Although solo queuing ranked matches in Rocket League can teach you how to be adaptable to all types of teammates, if you want to push for higher ranks and tournament wins faster, finding a team that you always play with will strengthen your chances. In this article, we will discuss why you should join a team, and how you can join it.

First, we should talk about when you want to start finding teams. It is possible to find a team while in Silver, but I suggest that you wait until you hit Champion before you start looking for a team. Everyone’s rate of growth in Rocket League is drastically different in the lower ranks, so retaining a team might be hard because one person will likely outrank the others in a couple of months. Also, when a player is a Champion, they have had to dedicate serious hours to Rocket League, which tells you that they are committed to practicing and winning.

Benefits of Finding a Team

Practicing is the key reason why you want to find a team once you reach higher ranks. When you queue up a random ranked match with other random teammates, it can often take half of the game to start grasping what your teammates’ playstyles, faults, and strengths are. If you find a team, every time you play matches together, you unconsciously start figuring out what balls they likely miss or how they play into space, etc. Once you understand your teammates, you can even change your gameplay to make them play better. For example, after 50 games, you may understand how your teammate plays on low boost. If you can sense this during a match, you may decide to pass to them on the ground instead of the air, greatly increasing their chances of making a play.

Taking from that last example, you do not even have to sense a lot of things from your teammates because you will constantly be in voice comms. Whether it is through Discord or your console’s chat feature, having the ability to make call-outs to your team removes the guessing game that can be Rocket League. The game recently added an in-game voice chat feature for random teammates, but in my experience, it is rarely used in higher ranks.

The fastest way to rank up is to put more hours into the game.

Sometimes, after playing a few ranked matches with your team, you may not want to queue ranked because you feel that you are playing too badly to win MMR. If you still want to play the game, scrims or scrimmages are your best friend for improvement. If you join the RL 6 Mans Discord Server, there is a channel called lfs, where you can tell everyone on the server that you are looking for a scrim. Scrimmages are essentially just highly competitive custom matches, where you can play a team for a best of 5 or 7. They are competitive but low risk. Another great feature of scrims is that you can try to find teams that are better than you. Playing against a team that is faster and more mechanical than yours will help your team realize where they need to improve.

The biggest benefit of teams is tournaments. Most small tournaments that you can play at a Champion or above level require you to have a team. I suggest you look around the internet for random weekly or nightly tournaments for your team to play. They can be fun, low stakes, or they can be for some money. The worst feeling I had as a player was finding the perfect tournament without anyone to play with. Once you find a team, I suggest trying out a league like the Indy Gaming League, which runs a season-long format and lets you play against people around your rank. It is the closest you can get to feeling like a pro at any rank.

An important but overlooked aspect of teams is finding friends. The digital world is a great place to find friends to hang out with at any time. Hopefully, you get close with your team and sometimes just sit around on a call to talk. Not only will this time be fun, but it will also build trust within your team.

My team is seen here showing our friendship through this rotational line!

How to Find Teams

The hardest but simplest method to finding a team is to try to create your own. You can do this multiple ways: playing ranked matches and reaching out to good teammates to team up, talking on the Discord servers that host tournaments to recruit players, searching for players on Twitter or Reddit that are similar ranks as you, or reaching out to people you know in real life that are good at the game. If you can create your own team that functions well, I think that is awesome, but in my experience, it is harder to find random players than it is to join an existing team that has an open spot.

The easiest way to join a team is to actually join a team. You should put LFT (looking for team) in your Discord name and Rocket League clan, and message people putting up team listings on random Discord servers. In the early days of finding a team, you should take every opportunity seriously and try to try out for multiple teams. It’s better to have a lot of options instead of none. The biggest tip I can give when it comes to finding a team this way is to try to see how serious the team is. If you are wanting to be super serious with daily scrims, you should only prioritize serious seeming teams. The opposite is true if you are looking for a more casual experience.

Tips for Landing a Position

When you are looking for a team, make yourself approachable and available. Keep your notifications and phone on so you can answer messages quicker than anyone else. Also, this seems obvious, but only send messages about finding a team if you are available soon to try out. If you are inspired during the middle of a vacation, just wait to reply to any listings until you are at home. The worst thing I have done is line up everything perfectly for a team and then make them wait for a week to try me out. They ended up just finding someone more available.

Also, make sure to make your schedule and expected hours on the game clear from the start. It is so much easier if you tell your teammates about your job before you even join so they are clear on playing during your available hours. If schedules do not work, teams will not work.

Closing Thoughts

Hopefully you now understand how to find a team and why you should! Like everything in life, Rocket League is better together. Good luck finding a team, and remember, keep trying to improve because the better you are, the easier it is to find a team!