Welcome to Rocket Launching, a midweek RLCS column that discusses the wonderful world of Rocket League esports.

In the world of flesh sports there are plenty of muscly dudes that will shout to the heavens that, “THERE IS NO OFFSEASON!” between bench press sets and chugs of protein shakes.

While that is cute and manly or whatever, Rocket League definitely has an offseason, and it’s happening right now. There are plenty of community tournaments to watch, but when the Rocket League Championship Series isn’t in full swing the waves tend to settle on Salty Shores.

Rocket Leauge’s competitive schedule is admittedly strange. Having the premier season only take up (if we’re being generous) half the year leads to a lot of downtime. That downtime can be good, but also incredibly boring.

Here is a list of the best and worst outcomes of that downtime, from most radical to least.

1. Pro players find more time to stream. This is great because fans really get a chance to peek behind the curtain and watch pros team up and utterly dismantle plebs in ranked. Watching Mariano “Squishy” Arruda and Garrett “GarrettG” Gordon queue 2v2 together is like watching the U.S. Women’s National Team play against Thailand.

2. @SpoodahRL

3. The Brawl. RLCS announcer Adam “Lawler” Thornton is organizing weekly draft tournaments for pros. Basically each week captains pick other pros and they play a double elimination 3v3 tournament. The only rule is that they can’t pick their teammates and there are a lot of behind the scenes moments where Lawler just jumps into a team’s channel so fans can hear their comms. It’s really fun.

4. Roster speculation.

5. Making fun of roster speculation. It’s always hilarious when someone poses the most insane and likely impossible roster move on r/RocketLeagueEsports. Even if the pros get mad about it, it’s still fun.

6. DreamHacks. DreamHack events are among the most exhilarating tournaments in the scene. It’s easy to see how hard it is to win consistently in Rocket League. It’s also fun to watch some ranked warriors have their souls ripped out by low-level RLCS teams.

7. Rocket League memes. There a lot of funny Rocket League memes out there. Here are some really juicy ones:

8. Rizzo’s making videos again! (They’re very similar to the old ones).

9. u/ConcernedRL. Oh my god this post is my favorite thing I’ve ever seen. I’ll link it in case you haven’t read it, but some poor member of the community was obviously wronged, and they were BIG MAD about it. (It was coincidentally the same day that The Game Haus broke the Yanis “Alpha54” Champenois to TSM and Aldin “Ronaky” Hodzic to Barcelona news. The posts specifically calls out Rocket League journalists. Hmmmm.)

10. Sorry ConcernedRL gets two because it was just incredible. He really had the audacity to make a burner account to call out the entire community and then said YOU MADE ME DO THIS. You can’t make this stuff up. I’m sorry we made you do it. Then he tries to play off the Stax vs. Dazerin thing like he has a sense of humor.

11. Remember when Jordan “EyeIgnite” Stellon just tweeted “F*** Reddit.” one time? That was incredible.

12. Beyond the Summit. This is going to be a very different LAN than DreamHacks and WSOE. It’s nice to have some new blood in Rocket League, especially among potential TOs.

13. Keemstar? I don’t know, this dude seems shady, but then again, I’m very low clout, so what do I know. The pros seem to want him in the community, so I guess we should give him a chance? Interesting that the older people in the community want him out, and the younger people in the community want him in. Strange generational gap there.

14. Funny Keemstar sidebar: While I was reporting at WSOE, Keem hopped into the Twitch chat, and one of WSOE’s executives noticed people were freaking out about him. He asked, “Who’s Keemstar?” (That isn’t the funny part, it’s just a lead in.) Right after that someone scored a goal, an announcer said, “What a boomer!” and everyone started spamming “BOOMER” in the chat. He thought the chat was slamming Keem and asked me what the RL community has against Baby Boomers.

15. Rocket League podcasts. There are some really interesting RL talk shows around the scene. I personally really enjoy Sub Par and RL Aftershock. Listen in.

16. Retirement announcements. 🙁

17. Having more time to actually play Rocket League instead of arguing about the esport. There must be Rocket League fans that lose and gain entire ranks during the season. There’s no way one can keep up with all the action, constantly participate on the subreddit and live a regular life with enough spare time to dedicate real energy into RL. It’s borderline impossible.

18. No more crates! Psyonix announced yesterday that they’re doing away with crates and will move to a store where you actually know what you’re buying. I personally love opening crates, but I guess it will be cool if everyone has Dissolver and 20XX or whatever. Make your cars look cool. I know plenty of people with weak car designs because they don’t want to spend a single cent on randomized crates. Now they can buy something cool with them.

19. Big RIP to r/RocketLeagueExchange. I had a lot of fun trading and finding good deals here. Outside of colored variants and certified stuff, the exchange might just end up dying. That’s sad. Sifting through Rocket League Exchange shops was always super rad.

20. AMAs. It seems like it was just a few weeks ago that Triple Trouble hosted a very bright and fun AMA without Andy “Kassio” Landais (which was strange at the time, and now seems like the writing on the wall was there for awhile). They had a lot of good perspective and took a lot of time answering all those questions. Cloud9 did one, 1Ne Esports just did one. The Beyond the Summit crew hosted another. They’re really interesting threads to read through.

21. The Mannfield Night 5K. Oops.

22. Esports bleeding over into traditional media. So this is more about regular old sports offseasons, but after the Fortnite World Cup, all the ESPN people were tripping about how one kid could make all that money for playing a video game. What a loser.

23. Ballchasing.com

24. Treyven “Lethamyr” Robitaille dedicating his time to recreating Call of Duty maps in Workshop. I can’t wait until he makes a prop hunt of Peach’s Castle from Mario 64. Better yet? I want to air dribble through a Superman 64 ring segment. Get on it Leth.

25. Cryptic Pierre “Turbopolsa” Silfver tweets. No one in the game bosses social media quite like Turbo.

26. Beach ball? I guess it’s cool to have a new ball model in the game? Spike Rush was cool for a few matches. At least it was something.

27. People asking innocuous questions of pros on r/RocketLeagueEsports. To pro players, do you think the Fennec is going to be the new main? What do you think about the Aftershock?

28. Preview articles. I previewed every RLCS team before Season 7, and it was hard. I like writing them though. They’re mostly fun. Except for when you say that Dignitas could make LAN with Gibbs as their third OOOPS.

29. Pat the community on the back reddit posts. Good gravy, I love these. This is a sign of growth.

30. Feigning interest in other esports. Everyone else here at The Game Haus LOVES Overwatch. I watched it for like three minutes and was not enthralled. Then I read this great article about how to get into Overwatch as a beginner. The article was great, but I’m still very confused.

31. Anything with the flair “Discussion” on r/RocketLeagueEsports. From celebrity pro-ams to who is the best Rocket League player in Mexico, you can be sure to read about it in a thread that has the same amount of effort put into it as Jeff Bazos has hair.

32. Watching old Rocket League clips. Imagine a world where you could use the Paladin, have camera shake on and never air roll and still be a pro. All of those things were true before Season 3.

Featured image courtesy of Rocket League Championship Series.

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