OFFICIAL FAQ: READ BEFORE POSTING!

[Psyonix-Jerad]

This is the Official FAQ, and will be kept updated with all of the questions that get asked almost every day. There will be no user replies, this is not the thread for you to ask more questions. If you have a comment or question, you can PM me, or post it, if something is incorrect or outdated, let me know and I'll edit it. I'm going to be adding to it for a little while, but will update the TOC here so that all of the questions are linked to directly. Now let's begin....



Table of Contents

• Cheaters
  1. What can be done about cheaters?
  
  
• How to...
  1. Set up Custom Music Tracks
  2. Use the Replay Editing Mode
  3. Import/Export replays
  4. Use "Ball-Cam"
  5. Accessing In-Game Help
  6. Create a Team
  7. Play a Team Match
  8. Mute annoying people
  9. Set up your router for your PS3
  
  
• Online Issues...
  1. I can't see my friend online, or can't invite my friend to my game
  2. Rating system, Rankings, or Ranked (or Team) matches do not show up on the standings
  3. Lag, weird ball behavior, driving through players
  4. How much bandwidth is needed to be a good host?
  5. "Registering player data please wait" hangs
  6. PS3 freezes, hangs, and other lockups
  7. Whenever I finish a ranked match, I have to go back to Matchmaking
  8. Why can't I play ranked matches with my friends?
  9. All players show up as "Ranked Player"
  10. I want to host, how do I do that?
  11. My Wins + Losses do not add up
  12. My team mate quit and I didn't get a win
  13. I can't play online
  14. Voice quality is bad, choppy or repeating
  15. Why do I not receive a win when the host quits before the end of the match?
  
  
• Updates, DLC, Tournaments...
  1. Will there be any updates in the future?
  2. Can you tell us anything about new features or content coming in a future update?
  3. Will there be any more arenas/cars?
  4. What about themes, backgrounds, avatars and other PS3 media?
  
  
• Misc...
  1. Rumble doesn't work anymore
  2. Where can I find the music you used for the game?
  3. How come the custom music doesn't shuffle
  4. Why so few trophies?
  5. Does it matter which car I choose?
  6. Is there a list of all the awards that you can get?

[Psyonix-Jerad]

Custom Music Tracks
1. From the main menu, select "Options".
2. From the options menu, select "System".
3. From the "Game Options" menu, select "Music Tracks".
4. Press "X," and select Custom from the selection menu.
5. A system menu opens up and allows you to select or set up a playlist to play while in game.
6. Select your playlist, and you will see the game save. From now on, when you start the game, this playlist will begin playing.

you can use the D-pad left and right buttons in-game to switch to the previous/next songs so you don't have to listen to the same ones every time.

[Psyonix-Jerad]

Use the Replay Editing Mode

1. First, you need a recorded replay. You can get one of these by playing a game in the "Split Screen," or "Online" modes. After you finish the game, the menu will show you your stats, awards, and (depending on the mode) have options for saving a replay. Save your replay in to an available slot, or delete an existing replay to make room.

You can have at most 20 replays, depending on how much space you have on your HDD. When space starts running low, the number of available replays will be lowered so you dont run out!

2. Once you've saved a replay, head back to the main menu.
3. From here, select "Extras"
4. Select "Replays"
5. A menu showing you all of your saved replays will be shown (or, if you dont have any, a message will greet you telling you how to get some stuff in the list)
6. Select a replay, and choose any of the options.

If you choose to upload to YouTube, or save to the XMB, you will have additional video editing options, otherwise, you just get standard camera controls. Also, the "Help" section contains special information for replay editing mode, I suggest reading them all!

Pressing Start and selecting "Controls" will show you a complete listing of all the available buttons for your editing mode. Every button has a function!

If you chose a video option in step 6, you will have approximately 10 minutes of recording time, in which time you may toggle recording as many times as you like, until your 10 minutes of video has been used, at which time you will be forced to save or quit. If, at any time during your recording process, you decide that your video is perfect, you can press Start and choose "Save Video" to begin the Saving/Uploading process. This is only available to users who selected a video option in step 6.

If your video is larger than ~35MB, you MAY have trouble uploading to YouTube. It will pause at 98% for up to 2 minutes, and then give you a message saying that the server timed out. This is an issue with Sony, and they have told us that it has been resolved in the next firmware update (2.5x), due out soon. Your video was still uploaded successfully, even though the message says that there was an error. There is no need to retry the upload. Sorry for the confusion.

