At the beginning of the game bots were just simple AI controlled non-playable characters. They could help or go against you and your team in a match. You could play a game full of bots or one would join when a player dropped out of a casual lobby. These bots would be extremely bad and sometimes even backfire and own goal This is how normal bots are.
Starting in 2019, a new foundation was born. It was called “RLBot”. It started as a Github page and allowed you to download a software that you could play against custom bots. It also had a very informative guide on how to make custom bots that even beginners could learn. This foundation was completely free but was barely known about.
In 2020, a few popular youtubers made videos about RLBot but it still was barely known. In 2022, a youtuber known as Rocket Sledge made a video about a revolutionary bot named “Necto”. This bot was predicted to beat the top 10% of Rocket League players and was proven in the video. This video blew up and people loved it. This inspired the creators of Necto to make an even better bot called “Nexto.”
This new bot could now beat the top 1% of players. Keep in mind that these Grand Champion players average over 1500 hours to get to their rank. To achieve such a good bot, the creator put it through a software called RLGym. This software would timelapse a bunch of the same bot playing against each other for 10s of thousands of hours. These timelapses would only take a few days though.
In January of 2023, a group of anonymous people figured out a way to put Nextos in ranked. This was horrible because this would decrease a lot of people ranks and sometime hours of progress from the amount of bots in the queues. This was also a huge deal because Rocket League has never had a big cheating event, it is known as a game that is “impossible” to cheat in.
Psyonix, the company of Rocket League soon removed and permanent banned all of the bots. They then kindly asked that RLBot stop releasing bots to the public, but they could keep the public bots public still.
Since then, no new bots have been released so nothing has really happened other than a few bots privately featured in youtube videos.
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