Writingbolt's Creation

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ROCKET LEAGUE NEEDS A FEMALE PLAYER’S PERSPECTIVE ON…EVERYTHING; PERIOD AND THE EXCLAMATION POINT.

At least, I want to hear from female fans of the game.

Every time I look up something YouTube-ish about Rocket League, I get a dozen or so videos from guys who are (assumed) in their twenties and who have very select artistic interests. [The British variety seem to trip over their own saliva; ‘just saying.] Every one has specific colors they like (usually black to match their wardrobes and dark studio spaces with giant microphones) and little to no tolerance/interest for most of the items offered in the game. They also have sponsorship and money to blow on stuff before other players get to see any of it.

[And, some, if not all, of these YouTube people claim they don’t even bother with “anthems” (because all they do is talk over gameplay, which they reduce to short clips of dazzling scoring efforts and boasting titles some of us players can only imagine achieving). Do they really play that well or just get handed titles for advertising the game? They probably have the most expensive and advanced controllers to play, too…and better reflexes and don’t sweat as much as I do.

But, without the anthems, I’d probably go nuts, after a while. I don’t like most anthems; some are downright annoying, and jerks know it, which is why they use those songs to drive other players away, mental weaponry at its worst. But, you need SOMETHING to hear during gameplay, something to motivate you. If all you get is silence or a blur of engine sounds and explosions, it gets tiresome faster.

I recommend Brakes Mistakes (which really sounds like Watch Me Go) by Julie Buchanan; best anthem from Season 5 (I think). Or, try one of the decent options from Phill Boucher or Kevin Riepl. Watch out for clever tracks like Season 11’s Crickets sound effect, Season 12’s Bob’s Ramen ad/jingle and Dial-Up twelve-second sound effect and Season 13’s dance track (4 Tonight).

So, enjoy your thirty-second highlight reals you might as well get with “god” mod and training spaces, you who live on YouTube. You’ll be back on paid vacation, soon enough, and making more excuses in your next installment of the ME Channel Show; don’t forget to show off the great tan and physique you got…on your vacation.]

When I look at every new season’s stuff/offerings, I can see the game trying to appeal to a diverse audience…and, usually, failing. I agree with some of what the YouTube “critics” are saying but also have more respect for the more youthful, creative items (and am okay with more than one color choice…just not sky blue, lime, black, grey or pink, in most cases).** I don’t dismiss something just because it’s not “sick” and edgy.

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**What’s wrong with sky blue, pink, lime, black and/or grey?

Well, while I am at it, I could also throw in just about every other color the game gets wrong, sometimes. Orange often looks yellow. Lime often looks like a slightly sicker saffron/yellow (and that’s not the cool kind of “sicker”). Purple sometimes turns indigo or blue, which really upsets me.

Pink is good in small doses and when it looks like quality bubblegum; otherwise it’s puke…though when pink is used as a lit/holographic item, it seems to be better than purple, as if pink lit IS purple lit.

Sky blue used to be a color I liked…until Rocket League made it a staple color and found a million ways to make me nauseous with it. So, now, I detest most sky-blue items. [That paint-brush antenna and matching bucket can rot you know where.]

Black would be great if I could get a decent car coated in it, with a matte finish. But, no, instead, you typically get an item that lacks any color or appeal…it’s just black, dull, dark, hard to see and otherwise basic. You offer a black version of a Premium/Rocket Pass (bought) car…and it might as well be the starter version; what difference do the little edges turned black make? I have yet to see a Black variant of a car that gets me excited, at all. Either paint the car black or leave this out. [Titanium white can be similarly bothersome when it’s white in the wrong places, breaking up an otherwise good decal/paint finish like a bad painting.]

Grey has also been one of my favorite colors, but Rocket League makes it a cheap clone of the standard items you cannot give or trade with anyone. So, enjoy duplicates for no reason whatsoever and don’t think about the extra time you just spent to get them, when you could have been getting a cooler item in a color you actually like. So, enjoy duplicates for no reason whatsoever and don’t think about the extra time you just spent to get them, when you could have been getting a cooler item in a color you actually like. [You see what I did there?]

Lime, in most cases, is nauseating; it just is. This isn’t the cool neon/glow-in-the-dark sort of green you might favor; this is a very mucus…booger…bad slime color. At best, it’s TMNT mutagen. Now, pair that lime up with a pinkish purple and put that on the only decent tentacle’d wheels, boost and trail the game has offered so far…and you might want two puke buckets. Way to fail, you money-grabbing game artists; you are the monsters in the Beast Box.

[I may be repeating some things from other rants I’ve made.]

