After being sent a video of a PC player doing some pretty impossible stunts in Rocket League, the footage of which you can see above, developer Psyonix Studios decided to take to Reddit to discuss the issue of cheating.
Psyonix Founder Dave Hagewood explained on Reddit how Rocket League developers have already taken steps to limit cheating, and how they have more fixes on the way. On top of that, Hagewood mentioned that “cheating of this sort is not a PC-only issue,” apparently meaning that some PlayStation 4 players have also been cheating at the game.
One of the reasons we decided to use dedicated servers was to take control over the authoritative physics for each game so it could not be manipulated by clients. This is a sound strategy that will prevent manipulation of the ball and car physics, even on PC. However, we expected this might require a few refinements to remove any lingering bugs which is probably what is happening here. We have serious doubts that there are very many ways to do this and we can fix them.
Does that mean it is absolutely not possible to cheat once the holes are found? No, but the cheating is limited to client-side information, meaning the same information you already know about the game just by looking around the field. Can this give you an advantage? Maybe a bit but we seriously doubt it will help you beat any significantly better player. It is worth noting that cheating of this sort is not a PC-only issue either. In games like shooters this is a much bigger problem because aim-bots can simply aim and fire for you. In Rocket League you need to understand a lot more about the laws of the physical universe to know what to do. You will be facing the same sort of physics problems that robot engineers in the DARPA challenge face.
On top of this we can add player reporting and statistical analysis to detect “Player A just did something impossible”. We do this regularly on other games. We’re really just getting started here.
In a separate Reddit post, Hagewood explained that power-ups or weapons will not be added into Rocket League, nor will Psyonix “change balance, add stats, change physics, etc” in the game.
There are not going to be power-ups added to the game. We’re not going to change balance, add stats, change physics, etc. We have a good formula and there are already infinite ways to make the game even better without changing core gameplay. That answer may have been based on the possibility of adding mutators that allow private matches to change things up for a single match just to mix things up but absolutely not for regular gameplay.
Have you come across any cheaters in Rocket League yet? If you haven’t already gotten a chance to play the game, take a look at our review of it to get an idea of what its like.
[Source: Tommykrem (YouTube), Reddit 1, 2 via VentureBeat, GameSpot]
