@r_hjort

Psyonix revealed Rocket League's month-by-month roadmap for the spring, and it's full of additions and improvements. One of the most notable changes is that the Switch version will get performance and quality modes in March. Those who want to prioritize performance will get 60 frames per second at 900p resolution in docked mode and 720p while portable; the quality prioritization is 1080p while docked and 720p while portable, both at 30 frames per second.

EDIT: @Abdooooo beat me to it! And yes, I'm definitely looking forward to the cross-platform party functionality so us Steam players can team up with youse guys on the Switch.

@Mop it up The game definitely has a learning curve, and it helps a lot if you're playing with teammates you can chat with to agree on general "positions" and stuff. I think the main hurdle in the early going is getting over that instinct to just chase the ball everywhere. In the early going, it's generally better to sit back a bit from the commotion and let your teammates/opponents jostle the ball around, and wait for it to pop out into the open for you to try for a shot or advance it up the field. Plus, if you're hanging back a bit, you're in better position to play defense if the ball should find its way past your teammates.

@Abdooooo
@nate38
Good news! Thanks for the link! Will be interesting to see how big of a difference there will be.

@nate38

Yeah, I agree with hanging back. You'll eventually understand where to position yourself to better intersect a break away or open ball. It reminds me of how you play defense in hockey.

@Mop it up Yeah it sort of does. The first night I played was with my two cousins, me and one of them were total n00bz, the other had only played a little bit. We went maybe 4 or 5 hours straight and didn't win a single match. So we tried again a few weeks later, and we won maybe 2 matches the whole night. Mind you this was playing on the PS4 version like a year after it had come out, so there probably weren't a whole lot of other n00bz.

Now, 30 or 40 hours or so later, I can hold my own but I'm still not amazing.

It feels sort of random to me who I get paired up with / against as well. Some nights my teams are winning a bunch, some nights not so much.

My tips for n00bz:

1. Instantly switch to the camera mode that always stays focused on the ball and never switch back to the other garbage camera.
2. Hang out around your own goal a lot, try to get solid at defense. A lot of goals scored literally just roll in because no one was playing defense.
3. Run over every little turbo patch that you can. You should try to make sure that you always have some turbo ready.
4. Even if you don't have a clear shot, just always, always, always try to get the ball near the other goal. I've scored or assisted on so many goals that just happened because of some weird, unpredictable combination of bounces.

Uh... yeah I don't know. Practice?

Thanks for the suggestions folks, I think our second round playing went better than the first since we started playing more like your advice.

Goals happening from strange bounces or behavior? Yeah, sounds like us all right!

I feel that 3v3 works out the best. 2v2 requires us to know what we're doing a lot more than we do, and 4v4 is pretty crowded.

I don't like to use the ball cam because then it's too difficult to see stuff like the ground or opponents. The car cam still has an arrow which constantly points to the ball. Losing track of the ball hasn't been one of my issues.

@Abdooooo I've never played hockey so I guess that's my problem!
I haven't tried the single player so perhaps I should give that a go sometime.

Hmm. You do you. BUTTTTTTTTTTTT... I don't know anyone who doesn't use the ball cam. My game is like constant positioning based on exactly where the ball is. And you see most everyone you need to see too, since most people are near or rushing towards the ball at any given moment.

But I can already see all of that and more with the car cam, and I can also use the stick if I need more angles. Plus then I don't have an annoying "BALL CAM" icon flashing in the corner.

Any time the ball moves off-screen you need to fiddle to find out where exactly it went though!

BUT YOU DO YOU.

I'm actually curious now how popular each camera mode is. From what I've read the "pros" toggle a lot, but mostly only use car cam for advanced moves. Seems like most everyone else goes straight to ball cam and never turns back.

No I don't, there's an arrow pointing at the ball at all times.

The only time I've switched to ball cam for a few seconds is when the ball pops way up into the air, when that happens it can be tough to tell where it is from the arrow and ground markers alone.

I wouldn't be surprised if a majority use ball cam most / all the time, but it isn't for me. I do think it's good advice for players to try both camera angles for extended periods to see which works out best for them, though. I'm sure pros can make good use of ball cam, but pros do lots of crazy things I can't do, hee hee. I'll never be a pro, nor do I want to be.