In the event that a video actually fails to upload, fear not! You can always retry, or just save it to the XMB for uploading later (by a PC).

[Psyonix-Jerad]

Use "Ball-Cam"

1. By default ball-cam is set to a "hold it when you need it" type of setting. By holding the Triangle button on your controller you can make the camera focus on the ball instead of the default camera position of pointing straight ahead. In this mode, simply release the Triangle button to go back to normal camera positioning.

2. Ball-cam cannot show you the ball if it is perfectly over-top of you. For those situations the camera will point up as much as it can but you may still not see it. If that's the case, use the ball shadow, which will always be directly under the ball, to gauge where it is.

3. Toggling ball-cam is done through your Profile Settings. You can access this through either the in-game menu (hit the Start button to bring this up) or by going to the Options menu through the main menu. Some players (myself included) prefer to turn on the "Toggle Ball-cam" mode where hitting the Triangle button once will switch you to a more permanent ball-cam mode, which you can then deactivate by hitting the Triangle button again.

[Psyonix-Jerad]

Accessing In-Game Help

From within any game, press Start! In the menu, select "Help."

Lots of useful tips are in there!

[Psyonix-Jerad]

Creating a Team

1. From the main menu, select "Play Online."
2. From the online menu, select "Team Match."
3. If you don't own a team already, you will have the option to "Create Team" under the "Captain Of" header. Select this option.
4. The Sony virtual keyboard will appear. Enter your desired team name. When you have entered it, press Start to continue.
5. If the team name is available and passes basic bad word filters, your team will be created. You can press "X" to continue to team management.

If you don't know how to create a team but someone else on your console has already made one, you can delete it and make your own by pressing "X" to select the team you're already a captain of, then selecting "Disband Team" and confirming. This will return you to the My Teams screen which will now have the option to Create a new team.

[Psyonix-Jerad]

Play a Team Match

First, you have to own a team or be a part of a team. If you need to see how to create a team, please see the previous section.

Once you own a team or are a member of someone else's team:
1. From the main menu, select "Play Online".
2. From the online menu, select "Team Match".
3. From the "My Teams" menu, select the team you wish you play a match with.
4. From the team info screen, select "Join Lobby". This will place you into a shared lobby for that team with anyone else currently trying to play a match with that team. From here, you can send lobby invites to all online team members or search for games if you have at least two players in the lobby. You can also join in split-screen players in this lobby.
5. Configure your map preferences and, if you were the first person into the lobby, select "Start Matchmaking". If someone else hosted the lobby first, you'll have to bug them over voice to start the search.
6. Once the match is over, you will return to the team lobby and can search for another match if you so desire.

[Psyonix-Jerad]

Mute annoying people

While in game, when you hear someone talking, you can press (and hold) R1. Scroll down to the annoying person's name and let go. They will be muted. You have to do this each game.

[Psyonix-Jerad]

I can't see my friend online, or can't invite my friend to my game

This is an issue with GameSpy's friends list implementation. For whatever reason, it can't tell that some people are online. It could be firewall, it could be DNS, it could be PSN, it could be cooties. We are never able to get any reason for this, and other people can sometimes see the person online.

NOTE: In the last update (1.04) we moved away from the GameSpy friends handling and these issues should be resolved.

[Psyonix-Jerad]

Rating system, Rankings, or Ranked (or Team) matches do not show up on the standings

The rating is an ELO based system provided entirely by GameSpy. We simply report who played, and who won, and a ranking number comes out. There is a strong mathematical background to how this works, and more of it can be read about here, and here. You can also check out this calculator. Basically, if you have a high rating, and you play someone with a low rating, you are expected to win. If you do not win, there is a severe rating penalty that will be assessed, and your rating will fall. If you win, you will gain very few points. However, if you play someone with a rating much higher than your own and win, you will get a lot of rating points.

There are some problems with the stats. Sometimes GameSpy will drop games for no (known) reason. Sometimes the games are dropped because the teams that report are uneven. Maybe someone's stats didn't report, or they left early, and GameSpy thinks the teams are uneven, and the game gets thrown out. We are working with them on finding reasons for these issues, but some of them are unavoidable, such as when teams are uneven. It's also possible that the game did post and you just didn't get any rating points.

