The true story of how Bots invaded Rocket League

[@WaytonPilkin]

A huge thank you to everyone who made this project possible

[@ZanderMiller213]

500k lets go man

[@Winter_vr_on_top]

Hi wayton

[@kibbycaps]

Awesome you are soon going to be known of by nearly all the comunity

[@daveberry3741]

Thank you so much for the content keep it up bro

[@jeremythomas1081]

As a person who loves to play dropshot as a gold i always play against champs and diamonds im wishing a hard reset comes soon.

[@ac2256]

These documentaries are always straight up quality Keep up the good work my dude

[@jout738]

In my opinion they should keep making even better Rocket League bots, but not publicaly give it to random humans to use. The better Rocket League bots could be used in rlsc to compete against the best RL players in the world, so we can see can they beat the best RL players in the world and become the new world champions in the world in RL.

[@tarotangrine3681]

Fr

[@kongoll]

@@jout738 That's not how it would work generally; in all cases we've seen where bots start to surpass human capability, they don't go head to head. I think there would be a parallel competition for bots exclusively considering once the bots have reached a certain level, humans will never beat them again.

[@DVigilante7]

​@@kongoll pretty soon, bots are going to take over the world 🤖🌎

[@shadowyzephyr]

@@jout738 they are doing this (or trying to)

[@DABOSS190]

This entire bot thing was one of the craziest things to happen in rocket league so far

[@christiantaylor1495]

And I didn't even notice a difference because I didn't watch KZbin

[@Supercharge7868]

Correction, THE craziest thing to ever happen.

[@gamerandcontroller9129]

Yeah, but console players are going “wait, what are you guys talking about?”

[@Supercharge7868]

@@gamerandcontroller9129 we know exactly what these guys are talking about

[@aqua-bery]

@@christiantaylor1495 or frequent reddit

[@khaseem_srt]

Wayton doesn’t upload too much but when he does 😈 the camera angles go hard

[@enrique593]

how did you reply a day ago when this was posted 45 minutes ago? is this just only me or the video giving me some vibes

[@muheebkhalid9717]

@@enrique593 it was premiered so i think he commented then

[@khaseem_srt]

@@enrique593I’m a bot, we are not just in rocket league

[@enverko]

Your production quality is unmatched in the RL scene. This is like a short movie!

[@kingsofspencer]

It’s not unmatched. You forgot about sunless

[@enverko]

@@kingsofspencer Sunless does produce some serious high quality content, but wayton has been continuously stepping up his game. I consider his content to be of higher quality.

[@Adrian-YT]

Im the 100 like on this comment xd

[@Snookbone]

Well done on Liking The Thing

[@DiegoTeliz]

There are many RL content creators, but Wayton's production quality and story telling is just another level 👏

[@Snookbone]

Well done on Liking The Thing

[@aKhemu]

i cannot thank you enough for making videos with this amount of work put into them. great research, great storytelling and executed just great as well.

[@_Onward]

Your production quality is remarkable and is quite reminiscent of LEMMINOs content in terms of research and narration. The way you’ve merged this cinematic and professional documentary style commentary content with the complexities and depth that comes with a topic as unique as Rocket League is genuinely amazing and I’m glad that you’ve found such success with it. Keep it up!!

[@piettrosantos9348]

This is lowkey one of the best videos I’ve ever watched in my entire life… The editing feels as good as movie and the way you tell the story is unmatched. Great job man.

[@MrShanester117]

That’s just sad. And if it’s one of the best videos you ever saw how is that low key?

[@sircarlos3767]

The thing is despite most people coming together to avoid something like this again there is definitely gonna be someone who is developing and releasing a much higher level bot with harder to detect movements. It probably already exists and is just not publicly spread yet

[@teo2157]

Ai randomisation is not hard to include. Or even hard code some noise or bad decisions

[@paulie-g]

@@teo2157 Oh, but it is. Neural networks are black boxes, so you can't tweak them directly. You'd have to find a way to do work at the output and that's tricky because you haven't done the feature extraction yourself. In any case, statistical analysis (if RL develops one) of bot gameplay against human gameplay is going to detect it easily and, while it isn't practical to run it on all players/matches all of the time, it would be trivial to do so upon report. The only way around that is to train the model on a corpus of human gameplay and rewarding it not for winning, but for closely matching human play. This is a completely different setup and would require an absolutely humongous corpus of real matches, which doesn't and likely won't ever (without RL's cooperation) exist.

