Progression from SILVER to CHAMP in 4 months in Rocket League

The year is 2015, Rocket League just got released and about two weeks later, some friends and I decided to give it a shot. Needless to say, we were absolutely terrible at the game, as you can see. Constant whiffs, barely knew how to flip into the ball to shoot and didn’t even realize aerials could be a thing. But nevertheless we spent many hours playing it casually and had loads of fun. After about a month or so, I stopped playing the game entirely.

00:42 - I don’t exactly remember the reason, maybe there was another game I wanted to play or I simply lost interest. This guy on the other hand did not stop playing. He kept at it and got really good at the game. He was out there with some other friends, scoring goals I’d never have imagined to be even possible when we first played. He’s still playing today and his advice helped me a lot to get to where I am now. I on the other hand didn’t pay much attention to Rocket League in the following years. Every time I saw it somewhere or someone talked to me about it, I didn’t really care and to be completely honest, I was a bit ignorant and thought playing Rocket League on a more competitive level was stupid and a waste of time. “Not really my kind of game”, I thought to myself. Well, since you’re watching this video, I guess I was wrong. Fast forward to July of this year. I was browsing the recommended section on YouTube and a video by SunlessKhan which was called “I recorded every toxic player in Rocket League month 2!” popped up.

01:46 - I didn’t know what to watch, so I gave a shot and absolutely loved the video. The video was so well made that I didn’t even care that it was about Rocket League. In the following days Sunless got recommended to me more and more and I ended up binge-watching most of his content. I discovered many other Rocket League YouTubers, watched some of their videos and what can I say, I developed a strong urge to try the game again. On the 11th of June 2020 I booted up the game for the first time after roughly 5 years.

02:19 - I still knew the basic controls and thanks to the ridiculous amount of videos I watched, I was aware of small quirks such as getting to supersonic speed by flipping instead of boosting, that the default camera settings are terrible or what backpost rotations were, at least in theory. Still, I obviously didn’t really know how to play properly. I was afraid to jump into a match right off the bat, so I spent the first 3 hours in free play just banging the ball around the field and getting used to the controls again. Quick side note: Instead of showing you the best plays I got while going up the ranks, I decided that I’d just show regular gameplay sprinkled with a highlight here and there. This might be a bit more boring than showing flashy highlights, but personally I don’t think highlights are an accurate representation of the skills in a rank.

03:10 - Enjoy! So, after spending some time in free play, I wanted to try to play actual matches on the next day. What you’re looking at right now is the first replay I saved. I was more of a passive player from the get-go, I let my teammates do the chasing most of the time. I think this mentality did help me in the long run, since picking your fights and being patient is an important skill to have, not just at the higher ranks. I jumped right into competitive 3v3 and somehow got placed into Platinum 1.

03:38 - Obviously I didn’t last very long in that rank, after a few matches and countless insults from teammates about how this was essentially a 4v2 I ended up where I belonged in Silver 3. However, this didn’t discourage me from playing at all, I knew I wanted to get better. Obviously the first thing any newbie wants to learn is how to aerial. It took me a bit, but after a couple days I was able to hit easy aerial shots in training packs. Unfortunately, I don’t have any footage of that, but five days after first starting up the game, I managed to get my first goal using an aerial.

04:11 - It’s not pretty, but back then it was really exciting. And surely enough, I hit some more, very basic aerial goals in the following days. In addition to aerial training, I wanted to get used to other essential areas of mechanical gameplay, such as getting used to powershots and wall-plays. It went pretty well and I felt that I was progressing and learning a variety of basic skills fairly quickly. Watching some of the first replays is an interesting experience.

04:39 - When I started playing I was told “I can’t wait until you’re good, you’ll be laughing your ass off at your own replays” and oh how right they were. It’s a bit funny looking at it, the mistakes are glaringly obvious now, but it just shows how much I’ve progressed since. If you’re just starting out, make sure to save some of your replays and laugh about them in a couple of months. My rank didn’t change a lot in the first three weeks. Even though I spent a lot of time in training, my game sense was obviously terrible and I was lacking experience in positioning, rotation, when it was my turn to challenge and general awareness of the field and players.

05:10 - Fortunately, I discovered Rizzo’s Road to GC videos and Musty’s Until I Lose series at that time. Usually I’d have Rocket League videos playing in the background while I was practicing, but I decided I should watch videos like these and actually pay closer attention to what they were suggesting. While this didn’t result in me getting better immediately, in hindsight this helped tremendously. It’s not really possible to practice positioning, so I just kept playing with the advice from those videos in the back off my head. Often times I found myself in similar situations as I’ve seen in the videos and that’s when I was able to apply my newfound knowledge.

