Rocket League Championship Series 2021-2022

Introduction: Rocket League & RLCS

Rocket League is a vehicular soccer video game developed and published by Psyonix. The game was first released for Microsoft Windows and PlayStation 4 in July 2015, with ports for Xbox One and Nintendo Switch being released later on.

Described as "soccer, but with rocket-powered cars", Rocket League has up to eight players assigned to each of the two teams, using rocket-powered vehicles to hit a ball into their opponent's goal and score points over the course of a match. The game includes single-player and multiplayer modes that can be played both locally and online, including cross-platform play between all versions. Later updates for the game enabled the ability to modify core rules and added new game modes, including ones based on ice hockey and basketball.

[...]

Rocket League was praised for its gameplay improvements over Battle-Cars, as well as its graphics and overall presentation, although some criticism was directed towards the game's physics engine. The game earned a number of industry awards, and saw over 10 million sales and 40 million players by the beginning of 2018. Rocket League has also been adopted as an esport, with professional players participating through ESL and Major League Gaming along with Psyonix's own Rocket League Championship Series (RLCS). [...]

Rocket League Wikipédia page

The Rocket League Championship Series (RLCS) is an annual (previously semiannual) Rocket League Esports tournament series produced by Psyonix, the game's developer. It consists of qualification splits in North America, South America, Europe, Oceania, Middle East/North Africa, Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa, and culminates in a playoff bracket with teams from those regions. The qualification rounds are played as an online round-robin tournament and the finals are played live in different cities. [...]

RLCS Wikipédia page

Content

The datasets present Rocket League Championship Series 2021-2022 available data, for every single one region around the world ([EU] Europe, [NA] North America, [SAM] South America, [OCE] Oceania, [MENA] Middle East & North Africa, [APAC] Asia Pacific North/South and [SSA] Sub-Saharan African), including International Majors (Tiebreaker Match and APAC Qualifiers included) and the World Championship.

All information available with these datasets was obtained using both octane.gg and ballchasing.com APIs and cover the following events (pending data availability*):

Fall Split

• Regionals 1, 2, 3 (All regions - Invitational Qualifiers, Closed Qualifiers and Main Events)
• Fall Major - Asia-Pacific Qualifier
• Fall Major - North America Tiebreaker (Complexity Gaming vs. Spacestation Gaming)
• Fall Major - Main Event

Winter Split

• Regionals 1, 2, 3 (All regions - Closed Qualifiers and Main Events)
• Winter Major - Asia-Pacific Qualifier
• Winter Major - Main Event

Spring Split

• Regional 1, 2, 3 (All regions - Closed Qualifiers and Main Events)
• Spring Major - Asia-Pacific Qualifier
• Spring Major - Main Event

World Championship

• Wildcard Stage (Play-In)
• Group Stage
• Playoffs

* The work of the octane.gg team, where most of the information are coming from, is to parse RLCS data posted on ballchasing.com, which is using Saltie's carball library to decompile .replay files associated with each game of the season. If a game replay has not been uploaded to ballchasing.com or saved to be decompiled, then information (or a major part of them) associated with the game will not be available in datasets. That is why Open Qualifiers games are not in datasets, because these event phases are not covered enough by the community. Some information from Qualifiers and minor / new regions (OCE, SAM, MENA, APAC, SSA) could also be missing.

** Features' metadata will be edited at the end of the season.

For better understatement

Regarding Rocket League gameplay

• Rocket League scoring.
• Pads & Boost
• Powerslide: when a player use boost while drifting.
• Unreal Units: Unreal Engine (Rocket League game engine) used UU as inside metric system, for distance 1 UU is equal to 1 cm.
• Supersonic speed: reachable car speed at 2.2k UU/s which able a player to demolish an opponent, see more about Supersonic speed and Max Speed with this video.
• Overtime: Rocket League games can't generally end with a tie and RLCS match are not exception. An overtime is an unlimited second period of the game where the first team to score win the game.

Regarding the RLCS

• RLCS rules: regions, splits and more.
• Best of 5/7: depending on the stage of an event, an RLCS match can be played to the best of 5 or 7 games, with special treatment for the Fall Split finals played in 2 winning sets of BO7.

Acknowledgements

Many thank to octane.gg team - Finnerdt, Derek "dRekt" Nilsen, Swami, Elliot "Slybae" McSheen & Kartik - for the constant work on competitive Rocket League scenes and for providing the reliable API.

Many thanks to Can't Fly for this amazing work on ballchasing.com through the years, from building the website as the Rocket League replays hub to designing the associated API.

Many thanks to Saltie team for designing carball, the .replay files decompiling library, and for other tools created to help the community.

And finally, many thanks to Psyonix (Epic Games) for the work done with Rocket League and the RLCS, and to community members (players, coaches, casters, referees) and RLCS' admins contributing to the project by saving replay files on ballchasing.com.

Inspiration

• Data visualisation.
• Data analysis.
• Match outcome prediction.

Repository

The present datasets are attached to the following project / GitHub repository: rlcs_data.