Rocket Leauge Playstyles with Esports Data
Rocket League is a high-energy video game that combines soccer with rocket-powered cars. The objective is to score goals by hitting a giant ball into the opposing team's net using acrobatic and skillful maneuvers with your car. It's a fast-paced and exciting game that requires teamwork, strategy, and precise control of your car. The game was released in the summer of 2015, which is when I started playing.
Psyonix, the company behind the game, focused on the esports aspect of the game from day one. Today, Rocket League esports has become a global phenomenon, featuring top-tier teams and players from regions worldwide, competing in tournaments like the Rocket League Championship Series (RLCS), with a $6 million prize pool for this year. It is becoming something bigger each year. This year the RLCS 2022-23 World Championship took place in Düsseldorf, Germany at PSD Bank Dome. It broke the concurrent viewer record with more than 468.000 viewers watching the final game at the same time.
For those of you who are interested in learning more about Rocket League and RLCS, you can contact me and I would be more than happy to provide information. Now, let's talk about a tweet I have come across that uses the in-game replay data of the games that have been played in the RLCS 2022-2023 World Championship to categorize the playstyles of each player that participated in the tournament.
The person who tweeted this post is @atomcoreRL who is a data enthusiast and loves to analyze RLCS data. In his own words, he used all the data categories from replays to assign weights between players, and then cluster them based on 3 different main playstyles using Gephi. The standard gameplay mode in Rocket League and RLCS is 3 versus 3 players.
Each node here is a player and you can see their nicknames on the nodes. The 3 playstyles are basically a player who takes on the task of striker, a player who is trying to assist the striker to score taking on the form of a supporter role, and a player who stays passive and saves incoming shots to their net like a goalie. Of course, these playstyles are not the rules of the game, and everyone usually plays each role a little in a game. However, this type of classification checks out considering that most of the teams have one player in each role.
We can also notice that there are players in the middle, we can say that their playstyle is more versatile, whereas for example, oKhaliD, in the lower right corner, is an extremely defensive player compared to others. We can also say that some players have a hybrid of two roles, like M0nkey M00n at the bottom of the graph, taking on both the goalie and striker roles.
Below is, for example, the rooster of a French team Karmine Corp who got 3rd place in the tournament. They are known for their aggressive and assist-heavy playstyle and the graph definitely checks out in this sense.
Thanks a lot for reading!
Oğuz Arslan
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