We’ve had three international majors in the RLCS 2021-22 season. One for each of the Fall, Winter, and Spring splits. Teams for various regions competed in these majors for points to qualify for the World Championships, coming up in a week’s time. 16 teams were invited to each of these Majors: 5 from North America, …
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Evaluating Rocket League Gameplay From First Principles In this series of articles trying to evaluate player gameplay, we’ve introduced Situational Player Value (SPV) and found that it’s great at pointing out players that keep themselves in relevant positions where they can have a positive impact on the play. While doing so, SPV can punish players …
Evaluating Rocket League Gameplay From First Principles Rocket League gameplay is complicated. From the subtle reasons behind every action to the intricate details you have to consider when analysing movements, analysis is not easy. When tackling this problem before, I’ve chosen to look at a very narrow slice of gameplay; expected goals only considers shots …
The Evolution of Competitive Rocket League Through the Lens of RLCS League Play TL;DR at bottom Previously… The first article in this series can be found here. It goes through the general trends across seasons via the stages of motor learning. While some of the gameplay differences between players performances (especially those from different seasons) …
Continue reading “A Brief History of Rocket League
Part II: Pioneers & Outliers”
The Evolution of Competitive Rocket League Through the Lens of RLCS League Play Rocket League gameplay has evolved greatly over the RLCS seasons: from its infancy in Season 1 when the air dribble was a new mechanic, to the current high-flying demo-heavy meta. How can this progress be broken down? The stages of motor learning …
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Part I: The Stages of Learning”
Identifying a bim-bam team They was lookin’ for us, but they didn’t catch us. Bim-bam teams (BBTs) can be characterised by their fast-paced gameplay that seeks to overwhelm the opponents with pressure. This can be seen in their count of hits per game, average speed, boost usage, and time spent close to the ball.
TL;DR at bottom Previously… Part I was the origin story for the expected goals (xG) model, while Part II covered the stats in detail. Makings of a Winner Here, we will take a look at what characterises a winning team and draw some conclusions about where Rocket League. This article will make references to stats …
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Return of the Winners”
TL;DR at bottom Previously… The first article of the series (basically the origin story for the model) can be found here. To summarise, I’ve trained an expected goals (xG) model and applied it to RLCS Season 6 League Play. The calculated stats and visualisations are here: 2D shot charts: https://imgur.com/a/iegdnoi 3D interactive shot chart: http://blog.calculated.gg/files/xG.html …
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The Data Strikes Back”
TL;DR at bottom Expected goals: An introduction What is an expected goal? Expected goals (xG) is a stat (commonly used in football and hockey) that quantifies the quality of a scoring opportunity (a chance). For every shot in every game, the probability of that shot becoming a goal is predicted. In the simplest of models, …
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A New Stat”
This is a very interesting problem, since the skill level at the professional level has clearly gone up. We’ve had similar ideas floating around the calculated.gg developer Discord for a while. Then, recently, there was a reddit post on this topic on /r/RocketLeagueEsports: The general consensus in the post was that they would be around …
Continue reading “If RLCS Season 1 players were transported to 2019, what rank would they be?”