[@teo2157]

​@@paulie-g Perfectly valid points, but i still think we have methods to introduce randomness. AI researchers have been experimenting with various techniques to introduce randomness or errors into AI models to make them more robust and adaptable to different situations. For instance, some researchers have used techniques like dropout, which randomly drops out neurons during training. I'm sure this could be one of many techniques to introduce quirks and randomness Also, The I developers could also just use adversarial training or your suggestion of just imitation learning, which while suboptimal, I really doubt that it would be too difficult to find enough material to through off any statistical analysis anti-cheat. And also, if worst comes to worst, just simply hard code imperfections, and randomly adjust the bot's reaction time or accuracy to simulate human-like errors. (At the cost of performance)

[@paulie-g]

@@teo2157 It's not about randomness or reaction time or errors. Models that are not specifically trained to imitate human performance are going to have statistically very significant differences with human play. It's telling that not only did players identify bots, but were able to clearly state discernible and easy to measure features of their play. It's one thing to train models on 100k+ hours of play when it is cheaply produced by another copy of the model in real time and never stored. How are you going to get that much from humans and who pays for the storage? It's entirely off-limits to hobbyists for cost reasons, and anyone RL or another server doesn't cooperate with for access reasons.

[@teo2157]

@@paulie-g but aren’t we talking about simply making it harder for anti cheat to detect statistically impossible gameplay? like, take any other game with anti cheat, the players usually know if a player is hacking, of course, to solve this would be just as you said, training the model on actual human gameplay. but the point is to foil the anti cheat.

[@rap_lover321]

waytons ability to turn a video game into a full documentary is crazy. Keep up the great work.

[@tele_gram-Covert_goblue]

👆👆HIT ME UP AND TEST ME ON TELEGRAM, now you have won a Gift congratulations 🎁🎁

[@Snookbone]

Well done on Liking The Thing

[@StuffByDrew]

Can’t wait! Your stuff got me from d1 to c3, and it’s been fun to see your story/narrative videos get better and better! Cheers.

[@christiantaylor1495]

He made me derank

[@StuffByDrew]

Sorry lol not every night’s a good night

[@Notriz.]

dude same, thanks to him my rotation and decision making are far way better, I was d1 months ago and I couldn't rank up until I watch his videos, now I'm c3

[@TuxicToiger]

Bro's like the anttvenom of RL

[@Atomz09]

@@Notriz. if you’re still looking to improve, i suggest watching Oz Rl Analyst’s ssl in one minute series. I went from c3 to gc2 in one week

[@DrMario_666]

“Sold it on their discord… for free!” Cracked me up

[@tazer2151]

I followed this chain of evens from the beginning and it is easily one of the most insane things in gaming history. We were shown that just machine learning can be better at games than most humans within 2 months, while people using it in competitive is scummy for sure, this showing of machine learning and AI is an amazing sign for the future and I hope they are allowed to release more bots in the future.

[@SuperJoF]

40 years*

[@SilverBirchMC]

there is no doubt that this kind of thing will happen over and over again as new AI's are created. the unpreparedness is the basis for almost all ethical debates of AI.

[@throwaway3645]

I remember this being done in Dota 2 back in 2015. The exact same process and method. I’m shocked it took this long for it to happen to rocket league.

[@TussleRox]

Wayton, you’re a true talent. Your cinematographic abilities are incredible. I could see you being a filmmaker one day. Absolutely incredible quality. Thank you for taking the time to make this so we can all watch and enjoy. You a real one.

[@aqua-bery]

Even with all the buzz around the bots, not only have I not ever encountered a cheater, but it seems like phsyonix was able to, almost completely, remove the cheater and lately I've not seen people complaining about it almost at all. Nice job phsy

[@henrykaufman5177]

Congrats on 500k Wayton! You deserve every bit of it!

[@jamilshahror2920]

I really like how you manage to keep me attached to your video. Congrats for being a mutual entertainer for the whole community of the game.

