance from your car rubber-band further in relation to your speed. It might seem as if maxing this out would be ideal, because why wouldn't you want the camera to follow your movement as closely as possible, and why would you want the camera to lag behind you when you go faster and disorient you when you're trying to aerial? But I'm not so sure. I've tried stiffness at 1 (max) and I don't remember why, but apparently it didn't work for me, because I lowered it to 0.75, which I guess I found acceptable enough not to have changed it. I've just come across some people saying a stiffness of around 0.35 is counterintuitively great as it turns out that moving the car without instantly moving the camera helps a lot with car control for some reason, so I'm about to test run that value myself and see about it.

[mh-]

I used to run max distance as well, and I think it was better for ground outplays etc. But I, too, switched to 280.

My current settings:

  Shake: off
  FOV: 110
  Distance: 280
  Height: 110
  Angle: -4.00
  Stiffness: 0.40
  Transition: 1.30

I also used to run with stiffness maxed out and I think it contributed to the motion sickness feeling. There's definitely a tradeoff in all of these values.

[walr000s]

I highly recommend turning ball cam off once you get close to the ball.

[molli]

Maybe you will be good at Hacker League:)