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I highly doubt any respectable female fan would even use the word “edgy” (or “sick”). So, I want to see a woman’s perspective on the game. [Unless…all female players are smarter than the guys and doing more with their lives. Then, ignore what I am saying, ladies. You’re doing just fine. Let the guys be “foolcrum.”]

Every “season” (three months per season, four seasons per year), Rocket League pulls some stupid moves and messes up what could be much better “swag” for the players who try so hard to enjoy the game.

[I am not speaking for those players who give the game five percent of their play time, who use the most basic stuff and whatever scraps they get tossed for just signing in to play once in a blue moon. If you’re guilty of being “carried” to some high rank and collected benefits (like a fancy goal explosion or decal), you don’t care enough to read what I have to say. It doesn’t really matter/apply to you.]

I don’t know who the artists are, but they need some help. And, if they need financial help (as there has been so much pitch for “supporting the artists”), they need to talk to the boss who’s cruising around on his yacht like that Grand-Theft-Auto version of Ned Flanders in LA-Z Rider. Color combos typically disappoint if not disgust. [Who pairs cantaloupe orange with sky blue other than maybe Miami, Florida in the 1980s?…which was a time before most players existed, thus they would call these concepts antique. Who puts lime with pink or a pinkish purple?] SO many items have potential but also exhibit room for major improvement. Reviewers are giving passing grades to stuff that just typically disappoints, evaluating one set of trash better than another. It’s not a point of pride for the game designers.

I get the feeling the artists have been struggling for some time, like those who slaved for Walt Disney, year after year, to make animation that earned awards. It’s slave labor instead of inspired exhibition. Like so many creative product lines, there will be a few gems that show divine inspiration…but there will be plenty more pieces of junk no one respects for long or at all. And, that’s a shame because I can see so much potential.

I also see themes that don’t hold up or come as advertised. For example, you pitch a forest theme (with no hint of spooks or excess Halloween swag) and then reveal it as a spooky forest theme…with only maybe half of the items reflecting that theme. That seems to happen too often, lately, probably since Season 6 went “animated.” Actually, Season 8, with the street art, was rather consistent and decent. But, everything started falling apart with Season 9. Free-player chase items started looking really crappy. And, premiums raised eyebrows with concern. WAY too many junky, uninspired wheel sets. Lookalike boosts and trails with no style, whatsoever. [It’s a spooky forest theme. How about a trail of ghosts or a lumberjack boost spitting out wood chips and tree branches? Maybe a boost/trail of moths and street light to go with the other moth items? A flashlight beam that produces shadow puppets?] Animated decals that are confusing at best (a forest decal that looks more like pulsating veins, which is really disappointing), and adding touches of color to the wrong places does nothing to improve them. Artistic waste, all around. I feel the urge to scream, throw stuff and cry, every season, for some reason. It’s a bad, bad, bad romance.

I don’t know if adding seasons of duplicate junk takes up memory space or affects server performance, but if it does all of that, these amassing seasonal collections need to stop. And, trading needs to be brought back/improved. The whole Fortnite merger/limitation of trade-ins is trash forcing players to sit on the stuff of past relationships they wish they could discard and/or burn. Even a normal, functional computer recognizes duplicate files and asks why you’d want to keep both copies. If you still want the duplicate, the computer slaps a special little added title to the file. You don’t have two duplicate files stacked on top of each other after trading in a fortune of other items, reading about some Fortnite policy that sucks or supposedly working up levels in a game just to get a duplicate sky-blue trail.

You want to make more money off players? Well, you must have plenty of idiots feeding your monster, because the sensible folks are not buying so much. We see garbage, and we don’t want more of it. We don’t need to pay three bucks every time we want to hear a song we like for five seconds…we just stream music on a player we actually can enjoy without feeling like dirt and ignore your stupid sound system. You’d get more people willing to pay for other things if you let them upload anthems they liked to their profiles…but, then, you’d probably have to filter some or all of that because creeps and freaks would start injecting music not appropriate for most people, especially kids who DO play as well as drug-fed adults. [I feel bad for the kids exposed to trashy people and behavior, but their parents aren’t likely very attentive, either.]

Speaking of filters……
[Nah. I’ve already ranted about how Rocket League filters suck. I won’t duplicate my rants if I can avoid it.]

Anthems should cost 50 cents/credits, at most. You’re borrowing a sound bite of a song people can stream other ways for better value. You’re luring people into paying to use a song title in a game for a fraction of the time. [“Yeaaah! That’s my jam…in this game. I get to hear a tidbit of it every time I score…and it only cost me more than it would cost to get a used CD of the whole album and play that on a CD player I could pair with a headset while playing this crazy game.”] People are selling CDs for pennies because more and more people are finding other digital ways to get the same music, and they’re not listening to sample clips for three bucks apiece.