05:48 - And what can I say, in July something must’ve clicked in my head, because I suddenly started ranking up fast. After a bit more than a month of playing I climbed to Platinum 1. At that point I tried to start incorporating air rolling into my aerials by using it just before I was about to hit the ball. This was really difficult for me and looking back at the footage you’re seeing right now, I apparently really liked this move. Other than that my training didn’t really change, I kept trying many different things.

06:16 - A lot of time was spent in Poquitos Wall Shots training pack and I believe that it is one of the packs that helps to develop many skills at once, such as shot placement, driving on the wall and aerial car control. I often felt like I didn’t make any progress and sometimes I thought practicing didn’t help at all. But with the knowledge that making mistakes and failing is actually good for learning, even if it doesn’t feel like it, I kept grinding and managed to reach Diamond 1 in the middle of August. When I wasn’t playing ranked, I played in casual with friends, since their ranks in competitive were a lot higher than mine. Playing against stronger opponents regularly was difficult since the speed of play and mechanical consistency was so much higher than mine, but a great learning experience nonetheless.

07:05 - I started focusing on things that I hadn’t considered before in hopes of improving the speed of my gameplay. Many people are tempted to practice flashy mechanics such as air dribbles, ceiling shots or flip resets and there are many tutorials on YouTube that emphasize these mechanics. But not many cover the mechanics that are often overlooked, but just as important, if not more important. I’m talking about recoveries, wave-dashes, half flips, powersliding and boost management. Fortunately, powersliding and recoveries came to me very quickly thanks to advice I received from the guy you saw at the beginning of the video and I’ve already been using them every now and then.

07:41 - I had the issue that I was wasting boost by boosting while I was supersonic, so I paid closer attention to that while playing. I learned how to wave-dash and half flip and while I didn’t use them as often as I should’ve, I’m glad I learned how to do them. Over the weeks that followed I found myself using them more and more naturally. I started to play with the friend mentioned at the beginning of the video competitively. He was much higher ranked than me, around Champion 2.

08:08 - And I’m not going to lie, he boosted my rank quite a bit and vice versa, his rank suffered because of me. I was ping ponging between Diamond 2 and Diamond 3, but I realized that I couldn’t keep up with the mechanics and the speed of play at that rank. My biggest problems were my rotation, my positioning and I was especially struggling with when to challenge the ball. At that point I found a post on the RocketLeagueSchool subreddit from Llexis, who offered free replay analysis on his stream, so I went ahead and sent in a replay. He dedicated over 30 minutes of his free time giving me advice and while it was only a single replay, he was able to spot many flaws in my gameplay and give some of the best advice I’ve gotten so far.

08:47 - His analysis was the reason I improved a lot in regards to rotations, fake challenges and awareness of enemy positioning. I obviously couldn’t implement every single suggestion into my gameplay as soon as I hopped into the game, but having his advice in the back of my head at all times was very advantageous. If you’re struggling, go ahead, send in a replay and check out his stream. I can’t recommend his replay analysis enough. The link to his stream is in the description.

09:14 - Shortly after that I was practicing my aerials and while I thought I was quite decent at it and had made great progress, I stumbled open a video by Thanovic in which he was teaching how to improve aerial car control. I decided that I was at the point where I had to step up my game and tried it out, with a few variations. This was about a month ago. I quickly noticed how terrible I was at flying backwards. Using parts of his routine in combination with Kevperts aerial car control routine, I got better and better and it was probably one of the most rewarding experiences with training I’ve had so far. I wasn’t and still am not keen on workshop maps for some reason.

09:50 - I generally don’t get frustrated playing or practicing, but I’m really struggling with playing workshop maps for an extended period of time. This is something I’ll have to tackle at some point, since I know workshop maps are a crucial part of proper training. Anyways, thanks to the routine, I also got rid of a bad habit that I had that would cause me to boost down to the ground and completely lose control of the car while I was in the air. I still have a long way to go, but having a training routine was a huge step in the right direction. And this is where I am now. About a week ago, I reached Champ 1 and feel comfortable playing in that rank.

10:23 - From what people have told me about their experiences climbing the ranks, I feel that my progression was very fast. But if you look at it, other than in 2015 I never really played the game casually. I was practicing all the time, watched loads of tutorials and gameplay from higher ranked players. I didn’t try to practice flip resets or ceiling shot musty flick double taps. I kept it simple and focused on the important things. I still suck at the game, I still backflip occasionally or miss the easiest open nets. I’m still not great with mechanics like dribbling, which I probably should be by now. Rotations in 3v3 are still a bit of a mystery to me, since I pretty much exclusively played 2v2. But I’m sure that if I keep up the grind, I can progress even further. And if I can, everyone can. This was the first commentated video I created in 3 years.

11:18 - If you liked it, let me know by leaving a like or a comment. Thanks to everyone who helped along the way. I might do more of these videos in the future. If you’re interested in any resource mentioned in this video, links are in the description. .