For years, the highest level of competitive Rocket League play relied on strict adherence to rotations, a strategy where players immediately circle back to defend after making an attempt on goal, allowing their teammates to advance and launch their own attack.
Well-executed Rocket League rotations create a blanket of coverage over the field, where one player is always in position for defense and two are further up-field looking to make an offensive play or break up their opponent’s attack. When put into practice, this creates an incredibly fluid system where players on both teams rarely stop moving.
The “Ball Chasing” meta often has all three teammates in their offensive half.
Psyonix/Rocket League
In the past few seasons of RLCS, however, a new trend has emerged among the upper echelon of teams, which fans have dubbed the “Ball Chasing” meta, though a more accurate term would be “pressing” or “forechecking.” Ball chasing acts as a mechanism for applying defensive pressure on your opponent to create goal-scoring opportunities.
In practice, it means that players try to give their opponent as little time to handle the ball as possible to prevent them from launching a well-coordinated attack. Often, this means that players will skip rotating back to defend their own goal in order to apply this pressure.
When playing with random teammates, ball chasers can be unbelievably frustrating. They’re hard to predict, so it’s hard to get into the rhythm of rotations. However, RLCS teams have started to take advantage of the unpredictable nature of ball chasing to throw off their opponents and attempt to regain possession. After launching an unsuccessful attack, players will quickly chase down the ball and apply pressure instead of allowing their opponent the space to clear the ball. The “chasing” player will remain in their offensive half to block passes, bump goalkeepers, or be the recipient of a teammate’s pass.
While committing more players forward to apply defensive pressure is riskier than maintaining a strict three-man rotation system, it has a few distinct advantages. By forcing opponents to clear or pass the ball much faster, they’re more likely to make a mistake that can be punished. Additionally, it’s much harder for teams to launch their own attack when opponents are challenging every pass they make, so it helps defensively as well.
NRG at the RLCS Season 7 World Championship
Psyonix
NRG gave a great example of this type of ball chasing during their match with Cloud9 during league play. At 8:40 in this video, you can see that Fireburner takes a weak shot that’s easily collected by Cloud9. However, instead of allowing their opponent the time to corral and pass the ball, JSTN. is immediately there to apply pressure and set GarretG up for a goal. Had JSTN. made a mistake when pressuring the ball, Cloud9 would have had a great chance to punish the weak shot from Fireburner.
Another example comes from the hyper-aggressive Vitality team in the RLCS Season 7 World Championship finals. Kaydop, after making an unsuccessful attempt on goal, steals the opponent’s boost and turns to challenge the ball again instead of returning to his own half. He’s immediately rewarded with a goal as G2 fails to clear the ball, but his own goal was left wide open since all three Vitality players were on the offensive half applying pressure.
Professional Rocket League players keep getting better and better, which allows them to make challenges that they would have avoided in the past. Without the level of communication that RLCS squads maintain during matches, this could be disastrous, but with great communication and the unbelievable mechanical mastery of professional players, ball chasing serves as a mechanism to create chances out of nothing.