[Real genius, Rocket League. Your biggest customer base doesn’t have the brain cells left to see their own financial mishaps. And, the other “big spenders” are paid to advertise for you; it’s like a book becoming a bestseller just because it gets the right TV support to hand out enough copies to qualify for that title.]

You’d also see more investment if you lowered prices on things that should never be as expensive as you make them, including goal explosions which you occasionally give away for a song, after advertising them for 20+ bucks. Who wants to see you give something away for a dime or nothing after they paid twenty-five bucks? That’s just rude. Try five bucks per goal explosion. That seems more fair.

Damn, let a bunny-gal-loving guy get his Buffy and maybe that missile strike of awesomeness, so I can punish all the jerks I keep finding (too often). I’m not dishing out twenty-five bucks just to see what I paid for get screwed up somehow when you make changes to the game, like having an anthem set to play when the game fails to properly function and plays no music. That’s a horrible investment strategy. I used to think being a “free player” meant you were a free-loader who deserved to get kicked, now and then. Now, I think free players are probably better off and free to be jerks as much as the fools who spend all their rent money and are not sure they’ll enjoy that. Paying to rent digital art that gets trashed or screwed up too often…..this isn’t rocket science, people.

It’s not about making a fortune on one item (or selling a decent item for too little, maybe). It’s about charging just enough to respect the designers of those items while still being affordable and fair to players who never really OWN any of this stuff…they just get to borrow it in one messed-up game…and designing stuff that makes sense (versus adding bits of color to something in a horrible way and calling it a worthy variant). If you add up the money people spend on this game, they probably paid more to play a game that frustrates and upsets (while failing to make the most of the community aspect because they suck at making friends) than they paid for a cartridge game/system that they probably get more out of just playing alone or with family (and friends…if they have any). I get more joy out of replaying the original Legend of Zelda and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 for the NES than I get from Rocket League, on an average day (though even that old TMNT game has lost its charm after playing so many other games and me experiencing the hard truths of aging).

You consistently talk about making changes and improvements, namely to servers to improve smooth gameplay, yet at least one big section of your fan base continues to suffer as it always has. Your changes improve nothing. Try fixing the prize system, altogether, for starters. That includes the casual “drops,” which, for me, too often upset and rarely please, at all. Forget making cosmetic changes to how your car explodes, as if that’s why we play…to explode cars. You don’t need to fuel the jerks in this game. They already consume enough Monster and bull body parts. Or, how about explaining why/fixing certain goal explosions (namely a “Premium” one you go so far to promote) don’t work in certain game modes, like Rumble or Hoops, leaving me with the Standard of boredom.

[That new demolition relocation/camera thing? I think it sucks, and so do those teammate boost meter circles (pointless); what am I going to gain from knowing how much boost my team has? They usually waste it, anyway, and get in my way when I go to get some…so I go without and whiff too much. I have yet to notice the difference in demolition sounds (between teammates and the other team). But, I have noticed how opposing teams, typically playing on a suped-up PC or Playstation/Xbox system, have amazing hearing and can detect me coming up behind them at every damn turn (yet they can get around my glitchy, lagging motion, as I sort of drift through the air whenever I get bumped or jump, and demolish me just fine…over and over until I don’t want to play, anymore).]

I think you’re giving everyone who doesn’t use the Nintendo Switch an edge to be bigger jerks than they already are, while Switch users (who I presume are mostly kids who like to depict themselves as colorful characters from the other more fun, childlike games they play) get diddly squat and abused.

[Be honest. You added the Nintendo Switch audience just to trick young fools into spending their parents’ money on perpetual failure for a system not fit to play this game. Didn’t you.]

In short, Rocket League continues to be a love-hate relationship, a real gut-wrencher. You look at your mate and see so much potential, but you can’t get through to them. You scream, “Give me fuel. Give me fire. Give me that which I desire.” But, what you essentially get is ignorance, mayhem and foolishness. You either put up with the mountains of crap or power through the breakup.

LADIES! GIRLS, however old you may be. If you play Rocket League, PLEASE let me know your thoughts. I must know. I won’t badger you to hit a LIKE or SUBSCRIBE button. And, are there any other artistic souls out there who give this game a chance? Can I help the artistic team of this game, somehow? Can I? I am sure, with some other/outside input, they could reduce the (duplicating) waste and put out some really pleasing seasons. If people listen, I tend to attract profits. But, you have to listen. Are you listening? Or, is the sweetness not concerned with you?