I have been seeing posts all over the place about how nonstandard maps are going to kill competitive Rocket League. Usually these people are citing that the differences in the maps reduce competitiveness of the maps or makes the game "unnecessarily hard."

This goes without saying, but all competitive games rely heavily on their players executing play in an positive and effective way, that's the core of every game but the concerns I'm hearing are all about variation.

Both of these claims are demonstrably incorrect, and maybe I'm just firing back at knee-jerk reactions to a change that will end up smoothing out over time, but I wanted to throw in my $.02.

Competitive games of any genre have variation built in as a part of what makes them good competitive games, all of this variation comes in one of four forms:

Environmental, Strategic, and Mechanical

Any well received, popular competitive game has all of these in one way or another. Some examples:

Which brings me to Rocket League. From its core, rocket league relies almost solely on Execution, strategy (in the form of rotations and playmaking) also play a role but it is much more slight, for example having better strategy than the other team will not win the match if they outplay you at every stage.

Vehicles in Rocket League will never have vastly different stats from one another so the vehicles you use for a "team comp" or "team synergy" will not factor into the overall competitive landscape of the game.

So if the game had remained as one central map style the game would start to stagnate around players getting to their personal skill caps and there would be no progression therein.

Which leaves us with environmental variation. With the introduction of irregular maps This opens up a lot of doors for strategy and execution at every level. Maybe you focus on getting very good on Neo Tokyo and become one of the best at that map, you will have a decided advantage over people who may be better than you on an execution level. But you have the upper hand on the map that you've practiced on.

So with the commitment Psyonix has made to introducing irregular maps they are also committing to evolving Rocket League in a way that that keeps the core of rocket league intact without jeopardizing the potential of individual skill.

TL:DR: Psyonix is putting new, different maps into the rotation to keep the game from getting stale. And adding new, different maps is the only way that can happen. If you change anything else, you change what Rocket League is.