Pysonix Is Fixing One of Rocket League’s Biggest Problems

Psyonix, the Epic Games-owned developer behind Rocket League, has released a new statement detailing some major fixes it’s been implementing to the popular and competitive multiplayer game. And some of the improvements in the pipeline could prove massive for the free-to-play Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC game if implemented and executed properly. 

Rocket League players are very familiar with the game’s server issues at this point. According to Psyonix, the culprit for the recent issues are the DDOS attacks targeting the game’s servers, in addition to “other server performance-related issues.” To this end, Psyonix has released a “series of fixes” that are designed to mitigate the DDOS attacks. 

More than this, the fixes target the motivation behind the attacks. With the changes, game servers now treat player disconnections when it is the result of a DDOS attack differently. More specifically, now the game server will disconnect all players in the scenario at the same time, which means everyone gets awarded a “No Contest.” The motive behind the attacks is the positive MMR gain it provides the attackers. This is no longer the case. Better yet, it also means the attack victims no longer lose MMR.

This also means overall server health has improved due to the decrease in attacks. When a server would be attacked, it wouldn’t just impact that single match, but all matches hosted on the same server hardware as said server was being put under stress, disrupting performance. 

Psyonix notes all of this is being done in an ongoing effort to improve competitive matchmaking and tackle the game’s biggest problem: smurfs. These changes don’t eliminate all smurfs, but it does eliminate some. 

“As part of ongoing efforts to improve competitive matchmaking for everyone and prevent some forms of smurfing, we’re improving how we calculate skill for the initial placement matches in Competitive for players active across multiple modes and playlists,” writes Psyonix. “Along with improving matchmaking quality for all players, we know server performance and DDOS match disruptions are top of mind for many of you. We’re working towards the needed fixes for these DDOS disruptions, and we’re also mid-stream on changes to our server fleet. We’ll share more on both of these when fixes and changes are complete. We appreciate the community’s patience while we work on these issues.”