[@rampalar3557]

I thought i'd never see the day where calling someone a bot in Rocket League is a compliment

[@ChaoticVengace]

Such a great story teller, 13 minutes felt like a 30 minute short film. The suspenseful music, flickering lights during crucial moments. Awesome work :)

[@LawlerTV]

Great stuff as always Wayton 👍

[@russellvanderwoude4893]

Wayton’s videos have so much quality. Great research, and very well made video!

[@DingoZed]

"We always knew that it was technically possible to do but the scale of it was not expected at all" - Rolv (This is a terrifying quote for the future of AI considering we're on a MASSIVE AI boom right now in 2023)

[@nootmeh]

This RL bot situation shows how people can take one thing which is beneficial and completely flip it upside down and not have anything and ruin the fun for others. We cldve had bots at SSL level which wldve helped us play better, practice with them and see how far can a bot go, but just cuz of few people, we might never see a bot above 2000mmr ever again.... truly sucks. Also wayton, this video was a really high quality video, the editing to the music used, everything was very immersive, this might be one of your best videos yet. Congrats on 500K subs btw

[@decentvids2969]

Its insane how fast bots are getting better and better, eventually they might even surpass humans.

[@Johnpdf]

Well technically they should

[@sunshot_addict]

they already did tho

[@siddhantgarg6899]

bots already surpassed humans in some decades we will see terminators irl

[@redragon9588]

bots can and do surpass humans in almost everything, give it some time and bots will be better at literally everything

[@YoutubeDictatorship2024]

@@redragon9588reproducing. No matter how intelligent ai becomes they still will not have the ability to have sexual intercourse and create a totally unique life force from it.

[@Tekay37]

Great video! There had been a player using the bot in ranked in June 2022 and streaming it. He was shut down very quickly because both those who watched a lot of Bot Training at that time and those who developed the bots quickly informed Psyonix about it. I wouldn't be surprised the reason Psyonix was able to accurately detect and shut down all bot accounts within just a few weeks was because they had about 6 months of a head start and there was not any fuss about it.

[@Kelvenocity]

congrats on 500k wayton!

[@Joe_Blow_]

Dude really set the premier for 24 hours from now

[@spazneria]

You know, I see this and I don't see a short documentary about cheaters in a video game, I see a young man working on his art form. Great stuff. Keep it up, you're opening doors you don't know yet

[@silentblackhole]

Great video man. I'm mainly been a Counter Strike player over the years. We have had to deal with hacking pretty much the entire time. The game allows just simple hacks to be so powerful, like just think of how powerful seeing through walls would be in an FPS. I feel jealous that your game has had such a clean non hacking experience. All I can say is that the skill level has been raised for how hard is is to create a bot. Now that these bot creators have removed their code and their creation is banned. This won't stop other people with the skill level to creat their own though. My advice to RL would be to prepare for the return of bots, and pay attention to small accounts that may use this. Not everyone that creates hacks will release them like happened this time. You got lucky. Now prepare for more stealthy hacks. Good luck.

[@EboRL]

Not often am I blown away by the quality of a video, but this video was outstanding. It was incredibly engaging and informative throughout and was structured beautifully. Keep up the great work Wayton!

[@cedi2929]

Once again had chills. 10/10 videos as always!

[@prozazo11]

the effort put in this video is wild. Thanks man

[@brendanjohnjones]

The production is juicy my guy

[@9425]

Rocket League should hire the devs from RLBot and build their bots into the game. Win win for everyone.

[@Rispy]

bakkesmod is literally the meghack of geometry dash, everyone uses them if they can and the communities would be drastically different without their existence.

[@raaghavdatta7814]

Bro you are a genuinely good storyteller. You should get to make stuff like documentaries in rocket league scene like NRG's journey to win s8 or BDS world championship

[@stormi2534]

Holy, this is so well put together. Big ups Wayton!

[@dboylee23]

When I started playing SFV again I noticed when I played offline again that the highest bot lvl was about as good as a high bronze. They know what's happening but still don't have the capacity a person does to pull off fakes or frame traps. So basically as soon as you learn how to use 1 Char. you can always beat the CPU version because you know more about the limits than the program reading the actual numbers

[@sunzy6629]

You know I hate that bots are being abused in-game like this, but at the same time, I can't help but be proud it took a bot the equivalent of 30 years to reach my skill level.

