Developers respond to Vatira’s #RocketLeagueIsDead campaign
Psyonix and Epic Games have released a statement about the status of Rocket League’s servers after long-standing DDoS issues.
Rocket League players, particularly those at high ranks, have been dealing with hackers and cheaters for well over a year.
With the attacks still rampant, former RLCS World Champion Axel ‘Vatira’ Touret declared that Rocket League is dead just last week.
The furious Frenchman then began a Twitter campaign under the hashtag #RocketLeagueIsDead, to which the developers have now responded.
Vatira’s campaign to fix DDoS issues
Vatira, a pro player for Karmine Corp, has rallied the Rocket League community to demand that the game’s hacking issues be fixed.
Other pros have been vocal about the issues. Back in July English pro Jack ‘ApparentlyJack’ Benton blasted the Rocket League developers for the same reason.
Now, Vatira has asked players to post with #RocketLeagueIsDead, and the campaign has quickly gathered a lot of steam.
A lot of big names have used the hashtag, including three-time RLCS World Champion Alexandre ‘Kaydop’ Courant and French YouTuber Thomas ‘Laink’ Iturralde, one half of the Wankil Studio YouTube channel which has over 2.7m subscribers.
Other high-profile players also posted their frustrations with this affecting their practice, including Alexis ‘zen’ Bernier, who said:
“To be honest, I’m just tired of this game. We can’t even grind, and we have RLCS tomorrow!
“It’s good to release updates but if the update is not working, you need to be more reactive to ban, is it that hard!?”
The anger and frustration then reached a fever pitch last week as DDoS attackers were even affecting RLCS LAN qualification matches.
Teams were disconnecting, putting players in awkward situations where they had to score on the empty net.
ApparentlyJack was vocal again, saying:
“It’s a complete joke that we don’t have admins in top 16 matches, especially in a regional where direct LAN qualification matches are on the line.
“We disconnected in game 1 vs Gentlemates and dropped 2 goals because of it, which cost us the game. Your rules pretty much force the other team to take advantage. It also happened in 3 other series within the span of 1 hour.”
Another former RLCS World Champion, Enzo ‘Seikoo’ Grondein, added:
“But let’s be honest, Rocket League, you guys are total idiots, everyone has deco/lag and we can’t do anything about it because you’re incompetent, even when it’s qualifiers for LANs.”
His coach, Dylan ‘eekso’ Pickering, added: “If I tweet what I want, I’d 100% get banned.
“I feel for all the scene, we are truly deprived and the game is dead and completely reliant on the community, it’s very sad to see.
“No dig at the players intended, it’s just miserable that we can’t play ranked and now even tournaments without regulation.”
Psyonix and Epic Games statement about Rocket League DDoS attacks
The developers explained that there have been two types of attacks on Rocket League’s servers: DOS and DDoS.
The former tricks the server into doing extra work so it can’t function, while the latter uses a lot of devices to flood a game server with data to interfere with players’ connections.
Originally, DOS attackers would join and force everyone else to disconnect to automatically be given a win via forfeit.
In response to this, developers say they optimised Rocket League’s server code to be far more resilient to attacks and added DDoS detection so these attackers’ wins didn’t count.
Then some turned to DDoS attacks, which achieved the same result just via a different method.
The developers claim to have banned a lot of accounts that were cheating in this way.
However, the statement also admits that defending from these attacks is becoming increasingly difficult:
“Attackers have evolved their tactics to new techniques, including the use of much bigger botnets. If previous attack methods were a drizzle, today’s attacks are a flood.”
Epic Games and Psyonix claim it is a game of “cat and mouse” as they try to stay ahead of cheaters and their new methods.
Epic say they have expanded their fleet of servers and network capacity to handle these larger attacks and claim to be identifying attacks in real time.
The developers insisted: “Expanding our prevention and detection efforts is a top priority for us.”
They plan to continue banning a significant number of cheaters and work on how they can ban attackers faster and more comprehensively.
This includes setting up ways to prevent attackers from returning to the game with alternate accounts.
Vatira responded to the statement somewhat positively, telling the developers:
“Communication is good and you need to keep us updated about the situation, we will see if the solution you guys work on is going to work this time and not for just a few weeks/months like usual.”
Vatira also thanked those who had joined his campaign:
“By the way, thank you to all the people and communities for being so involved in this movement.
“We are still waiting for a real solution and the best is yet to come. Keep letting them know we are not happy!”
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