Rocket League cheaters are currently using AI in ranked matches

Jan 06, 2024

AI is coming for not just our jobs, but our ranks too.

First spotted by Tyler Wilde over at PCGamer, one Reddit user supposedly encountered a cheater when playing ranked Rocket League. Like many of us, Tyler initially brushed the clip off as an unhappy player, until he actually watched it.

Halfway through the clip (embedded below), it becomes blatant that something fishy is going on here. The supposed cheater in the clip is on the same team as post author, u/ghost_snyped, and the clip is from the cheater's perspective.

If, like me, you’re not massively experienced with Rocket League and only occasionally jump on for a friends’ sake, you might view this clip and assume the player to be really skilled at first. However, a closer look and it's easy to see that the level of skill shown off by the alleged cheater is inhuman.

And that's because the cheater is, literally, inhuman.

The cheater is actually a bot borne from RLGym. RLGym is a pretty rad machine-learning tool that can be used to train Rocket League bots, including the one shown in the above clip. Now, of course people were going to discover this and use it for nefarious means.

However, this is not what the tool was intended for, nor are bots necessarily new to Rocket League. It just so happens that someone has manipulated RLGym's machine learning bot for in-game gain. The news is that people will only us RLGym's tool to make their own newer and better bots.

RLGym also says that it does not condone the bot appearing in ranked matches, and appears committed to not letting cheaters abuse bots. In the meantime, Rocket League developer Psyonix told PCGamer that it is "actively investigating solutions" to the cheating problem.