[@nineonine9082]

Also weird to think you find a loophole in the bot, but if you play it enough, that loophole will stop working, though I mean it could take a year of 24/7 matches.

[@J_vb]

I remember when from 2017-2018 it felt like a friend of mine and me were playing against bots in ranked in 90% of the online games (diamond/champ). Their movement was off, they all had privat steam accounts, didn’t Chat and just felt weird to play against. But it seems they were part of some other group.

[@Hazza]

this is one of the best made rocket league videos i've seen ever, great job dude

[@henningrydberg4341]

Man imagine if the bots could be tuned, so that u play against a platinum to practice, but like in normal RL. Instead of allstar bots its just bronze, plat, champ etc etc...

[@KazuLP]

I encountered those bots as well in many ranked matches back than. Even got some saved replays of those matches. But it's good they've been able to get this bots out of the game again.

[@chipmunk786]

One can see the effort you put in. Thanks for the high-quality entertainment.

[@mitsevox]

wow this walton guy is a pretty good editor

[@kibbycaps]

Wayton 🤣

[@bruhwhat8586]

walter?

[@reggiton1]

I just wanna say, that within 9 hours you gained 1k subscribers which is crazy to me, your content is mindblowing

[@nathanfife2890]

I love documentaries style videos like this, awesome work

[@owfi]

I played a 3 stack of bots in a rumble tourney with my two friends. They all queued up at the same time and we pretty much instantly knew they were bots. The kickoff and the lack of aerials confirmed our suspicions but we're top 100 rumble so it wasn't a big deal. The bots only used power ups for a save, other than that never. Then when the loser behind the screen got tilted he made all 3 of them ff and leave at the same time.

[@justonemacaroni]

These types of videos are always so interesting to watch, keep it up!

[@coltonjimmerson5030]

Your documentaries always explain everything well. Keep up the great work

[@wizardly9211]

The whole bot thing is actually pretty cool, in fact it's innovative. But it really should have *only* stayed offline or on the website. These bots are pretty much a resurgence of the TF2 bot crisis

[@ashleycrago5223]

The best thing about this whole situation, is that all the kids who boosted their account to get S8 GC tags, are now being slowly smashed down to diamond again and S8 GC tags are now not an indicator of skill at all.

[@WillSinks]

Nice work Wayton! The most sci fi part of this is how they figured out how to train the bot concurrently and sped up at the same time, cramming years of learning into real time minutes. That’s a literal plot point in Accelerando- a wild book about singularities - and is that book’s definition of it! I didn’t realize that was what made this take off like it did

[@shadowyzephyr]

I mean it already has been done in other games before.

[@WillSinks]

@@shadowyzephyr first time i've heard of something like this, cool though

[@i1a2159]

Accelerated training is actually relatively common in machine learning :) it is definitely very interesting

[@hgrx6757]

Ty for this video, i have seen a bot in my rl game but i didnt know anything about how they came in the game. Ty for enlightening me on the subject👍

[@Blockflote26]

The quality of these documentaries, man. Amazing work of research. Keep it up, Wayton.

[@mrgunnymadnesss]

Top tier, grade a, chefs kiss production quality from Wayton...again. Keep it up dude

[@RisageYT]

Really high quality documentary for a 10 minute rocket league video

[@predyaxc]

You can count on me when I say, when your teammate disconnects from a casual match and a bot replaces him, it's nowhere near bronze or gold. Sometimes even when it is mid and you pass to him, he can get a pretty rough shot for the opponent, so I don't think rocket league bots are anywhere near bronze. Edit: nvm i watched later the next 30 seconds and i got my message..

[@Sarnt_T]

Bro, this video was nuts. I feel like I'm watching a literal documentary.

[@OLodz-_-og]

There’s a new bot called Jess and hit has 8 ping and it’s a Diamond 3 almost to a champ and it says GG after the games

[@EllenNystedt_TurochNatur]

You are the most cinematic person Ove ever seen and you really live into the things Thats happening

[@alanconese.258]

this minidocumentary was just PERFECT.

[@ericenica3388]

I love rl documentaries man theyre so cool, especially the ones by wayton.