Funnily enough, the one player of us who has ball cam on all the time is I think our weakest link. But don't tell him I said that!

Zero said:

From what I've read the "pros" toggle a lot, but mostly only use car cam for advanced moves.

This is what I do, though I'm far from a pro, and for me an "advanced" move is actually hitting the ball where I want it to go. I think I use car-cam a bit more often than most people, from what I've observed in friends and others.

@Mop it up That's why I said EXACTLY, the arrow is just kind of like "it's some indeterminate amount of distance in that direction" plus you can't really tell if someone is there about to hit it in a completely different direction, etc.

BUT I MEAN BY ALL MEANS YOU DO YOU.

@Zero You keep saying "you do you" yet keep trying to argue against why the car cam works fine for me. That's kinda contradictory I would say. In any case, while I have reasons why what you just said isn't true either, it's clear you're just going to keep arguing anything I say, so we'd better agree to disagree before we fill up this topic, hee hee.

nate38 said:

for me an "advanced" move is actually hitting the ball where I want it to go.

Ha ha, yup, that sounds exactly like me and my friends too.

My Internet has been sucking lately, I'm lucky if I can play a single match without things screwing up.

BTW have any of you ever played this game when your Internet is bad? It's... weird. In something like Mario Kart if your Internet is bad you keep driving fine more or less since it's doing it all locally, it just doesn't know where the other drivers / items / etc. are so it estimates things and then catches up when it can... usually you just get a few little jolts here and there but it's still playable.

In Rocket League though, the second the Internet goes bad it's total chaos. You go flying every which direction, everything on the field goes flying all over the place. I don't even get the logic, it often sends me halfway across the field in an instant even though I haven't touched anything, I'm not sure if it is trying to guess what I'm doing or what but it's just a complete mess. It's unplayable.

I probably should call my Internet provider but everything else has been ok lately... Netflix, etc. I wonder what is up? Interference perhaps?

@Zero WiFi is almost certainly the culprit, I'm telling you. Even the slightest interference matters a hell of a lot more for online gaming than it does for basically any other online interaction, even streaming. I used to have these sort of problems every now and then in Rocket League and Overwatch, and all I did was switch from WiFi to Ethernet, and it never happened again in either game.

Yeahhh but I don't want to be stuck to an ethernet cable.

I've honestly never had issues until just the last few weeks. If our Internet as a whole was being janky I'd think that is the culprit, but it's sort of not, which is why I'm wondering if there is an interference issue related to the Switch specifica...

HOLY F IT JUST OCCURRED TO ME THAT THIS PROBABLY STARTED HAPPENING RIGHT AROUND WHEN THE NEW TENANT MOVED IN DOWNSTAIRS OH GOD HE PROBABLY HAS SOMETHING THAT IS CAUSING INTERFERENCE DOESN'T HE?!!??!!?

It's possible. Try changing the channel on your wireless router. That helped with my interference problems way back in the Wii days.

Yeah, wifi issues with the Switch are not my friend. Ever since upgrading my wireless router I haven't had too many issues. The Switch seems to work much better with a 5Ghz connection than a 2.4 Ghz connection. I used to have a 2.4Ghz connection literally 6 feet away and it sucked. Now I have a 5Ghz connection 30 feet away and its good. My statement goes against what other say though. 2.4Ghz is supposed to be better for longer distances. Maybe my level of interference with 5Ghz is minimal.

I suck at networking, but when it comes to online gaming, it's usually latency rather than bandwidth that causes issues, right?

Looks like Rocket League's two main US servers are on the west coast and east coast, so Chicago would be kinda screwed. ...right?

I'm in the midwest too but haven't played enough to really tell if it's good or bad one way or the other. I did play with a friend in Germany a few weeks ago, and that was impossible.

@Secret_Tunnel Yep, but when my Internet is being crappy I think it is less that it's low bandwidth and more than it cuts out here and there... something you don't notice as much when just browing the Internet, but you do notice in online gaming.

It actually shows your latency in Rocket League menus and when mine gets bad it's like 10 times or more what it usually is.