Also, it can take more than 10 minutes for stats to post. Our stats are on a shared GameSpy server, and the processing happens whenever it is scheduled to. It could be a minute, 5 minutes, or a day. It's up to GameSpy.

[Psyonix-Jerad]

Lag, weird ball behavior, driving through players

This is expected in laggy situations. Remember that there are no dedicated servers, so you are entirely at the mercy of your fellow player's connection speed. That means that a player who has a lot of latency will appear on your screen very far away from their actual location. The cars can travel 40 car lengths in a single second at max speed, so you can imagine what a few hundred milliseconds can be like. There is no way to predict the erratic driving of a human player, and so we rely entirely on fast updates for precise positioning.

Also, to offset the effects of host advantage, we allow clients to notify the host when they hit the ball (instead of the other way around). This means that when you hit the ball on your screen, you tell the host who then tells everyone else. The time it takes for this to happen causes a "delay" in the effects of your hit on other player's screen. Likewise, when another player hits the ball on his screen, it might look like the ball goes through the player on your screen for a moment, and then "warps" in the opposite direction, as if it bounced off an invisible wall. This is the effect of the other player telling the host he hit the ball and then you getting that update from the host. In general, with a non-laggy set of players, this wont be noticeable. If there is a lot of lag, however, there may be lots of these weird quirks.

[Psyonix-Jerad]

How much bandwidth is needed to be a good host?

Well, that of course depends on what kind of match you want to host. Hosts need a lot of upload to be able to send all that data to all the clients. We recommend more than a 384Kbps upload to host 4v4 matches. We also recommend ceasing all other internet activity such as downloads and web browsing while playing to reduce lag spikes, and that includes everyone on your network.

To give you an example of why, see this chart:

bandwidth.png

As you can see, the graph is exponential. The Y axis is bandwidth required in Kilobits per second, and the X axis is the number of players. Since each new car has to be replicated to every client (except yourself), the formula is non-linear.

For clients, the requirements is very linear, and much lower. You only need to send your own data so the upload rate is constant, but you need to receive the data of all other cars, so this increases linearly with the number of other players.

[Psyonix-Jerad]

"Registering player data please wait" hangs

This message appears while we are retrieving your player data from GameSpy. If you have bad connectivity to the internet, or are behind a firewall that Sony can not traverse through, you may have trouble getting through this. Check your internet connectivity, and try it without a router if possible. See the section about setting up your router for the PS3 for more help in this area.

[Psyonix-Jerad]

PS3 freezes, hangs, and other lockups

While the game should never hang, some users do report these. In general, these are due to DNS blocks or other online issues, possibly your PS3 overheating.We are investigating these issues and will have them fixed as soon as we find a cause.

[Psyonix-Jerad]

Whenever I finish a ranked match, I have to go back to Matchmaking

This is by design. Ranked is all about playing random players. You should never get to choose who you play with. And even if it did work this way, the rating system is ELO, so if you were to play 10 games with the same people and win all of them, your rating would go up less and less with each victory, so it would do you no good. And if you won the first 9 and lost the last one, you might end up with a lower score than when you started.

[Psyonix-Jerad]

Why can't I play ranked matches with my friends?

Because ranked is all about playing random players. If you want to play with your friends, play team matches.

[Psyonix-Jerad]

All players show up as "Ranked Player"

This is by design. We hide the player names to prevent people from leaving when they see a person they recognize, or gaming the system and quitting when they don't see someone they want to play with. You'll see who your opponents are when the teams are set up.

[Psyonix-Jerad]

I want to host, how do I do that?

We do not let you choose to be a host. We want to keep the host advantage as random as we can, so that the rankings include enough times of you being both client and host, so they are less biased towards host advantage. You can choose to be a client by using the server list.

[Psyonix-Jerad]

My Wins + Losses do not add up

We are aware of several issues with this. First, there was a problem before where they were not recording properly, but those have been fixed. Also, sometimes the games get dropped on the GameSpy servers for seemingly unknown reasons, and yet other times the stats get dropped when the teams are uneven (for example if someone didn't make it to the game when it started).

[Psyonix-Jerad]

My team mate quit and I didn't get a win

If the stats that are reported to GameSpy show that the teams are uneven, the game is usually thrown out.