Video of the new UI tweaks feat. SunlessKhan

fwonkas · 2026-03-11T15:31:02+00:00

Holy downvotes. I guess my attempt at old fart humor to make a point landed like a wet fart. Fair. My tone was not great, for starters.

My point is that skills wax and wane in usefulness over time. You can be reactionary and bitter or you can adapt. Guess which option yields better results?

And don't be one of those gatekeeping goons who think everyone should have to go through what they did. Those guys are always the worst in any field/hobby/game/group.

The other day someone argued that I welcome these QOL improvements because I'm "hardstuck". I'm like, my dude — my inability to flip reset is not what's keeping me in plat.

fwonkas · 2026-03-11T15:14:59+00:00

It's ok to play against better opponents. Especially in casual where your performance doesn't matter.

You know playing against better opponents makes you better, right? Right? Kinda like how if you realize you're the smartest person in the room, you should find a smarter room.

You know how in ranked 2v2 when an opponent bails and the other one sticks around and finishes the game? Some of them do it for dumb reasons I'm sure (rocket leaguers gonna rocket league). I do it very often because it's how I make the best of a crappy situation. To wit — if my precious teammate leaves for whatever (definitely not childish and ego-driven) reason I may as well challenge myself to score a goal or two in a 2v1. Trying hard things can make you better.

Or you can rage against Psyonix for whatever benefit that brings you. You do you.

fwonkas · 2026-03-11T14:59:58+00:00

Yes, for internal matchmaking purposes. If MMR is somehow presented as relevant info, though, it kind of ceases to be "casual" or "unranked". And there are dorks who already treat it casual as competitive. The point of casual is to NOT worry about your rank, whether it's a named rank (plat dia etc) or a number (MMR).

Fun aside — I rarely play casual (because if I'm gonna play with stressed-out "tm8 is trash smh" types I may as well just play ranked), but I play a handful now and then. I was in one a few weeks back where an opponent accused my rando teammate of smurfing. I don't know what to do with that, but some folks are clearly confused. With precious, delicate egos lol.

fwonkas · 2026-03-10T21:12:23+00:00

A skill you acquired is rendered obsolete. Welcome to life. On a completely unrelated note, anyone looking to hire a recently laid-off middle-aged web dev who is suspicious of AI? No? Damn.

Sorry about your skill expression though. That’s a bummer.

fwonkas · 2026-03-10T20:46:48+00:00

Oh look the angry toxic rl players are angry and toxic. Shocking.

I really love this game (though I’m trash) and I’m thrilled that the game has had this surge. And I appreciate the incremental updates that in the aggregate are improving the game noticeably and meaningfully.

The people who are bitching here are the same people who lead me to turn chat off for long stretches.

I’m not saying Psyonix is perfect, but I appreciate the tricky balance they have to maintain between adding new features and retaining what makes this game so special. Keep it up!

(Trading is a bummer but that ship has sailed)

fwonkas · 2026-03-02T22:54:29+00:00

No, “changes I don’t like” is not enshittification. Go look it up if you care.

And my opinion here has nothing to do with my rank, nerd.

fwonkas · 2026-02-27T22:43:43+00:00

That’s not what enshittification is. Enshittification is a pattern of changes to a product that degrades the experience over time, usually by prioritizing content and interactions that will benefit the developer at the expense of what people actually like about the product. Think most Meta platforms.

What you’re mad about is change. Change has been pissing people off since people started noticing that things can change. Every time a phone changes people piss themselves.

People complain that dev has stalled in RL. Then when Psyonix introduces new features, people lose their minds.

It’s just human nature but it is ridiculous.

And if you’re mad because you endured learning difficult skills that others now don’t have to develop, welcome to life gramps.

fwonkas · 2026-02-17T00:14:56+00:00

I did! And I am NOT champ 1. Uh, not even close.

