Not Only Can Players Beat Me In Rocket League, But Now Machine Learning Bots Can Too... And They're Being Used To Cheat

Ok, honestly, some bots created by the RLBot team have been able to beat me for a long time already, so that part may not be anything new. What is RLBot? It's a team that programs custom bots of varying difficulty to be used in Rocket League to help train yourself, have fun in tournaments, or just have some fun with friends.

Offline, that is.

Of course you couldn't just take these bots online and use them to rank yourself up. The programming didn't allow that.

There's another player in this story, though, and that's RLGym. Despite being similar in name, these are two different groups. RLBot makes custom bots. RLGym was working on something different. Rather than program a bot, RLGym built Nexto, a bot to push things forward. It learned through "learning algorithms." Don't program it, tell it what's a "good" outcome, and them let it run tons of games and learn.

That's the short version for you. It's obviously a lot more complex than that, but now you have the basic idea.

RLGym then let RLBot put the bot in their API so players could mess around with it like they do other bots. All good as Nexto only learns at the gym, it's not learning while playing 1s with you and you can't use RLBot bots online...right?

Until someone took the bot and designed their own way into the online servers since RLBot's API doesn't allow that.

Now, Psyonix has got to find a way to keep the bots out of online and ranked matches. The team told PCGamer that is is aware "a small number of players" using the bot to cheat in Rocket League ranked play." They've also stated that they are working on a solution and asked RLBots to not upload anymore bots of this caliber until a solution is found.

If you want to get more in-depth with how Nexto works and how it found its way online, there's a fantastic reddit thread with the RLGym folks. Until a fix is made, Pysonix just recommends that you report behavior that warrants reporting, including farming rank.

Which I am sure that means ever person that beats you must be using the bot, right? That's what I'm going to say in my games!