This post is two months old, but I've been stumbling through Piefed recently, trying to scratch that Reddit itch. Pretty new to the "platform."

I bought Rocket League in 2016, before Epic owned it and all the cosmetics were unlockable. It was a weird little game that was starting to gain some traction, and I caught it while it was starting to gain hype (I think). From what I remember, the community was significantly less toxic and folks didn't take the game quite as seriously. That may be rose-colored glasses though.

It started off as an awesome couch game with my friends. It was really fun getting a little drunk, talking shit about a game we all sucked at together, either against each other or online strangers.
I got waaay too into it for a year or two, before I had a good grasp on how my brain worked. It got to the point where I was either way better than my friends (so I wasn't as fun to play with), or way worse (so I wasn't as fun to play with).
I realized that I wasn't having fun anymore, and it became a thing I "had to" do. So I quit playing for quite a while.

For like eight years, if my friends and I were all together, we'd play for a night. I would get frustrated from time to time because I "used to be so much better" or whatever.

When I hit like 35, I hadn't played in a while. A friend of mine got back into it, and we played a couple games. All that dumb stress was gone, and it was just fun to bump cars into a ball and be kind of bad at it again. We played off and on (maybe once a month), but rarely against anyone but each other.

Part of that stuff was just being in my thirties. I was a calmer dude, and didn't feel like my identity would be erased if I wasn't good at a soccer-car game, or whatever else. It was just fun to drive a car into a ball.

Now, I'm 38 and way into it again. But it's much different. My friends and I have our own ELO board, and we play 1v1s and 2v2s for a trophy every season. It's all goofs. It's an excuse to hang out and talk a little shit again. It's 100% fun, no stress, and no real stakes. A lot of times, we'll hop online vs strangers. We care juuuust enough for some healthy competition and we all like to improve, but it doesn't matter that much. I'll play ranked with a friend ranked significantly lower than me (and watch my rating tank), and it doesn't matter to me anymore. It's just fun.

These days I play a LOT. But like 80% of it is spent in various training modes. I treat it like a skate park. It's fun to grind over and over to see if I can nail a perfect wall-to-air-dribble or whatever, and I send clips to my friends. I'll usually sit and watch TV while I drive my stupid little car around and whatnot.
I watch a lot of videos and love watching tournaments. It's an awesome game, and I adore it the same way I love skate culture but have never been able to kickflip.

It's kind of cool to be 38 and realize my brain isn't capable of learning anything well enough to be the best at it. It takes the stress and frustration away from a lot of the things I tend to hyper-fixate on. I have a much healthier relationship with competitive games because of that. It's neat!

(My highest ranking right now is gold. Heh.)

Oh also, I've always been a PC player. I have it on PS5, but I rarely play on there. Mostly when folks come over and we want a bigger TV. I like having a square deadzone on my controller and I can't set that up without Steam.

Sounds more like Saturday afternoons when all the kids who can't drive or don't have easy access to money and drugs yet, go online and call people nig-something-or-other and say ez after ever win.

Casual, in fact I’ve barely played in years. I actually bought it on disc for Xbox One before it was free. I’ve never been very good, though.

Would be fun if we could arrange some tournaments just for fun, or something similar.

No problem, and yeah, unfortunately, there isn't much going on in communities that focus on specific games.

Thanks for posting! Happy to see some activity here, even if it's only release notes! 🥰

The choose respawn feature looks pretty neat.

How does it work if two players choose at the same time one respawn point ? A bit of an edge case but I wonder how it's handled by the game.

I hope they improved the "authentication" time too. It's a bit frustrating to join a casual game mid-game and see the play while waiting for the authentication to finish.

I think I read this won't affect Linux proton uses if I recall as there is a Linux client and it does not use kernel level access to work.

Truly the nail in the coffin for me 🙁

This could get interesting lol. I wonder why it wasn't enabled before today?

Hell no. The game became hot garbage.

I got ENN AHH GEE!!!

Didn't get a chance to make a guess, but that Karmine-Falcons series was a banger. I don't think NRG cans stop Falcons but we'll see!

I don't think they can do it tbh. This game has mechanics that rely on weird little glitches in the game that probably can't be recreated in UE5.

If they release UE5, the entire professional scene will change, and Im sure thats the only thing really keeping this game alive since its one of the better esports.

4v4 is interesting. But they really just need to announce that they are working on UE5 RL 2 even if they ship it 2/3 years.

You said it! 📣

I'm so glad that after months of rampant cheating ruining the game and content creators calling them out for doing nothing about it, they're finally planning to do something about it at some point vaguely soonish. The only thing they've actually done is hide cheaters on the leaderboards, which is pretty damn pointless since they're still free to terrorize matches.

A lot of people think that this only affects top ranks, but it causes top ranked people to make smurf accounts to enjoy the game at a lower rank without cheaters. This effect cascades down until there are champs in plat and diamond lobbies. At that rank, they don't care enough to make a smurf account and just stop playing entirely.

They're somehow simultaneously celebrating a 10th anniversary of the game and ignoring it circling the drain.

Nice One!

These assholes need to make snow day full time again.

I think most e-sports kind of games tend to favour the "snowball" model where one team progressively gets more overpowered. One reason I like Rocket League is because even if you're down 3 goals the other team doesn't have any special powerups to maintain their lead. They have to keep playing well. The reason why I dislike Rocket League is because once you're down 3 goals your teammates will rage quit.

Huh, already been 10 years...

It's interesting that Rocket League didn't seem to inspire many imitators given its success.