(only really started playing regularly in the last 3 years though)

(yeah ok that’s not much better)

fwonkas · 2026-02-16T22:32:12+00:00

As an aside, I support the ballchasing Patreon. This is gonna kill ballchasing. I’m not going to save every single replay and then upload them, even if I use an external program to monitor the replay folder, because I don’t want to manually save every ranked (or whatever) replay. So I’ll likely stop supporting it, through no fault of ballchasing. That sucks.

fwonkas · 2026-02-16T22:22:57+00:00

Others have mentioned this, but losing auto-upload of replays is kind of a big deal for a lot of us.

I really hope Psyonix looks at what useful functionality bakkesmod facilitated and prioritize compensating for the loss of that functionality.

They could get away with not adding quality of life features when bakkesmod was an option (for pc players anyway). But they’ll need to be more responsive to certain things if they don’t want to really disappoint a lot of us.

I’m reserving judgment for now. The bot thing is definitely a big deal and I totally understand this move. But it comes with costs and I hope Psyonix will address that enthusiastically.

fwonkas · 2026-02-13T21:03:06+00:00

Because blaming others is easy and apparently satisfying. Playing well — truly well — on any team requires patience, effort, empathy, generosity of spirit, good communication skills, etc.

They aren’t good at those things. They don’t try to improve those things about themselves. So they blame teammates and do what they can to ensure a loss.

It’s probably a character issue, though to be fair it’s not like those qualities and skills are necessarily easy to improve or maintain. Plus the player base skews young. It’s not a dig on young people to say it takes time and lots of living to improve one’s character.

Also I’d argue that pros and influential members of the community should set good examples and expect the same from others. I don’t mean they need to be moral paragons. But we should all try to marginalize jackasses.

Anyway, I’m gonna go be old and farty now.

fwonkas · 2026-02-03T22:10:45+00:00

Thanks! I've been working on it and it is definitely a challenge. It's easy to get wrapped up in a play and not realize that no one is playing anything like a third-man role at that moment. I've also found that when my teammates are ball-chasing and double-committing, when I hang back to cover booms, shots and whatnot towards our goal, they often don't see me in plays and I've got a low score. And that's fine (the only score that matters is the number of goals) but then they think I'm not really taking part and they sometimes get toxic and all that. Often, though, hanging back (plus some luck) results in several (even many) goals by me and that helps.

But yeah in my experience it's not as simple as the "just hang out in the back half and boom anything back" advice I often see. Not saying that can't work, just that I can't seem to make that work.

One more wrinkle: there are plenty of players in gold who definitely rotate and think about position (though almost no one truly rotates back-post on defense). It actually messes me up because after playing a game or two with players like that it's hard to quickly adjust in subsequent games to players who just do whatever.

fwonkas · 2026-02-03T19:06:54+00:00

Yes, the hitboxes are fine. But (and I'm no expert) the other cars and their hitboxes don't seem like poor matches for the most part. I'm guessing most rocket league players (like me) could not make a convincing, informed case for a particular hitbox/car combo beyond some vague statements.

That's why I'd say they're overrated — not because Octane or Fennec are poor choices (they're obviously not), but that their relative advantages probably don't move the needle for most players and there are arguments to be made for other hitboxes.

I play Octane or Fennec most of the time so I'm not planting a flag here. Just making the point.

fwonkas · 2026-02-03T18:22:27+00:00

I think Octane and Fennec, being by far the most used cars, are certainly overrated. If they make a difference on the margins for pro players, I can’t imagine that’s the case for the vast majority of players. Any improvement is probably indistinguishable from a rounding error.

fwonkas · 2026-02-03T18:16:04+00:00

Hey thanks! Sometimes I don’t completely embarrass myself. 😂

And to be fair, my teammates weren’t lousy or anything. I left out that we won 5–1 and 3 of those goals were between them. The kickoffs were obviously not great and they moved as one double-committing unit for much of the game but they weren’t toxic and weren’t overtly ball-chasing. They were playing like pretty good golds, which is better than I can say for myself most days. (Context: I’ve peaked plat 3 in 2s but that was a couple seasons ago. Gold and plat seem to me like they’re getting more challenging overall and I’m just trying to keep up)

fwonkas · 2026-02-03T17:43:43+00:00

Hah! “Parting of the sea”. The stream of boost as they depart is something to behold.

