RSF, what issue did Rocket League have? Did a buy only car and have a bigger hit radius?
I think it's an ongoing, if ultimately minor, issue.
Psyonix initially released a bunch of different body types through DLC, which wasn't really all that frowned upon. Two of those bodies (Dominus and Batmobile) had hitbox advantages... The Batmobile in particular had the largest hitbox in the game. Obviously, there are compromises here (they both suffer in terms of turn radius), but again, putting them behind $2 DLCs wasn't really a problem. This was (and still is) mostly because the most used car in the game is still the Octane-- the car you start out with. And honestly, the Dominus wasn't all that different from the Breakout, another starting car.
Then came loot crates. For a while, Psyonix insisted that loot crate cars would only be different cosmetic variants of existing bodies in the game, which is how we got the Octane ZSR and Dominus GT, among others. It's also how we got the Mantis (a reskin of the Batmobile)-- I think Psyonix's explanation here was that, if you didn't want to buy the Dominus or Batmobile DLCs, you could get their variants through the loot crates, and if you don't want to pay to open loot crates, the bodies' inclusions in loot crates makes them possible to get thru trading. At the end of the day, since the Dominus and Batmobile were already behind DLC, including reskins in loot crate probably was a good thing in a lot of ways. Morally, there are the same problems that we've been talking about the last couple of days, because you'll likely spend way more money gambling to get the Dominus GT than you would by just buying the Dominus, but at least it was an alternative option.
But I guess they realized nobody gave a fuck about most of those variants, because they walked back their initial insistence, and started including unique bodies in loot crates, like the Endo, Animus, Centio, and Jager. They tried to compensate for those additions by standardizing all bodies across 5 "types" (Octane, Dominus, Plank, Breakout, and Hybrid), minimizing differences in handling/hitboxes for cars within the same type. Two problems with that, though:
1.) "Hybrid" is super undefined as a type, and seems to just be a catchall for things that don't fit in other categories. Two new loot crate cars (Endo + Jager) have already been added to that category.
2.) The key phrase there is "
minimizing differences." For example: while the Batmobile, Paladin, and Centio are all in the "plank" category, they all drive super differently, and you aren't going to see many people in competitive play rocking the latter two. Same goes for the Breakout category, containing both the Breakout and Animus GP. As someone who has played with both of those cars for significant time, nah, those aren't even close to the same. The Animus is closer to a tall Octane than it is to the Breakout, IMO.
So, I dunno. It's not really "pay 2 win", because two of the best meta cars are still free starting bodies, and every body comes with its own trade-offs, but I do think there have been times in Rocket League's history where they've deserved criticism for locking certain bodies behind paywalls. I do think most of the problem was with the inclusion of loot crates, even if initially I think their line of thinking was fine. It makes way more sense to ask people to spend $4 for a car than to force them to gamble for one.
