‘Rocket League’ developer is “investigating solutions” to AI cheats in ranked matches

Psyonix, the developer behind Rocket League, has confirmed that the studio is currently “investigating solutions” to tackle AI cheats.

According to Pysonix, “a small number of players” are currently using Nexto (a bot that uses AI and reinforcement learning algorithms to optimise play) to compete in ranked matches, giving them a massively unfair advantage.

Speaking to PC Gamer, the creator of the Nexto bot confirmed “we’re taking steps to ensure our bots can’t be abused in the future and we can’t wait to show everyone the exciting projects we’ve been working on.”

Psyonix also confirmed it was “actively investigating solutions” to the problem in the report.

I think I just played a bot in that had 1930 MMR. They couldn’t aerial or anything but had perfect flicks and were typing saying they were real. At first I thought it was a boosted player but then they had the best ground control and flicks so idk what do you guys think pic.twitter.com/uSHkCAq0si

— GarrettG (@GarrettG) January 4, 2023

Speaking during a Reddit Q&A last week Aech, one of the authors of RLGym which was used to train Nexto, said the cheating was “incredibly disheartening. I love this game, I love machine learning, and I’m incredibly proud of the RLGym community. Seeing all our hard work and passion abused like this is crushing.”

“We have let Psyonix know about the cheat and that we’re open to helping them if they decide we can do something useful for them,” he added. “They did ask us not to publicly release any more bots of this caliber until they get the situation under control.”

Aech went on to say: “Nexto was exceptionally hard to make. It took an enormous engineering effort and a lot of community support to do, and it is not easily replicable. That being said, there is now clearly an incentive for bad actors to try making bots that are better than Nexto, so I think we have to assume something better will appear eventually.”

In other news, Riot Games has released a statement regarding the League of Legends cinematic launched alongside Season 2023, claiming it “missed the mark” due to “unprecedented circumstances” cropping up.