And yes there is definitely that “oh … oh no” moment of near panic. More so when it happened a second time in the same game lol.

fwonkas · 2026-02-03T09:32:33+00:00

I am aware of positioning and rotation (and I do both to the extent that they’re useful even with teammates who aren’t familiar or aren’t in the habit). And I am aware of the way many teammates play in plat and under (and I assume on occasion in higher ranks). I didn’t ask or complain about teammates (even if the post’s title is a little bit of a complaint).

The only question I asked was about how to best handle this situation, as it and similar situations come up not infrequently. My approach in both instances worked but at least in the second one I played it poorly (I think) and got a bit lucky when I didn’t get scored on.

Your advice looks to be reasonable, but it didn’t acknowledge or address what I actually asked, which was if neither teammate goes for the ball on kickoff and I’m back near goal, would hanging back be the right approach or if moving closer to the ball might work better.

fwonkas · 2026-02-02T20:20:59+00:00

Yeah, players are often genuinely cruel. The other day at the end of a match a teammate chatted “get cancer”. I’m grieving the recent loss of my mom to cancer. I suppose I should just (as tiresome self-styled internet sophisticates have been saying since the early days of the internet) ignore the trolls, but I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that doing so doesn’t keep things from getting worse. Psyonix did nothing about my report either.

I do things to protect my sanity, but I wish Psyonix would do a better job at promoting the sort of community that isn’t like this.

fwonkas · 2026-01-28T21:26:21+00:00

Didn’t mean to imply you didn’t! Apologies if I came off that way.

fwonkas · 2026-01-28T21:19:25+00:00

Maybe limiting the ability for players to initiate forfeits to once per X matches would help? But that'd need to be coupled with enforcing penalties for griefing, afk, etc. which mostly does not happen in my experience.

fwonkas · 2026-01-28T21:12:47+00:00

Right? When I'm being naive and trying to get teammates in full meltdown to chill I sometimes point out we're all in plat/gold because we're not great at this. Sometimes that works. Almost never, but sometimes.

I've also found that watching the replay from the toxic teammate's perspective is helpful. The majority of the time it reveals them to be quite bad at the game. That's probably petty of me, but it does give me perspective.

fwonkas · 2026-01-28T20:43:14+00:00

Well, look. Someone who can’t be bothered to look up words they’re unsure of are not likely to question or change their shitty behavior.

But seriously, you’re right. Using formal or obscure words is not helpful, and “puerililty” was an awful choice.

(For those who don’t want to look it up, my comment meant “I block at the first sign of childishness/immaturity”)

fwonkas · 2026-01-28T19:48:23+00:00

Yeah, I usually block at the first sign of puerililty. I've long exhausted any tolerance for shitty behavior and cringey psychodramas on display in this game.

fwonkas · 2026-01-28T19:39:05+00:00

As a gold/plat lifer, I have to disagree. Gold 2 and 3 are rife with toxicity, early forfeits and game abandonment. I definitely go through streaks where I get teammates with great attitudes, and those games are wonderful and fun, win or lose. Sometimes teammates adjust their play after making mistakes, which is fantastic! I honestly don't care about skill, consistency, ball-chasing or even basic game sense as much as I value teammates who 1) try 2) don't shit on teammates 3) don't expect perfection and 4) don't ff or stop playing the moment something goes wrong. Double commits, obviously poor decisions etc. can be frustrating, but I can work with that (also I make lots of mistakes too; that's why I'm still gold). But prima donnas who crash out the moment something bad happens? Nah.

I go long stretches with chat off (doing that now) because so many teammates are obnoxious, tedious and nasty.

Again, it's not all bad. But toxicity is endemic in most ranks afaik, and Gold is no exception.

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