[@nicholascoello7951]

I just watched the video and at the end it said 501k subscribers. For me when I’m writing this it was made 6 days ago. He has 503k now. He gained 2000 subscribers in 6 days from I think one recent video? Congratulations Wayton 👍. Edit: Also, I just realized I don’t know much about this stuff, and 2000 subscribers might be average in 6 days so maybe someone can tell me?

[@electricbelt]

should've ended with a "or they just have a good gaming chair", if it wasn't a serious doc 💀

[@rednaxela7875]

This is a scinematic masterpiece, well done!

[@Bumselumse]

Well deserved 500k Wayton, keep up the great work

[@aakarshgupta7791]

I am a Rl player from Indian server. Yesterday I got matched to a bot for the first time in RL. As soon as the game started it started blabbering stuff like its Name and that don't search its name on Google and that there are multiple modes we can set it by just commenting in chat like 'ballchase' or 'defend' or 'attack'. At first I thought it was definitely a troll but when I saved the replay and saw its movements I was 100% sure it was a bot. It's insane that there's not just Nexto but a whole lot of other bots as well in ranked rn.

[@calebjardine7]

Wow, I can tell you spent a lot of time in audio design. Incredible. Makes the story. As a youtuber myself on another acount I know how important that is.

[@MeegMaster]

Grats on 500k subs! Let's gooo! Awesome video and content as always.

[@tele_gram-Covert_goblue]

👆👆HIT ME UP AND TEST ME ON TELEGRAM, now you have won a Gift congratulations 🎁🎁

[@decentvids2969]

This is some peak Wayton editing

[@Hall003]

Rocket League players: Bots invasion noo! TF2 players: First time?

[@tstokemb]

It's a shame how it all went down. These bots have the potential to help players improve without stressing about losing your rank. Training against these bots in private matches can become invaluable tools for people serious about improving.

[@sinnlicher2637]

Wayton Vids the only Rocket League Vids i still watch after i quit

[@Kelsenfeller]

So well produced and structured, love it!

[@codysmith43]

The 500k is much deserved. Great video as always.

[@joe_paine_YouTube]

All the years of being called a bot and now it's finally a compliment let's go

[@zinowardenier]

Sick video! Love these documentary style RL vids, always a blast to watch

[@A1AZ0FN]

Keep it up with these documentory worth the wait and great to watch

[@natnof9482]

You might not even see this, but I'll still write it anyway. But there's still bots in ranked. I faced one 3 days ago in low GC1 doubles named "her 0ctane". I reported for cheating, but still no action against them. This bot doesn't even seem to be Nexto, it played much more human except with insane reaction time. Much like all the bots, no airplay like air dribbles, flip resets, etc. Also like all the bots, when they drive they have those micro jitters/stutters while turning and driving straight. The dribbles weren't as effective (such as the perfect timings to beat you) as nexto, but it had insane recoveries and the flicks were pin point.

[@shadowyzephyr]

The only released GC bot is Nexto. There is no other GC bot besides KBB which no one has the code for except the devs. If it wasn't as effective, it's probably due to issues with ping. Or it was just a human smurf pretending to be Nexto to troll you.

[@nathanperley2612]

CONGRATS ON 500K!!! Keep up the good work wayton

[@Carhill]

As soon as this blew up, my first concern wasn't the fear of running into a bot and having a hit to my ego, nor losing the ability to say Rocket League doesn't have hackers.. no.. My fear was for Bakkesmod. Such an invaluable tool that lets developers make plugins which add functionality beyond what the game offers as well as acting as a testbed for creative new ideas. Not only has Psyonix employed bakkes devs, but they've incorporated concepts from bakkesmod into the game.. to lose such an invaluable tool would be heartbreaking That's before getting to how useful it is for content creation.. with no direct API from the game, every RLCS team stream will go back to having no on-screen live-updated graphics, Streamers won't have on screen session stats, and to lose dollycam would be unthinkable... There'd be no more extremely high quality montage edits or afterstory videos. I think it would kill rocket league... or at the very least.. kill what makes this game so special. I hope that Psyonix make the right call.

