TLDR: dunno if anyone wants to replicate it today, because the experience of early years Rocket League is completely gone now. So ‘they’ dont even have a reference point to replicate.
Psyonix fumbled RL so hard its not funny. I have 1500 hours on Steam since launch. In my experience, like with a lot of competitive online games, RL became more and more sweaty and toxic as time progressed - it’s already not the largest pool of players, and even when queuing casual matches you’re matchmade with similarly-skilled players - so once you’ve been playing for say 50 hours you find yourself in quite a few toxic matches with higher-skill players. But, there was thankfully a remedy - anyone wanting to chill simply used the fun modes (snow day, rumble, and hoops) and told anyone who was toxic in game to get bent. I had a crew of several dozen regulars that I’d befriended and we enjoyed hitting those modes because they were taken much less seriously than the standard 2v2 or 3v3 matches. Many many laughs had over the years I played. Then Psyonix retired those modes from the casual queue/playlist and made them competitive-only around 2019 - no reason cited. This pretty much quadrupled the queue times for those modes, and ensured the matches were higher stakes (rank points) and more toxic. Why?
This was not the first or last time Psyonix made decisions that the community at large hated. Every controversial change they made was met with a lot of pleading on the forums (and Reddit) with devs to reverse course, which they would hand wave with ‘we’ll take this feedback on board’ kind of responses, then as time ticked on we saw lootbox after lootbox/decal/season-pass/timed-exclusive-grind-drops/paid-cars hit the game… And dev focus started to become clear. Before you say ‘they had to pay for the game’, this was all before the game went F2P. It became obvious that dev priority was ways to make the game even more of a dopamine-to-wallet loop, and casual fun is not a priority, they wanted an e-sports scene. I guess the casual players fit none of those goals.
At that point my RL friends persisted gettinf together regularly for private matches (so we could still load the fun modes), but the ability to just load into the game and queue up some relaxed no-stakes silly car soccer (or hockey, or basketball) was long gone for experienced regulars - i can’t imagine it was easy for new players to get into the game at that point. Gg. Haven’t even had it installed for a few years now, and I read now they removed the ‘fun modes’ entirely from the ranked queue options now, so they just come back for seasonal events? Why??
Psyonix had a money printer and they broke it by trying to make the money print faster. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
Im completely oblivious to any of the enshittification, but like any online game the fun is long gone for most people. Skill floor is way too high. As soon as you join a match youre completely outskilled by everybody and its clear youre nothing but a hindrance to your team.
Your opponents laugh at you and style as hard as they can and your teammates resent your existence, assuming they stick around long enough to make it clear.
Hyper-competitive games are fun for about 3 months and then youre either in or out.
I bought the game about 6 months after it was released and I had over 3000 hours in that game before I stopped playing a few years back.
The first 1200+ hours was in Snowday alone, and I doubt I’ll ever have as much fun in a video game than I did in that mode. I started to play all the modes plus the steam workshop mods (for hundreds of hours) just to get better car control to play Snowday.
Unfortunately at the end it was all competitive and it had started to be more of a chore than fun but I stand by those first thousands of hours at the most fun I’ve ever had.
Hell, most of the time even the losing part of Snowday was enjoyable when playing against and with the right people.
TLDR: dunno if anyone wants to replicate it today, because the experience of early years Rocket League is completely gone now. So ‘they’ dont even have a reference point to replicate.
Psyonix fumbled RL so hard its not funny. I have 1500 hours on Steam since launch. In my experience, like with a lot of competitive online games, RL became more and more sweaty and toxic as time progressed - it’s already not the largest pool of players, and even when queuing casual matches you’re matchmade with similarly-skilled players - so once you’ve been playing for say 50 hours you find yourself in quite a few toxic matches with higher-skill players. But, there was thankfully a remedy - anyone wanting to chill simply used the fun modes (snow day, rumble, and hoops) and told anyone who was toxic in game to get bent. I had a crew of several dozen regulars that I’d befriended and we enjoyed hitting those modes because they were taken much less seriously than the standard 2v2 or 3v3 matches. Many many laughs had over the years I played. Then Psyonix retired those modes from the casual queue/playlist and made them competitive-only around 2019 - no reason cited. This pretty much quadrupled the queue times for those modes, and ensured the matches were higher stakes (rank points) and more toxic. Why?
This was not the first or last time Psyonix made decisions that the community at large hated. Every controversial change they made was met with a lot of pleading on the forums (and Reddit) with devs to reverse course, which they would hand wave with ‘we’ll take this feedback on board’ kind of responses, then as time ticked on we saw lootbox after lootbox/decal/season-pass/timed-exclusive-grind-drops/paid-cars hit the game… And dev focus started to become clear. Before you say ‘they had to pay for the game’, this was all before the game went F2P. It became obvious that dev priority was ways to make the game even more of a dopamine-to-wallet loop, and casual fun is not a priority, they wanted an e-sports scene. I guess the casual players fit none of those goals.
At that point my RL friends persisted gettinf together regularly for private matches (so we could still load the fun modes), but the ability to just load into the game and queue up some relaxed no-stakes silly car soccer (or hockey, or basketball) was long gone for experienced regulars - i can’t imagine it was easy for new players to get into the game at that point. Gg. Haven’t even had it installed for a few years now, and I read now they removed the ‘fun modes’ entirely from the ranked queue options now, so they just come back for seasonal events? Why??
Psyonix had a money printer and they broke it by trying to make the money print faster. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
Im completely oblivious to any of the enshittification, but like any online game the fun is long gone for most people. Skill floor is way too high. As soon as you join a match youre completely outskilled by everybody and its clear youre nothing but a hindrance to your team.
Your opponents laugh at you and style as hard as they can and your teammates resent your existence, assuming they stick around long enough to make it clear.
Hyper-competitive games are fun for about 3 months and then youre either in or out.
“WHAT A SAVE!” “WHAT A SAVE!” “WHAT A SAVE!”
I bought the game about 6 months after it was released and I had over 3000 hours in that game before I stopped playing a few years back.
The first 1200+ hours was in Snowday alone, and I doubt I’ll ever have as much fun in a video game than I did in that mode. I started to play all the modes plus the steam workshop mods (for hundreds of hours) just to get better car control to play Snowday.
Unfortunately at the end it was all competitive and it had started to be more of a chore than fun but I stand by those first thousands of hours at the most fun I’ve ever had.
Hell, most of the time even the losing part of Snowday was enjoyable when playing against and with the right people.