[@botox_to_kox]

A video I haven't watched in 1,5x speed because I didn't want to ruin watch-time for literal top1 quality of content on KZbin about Rocket League it felt kinda slow ngl XD but still felt great after watching 8) Your editing skill and use of music is just actually either 'next level' or simply one of the best I might have seen and heard + that's actually the biggest flex ever - not just in game industry xD - to not have "cheating" in report box because your game is literally uncheatable lmao

[@jomahela2580]

Wayton the only one who makes opening a google docx and title it look like the most epic part of the whole story

[@trainerkasper1124]

a truly masterpiece of a storytelling. Good job

[@RyanGoldfishTV]

Quality video, was a really great runthrough of the history. However, I have a slight correction, the bot actually first started getting used in online matches around June 2022 and the person behind it was streaming their online games using it, but it was only when said person released the details of how to do so publicly that it started getting seen more regularly.

[@shadowyzephyr]

Yeah, that's why I was surprised psyonix didn't have any anticheat or anything in place already by 2023. They probably should have seen this coming, since the creator had said they planned to release it multiple times before then.

[@RyanGoldfishTV]

@@shadowyzephyr it's probably not as easy as something you can just push out in a couple months

[@shadowyzephyr]

I mean, shouldn't be too difficult. You just get nexto's neural net, compare its actions on each frame to what the players actually did, and if they consistently match, you have a suspect. Along with that, there are some statistics that are clear signs of bots. For example, pretty much every player in champ/gc ranks air rolls more than Nexto. The fact that they censored all mentions of it originally (literally talking about it in RL discord or RLBot discord, even if it was just in warning, could get you banned), but then they had something within 2 weeks when the hack actually got released, makes it seem like they just tried to sweep it under the rug instead of doing anything. Although it's possible they had something before that and it simply took them 2 weeks after the hacking to put it in the game.

[@tylerweigand8875]

@@shadowyzephyr That only covers the specific nexto case though. Other capable bots exist including older versions of nexto and it's unrealistic to keep patching things that way. There's definitely things the bots do that are very different from players, but exactly characterizing those as a computer is difficult. Sure, nexto air rolls less, but you can't just ban based on that because there probably is a small percentage of champ/gc players that rarely air roll

[@shadowyzephyr]

@@tylerweigand8875 I mean it is realistic if there are not that many high-level bots released. You could check against all the neural nets. I'm saying the reporting system + having moderation + checking against neural nets + other suspicious patterns (accounts staying on for 24 hrs/ day, or ranking up 6 ranks in 2 days) combined should be more than enough to detect cheaters.

[@mrmidnight32]

“Just showing AI is no match for human skill” Wrong. AI will always beat humans in all forms of precision and accuracy. The weak point IS humans who program their limitations and constrictions.

[@zxifide8997]

fire documentary, keep it up wayton, love to see it!!!

[@R.K_Chalkboard]

I play RL early, and it's so hard to tell whether I'm playing against bots, or if RL doesn't have enough to players that are my skill. Some are believable, but others just do full aerials in bronze.

[@hey_imnotsmart]

Nice work man this feels like a documentary

[@StewartShubert]

Loving the documentary style vids, keep it up Wayton!

[@vibing6488]

Very impressive. Everybody disses psyonix (epic), but this is a time to have immense respect. There have been no bots as of now, and as of now the game is back to its no cheating reputation.

[@tele_gram-Covert_goblue]

👆👆👆HIT ME UP AND TEST ME ON TELEGRAM, now you have won a Gift congratulations 🎁🎁

[@CrowzenOver]

Absolutely beautiful vid, and congrats on the half-million sub milestone!

[@xxltnt3]

Just wanna add that there have been RL hacks out for a long time. Aerial bots, kickoff bots, etc. So you are not completely right, there have been hackers, but its different compared to other games since you still need some skill to utilize the hacks.

[@-covertgoblue]

Congrats you just won a gift 🎁 Dm me on telegram to get your gift now 🎁

[@Lmb1509]

Love these types of videos. Was well worth the wait

[@Videogame386]

WOW. That is all I can say. What a banger of a video plontion, I enjoyed every second

[@roseflows6585]

I feel odd for having expected bots to invade already. If you like at call of duty, halo, geometry dash, even games like forza, they've all been botted before, both via machine learning and hard coded bots. It was only a matter of time before they did invade here too. Still, great documentary, wayton!

[@TheFr8train612]

Yooooo nice job Wayton 500k subs good job I have been with you since 2021 🎉

[@splashygoat]

*I absolutely LOVE Wayton's documentaries