PUBG: Battlegrounds at the EWC 2026: drivers, tools and gear allowed

In a PC battle royale, the line between a player's own setup and an unfair advantage runs through small things: a mouse driver, a color filter, a key that fires a burst on its own. A tournament that does not draw that line in writing leaves referees to argue it out in the middle of a match day. The rulebook of the PUBG: Battlegrounds tournament at the Esports World Cup 2026 draws it in detail, and it does so for a field of 24 teams and a prize pool of US$2,000,000.

The tournament opens in Paris on July 21. The Esports World Cup, the multi-game event run by the Esports Foundation, was first set for Riyadh; on May 20 the foundation confirmed its move to Paris, with its titles and formats kept. The rulebook published for the event calls this competition PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS at EWC 26 and places it under the jurisdiction of the Esports World Cup Global Rulebook, the set of rules shared by every game of the event. It also brings in the PUBG Global Rules - SUPER, the publisher's own competitive rules, by reference.

This guide reads the rulebook for its technical side: what the organizer supplies and what players bring, what kind of mouse driver is allowed and which tools count as cheating, what may and may not be changed on the tournament PC, how voice, observers and replays are handled, and what happens when a player drops out of a match through a disconnection.

PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS at EWC 26 rulebook, format section and section 5.1.

The tournament the rulebook governs

PUBG: Battlegrounds, made by Krafton, drops players by parachute onto a large map where they collect weapons and fight while a shrinking zone pushes the survivors together. In its competitive form, squads of four share a lobby, the virtual room a match is played in, and points come from where a team finishes and how many opponents it eliminates. The rulebook sets the lobby at 64 players, four per team, in third-person perspective, known as TPP, with the weather fixed to sunny.

The rulebook places the competition in Paris, France, with an arrival day and a Media Day before play. The Group Stage runs from July 21 to 23 and the Finals from July 24 to 26. The 24 teams are split into three groups of eight. Two groups play each day, six matches a day, so each team plays on two of the three days: groups A and B meet on Tuesday, July 21, A and C on Wednesday, July 22, and B and C on Thursday, July 23. Each group's ranking is built over 12 matches, and the top 16 teams go through.

The Finals bring those 16 teams together for 18 matches over three days, six a day. They end with a match-point rule the rulebook calls SMASH: match point is decided after the second day of the Finals, a team must first reach it and then win a match to take the title, and it cannot do both in the same match. If no team wins through SMASH within the 18 matches, the standard ranking rules decide the champion. The prize pool of US$2,000,000 is split in the rulebook between US$228,000 for the Group Stage and US$1,772,000 for the Finals.

Every day, in both stages, follows the same map order: Erangel, Taego, Miramar, Rondo, Taego, Erangel. The game patch is v2606, build 42.1. A team may register six members at most, which must include four to five players, one to two managers and up to one coach, and managers can never step in as substitutes. A team needs at least three of its squad to take the field, and only the four players competing that day may enter the stage area.

What the organizer supplies and what players bring

The equipment rules sit in section 8 and follow the pattern shared by the Esports World Cup's PC tournaments: the organizer owns the machine and the screen, the player owns the hands-on gear. Section 8.2 states the principle plainly: "Players must use the provided hardware during all tournament matches and scheduled practice matches."

Two lines of the table need a word of explanation. A sound card is a small device that converts the computer's audio for the headphones; the rulebook accepts one only when it ends in a standard 3.5mm jack, and section 8.2 then rules out the USB kind. The offline rule follows from section 8.3: the tournament computers have no internet access, so whatever a player brings has to work without one.

All player equipment is subject to the approval of the tournament administration, the officials who run the competition, and participants are responsible for keeping a set of replacements in case their main hardware fails. Once a station is set up, the equipment may not be removed from the seat unless the administration allows it. A player with an equipment problem reports it to the Referee at once and may ask for it to be escalated to the Head Referee. A device brought on stage for a health reason needs the administration's approval in advance, as does any exemption from the provided headset or the use of a gaming microphone.

Only a mouse and a keyboard go into the PC

Section 8.2 narrows what may be plugged into the tournament computer. Without permission, only a mouse or a keyboard may be connected. Hardware that needs an unauthorized conversion to connect to a USB port is not permitted, and neither are USB sound cards.

The rulebook does not give reasons for the list. It adds that any unapproved modification of the provided hardware is penalized, so the station a player sits at is the one the organizer prepared.

The ban list for the tournament area reaches beyond the PC. Mobile phones, smartwatches, USB storage devices and speakers are not allowed, along with any other electronic device unrelated to the competition. Section 8.3 completes the picture: internet access on tournament computers is disabled for all participants.

Mouse drivers, and no macros

A driver is the software that lets a mouse or keyboard talk to the computer and, on gaming gear, sets things such as sensitivity, polling rate and button mapping. Section 5.4.2.13 allows mouse driver software from the makers and gives BlasterX, Razer Synapse, Logitech G Hub and SteelSeries Engine as examples, not as a closed list. Referees check the mouse drivers before the match day starts. Section 8.2 adds that players may install the drivers they need during a designated setup and testing period.

The same section bans mouse macros. A macro is a stored sequence of inputs that one press of a button replays, and in a shooter it can stand in for skill: a macro that pulls the mouse down at a set pace while a weapon fires can cancel the weapon's recoil, the upward kick that players otherwise control by hand. Allowing the driver while banning the macro means the software stays on the PC, but the feature that would do the work for the player does not.

Whatever the brand, the driver goes onto a machine the organizer controls. The rulebook makes every software installation subject to inspection and approval by the administration, so the named examples describe the kind of software accepted, and the final word on a given program stays with the officials.

Tools that count as cheating

Section 5.4.2.13 opens with a plain statement that cheating is forbidden and then lists what it means. The examples include ESP, short for extra-sensory perception, which shows opponents' positions or details through the screen; radar hacks; wallhacks, which make walls see-through; speedhacks; aimhacks, which move the aim onto a target; manipulation of hitboxes, the invisible shapes that decide whether a shot lands; teleportation; and the exploitation of bugs. Editing game files to remove grass or other parts of the game is also cheating, because a player who strips out foliage sees opponents who are meant to be hidden in it.

The section then names three programs that are banned as unauthorized third-party tools: Nvidia Profile Inspector, SweetFX and VibranceGUI. None of the three is listed among the hacks above; they are banned under a wider principle. The rulebook classes as cheating the third-party software or tools that the game publisher does not allow and that give an unfair advantage. A program does not need to be built for cheating to fall under it.

One last line covers who may play at all. Fielding a player whose PUBG account carries an active ban leads to the team's disqualification. The rulebook ties the level of a penalty to the level of the fraudulent behavior, under the sanctions of section 6.1, which range from penalty points and fines to default losses, suspensions and disqualification.

The rulebook does not name an anti-cheat program. It does sit in a wider effort by the publisher: in its Anti-Cheat 2026 Roadmap, published on March 24, Krafton said it permanently banned about 260,000 cheaters using DMA in 2025. DMA, for direct memory access, refers to hardware that reads a game's memory from a second device rather than from software on the gaming PC. Krafton said the eradication of DMA cheating remained its top priority. The roadmap concerns the live game and does not mention tournaments.

Game files, settings and the patch

Section 8.2 forbids players to alter game files, modify drivers or change the video settings in Windows without approval. That last point matters on a PC where the monitor and the graphics card belong to the organizer: color, brightness and scaling are set by the tournament, not by each player's habits at home.

In-game, every match uses the Esports Mode Settings, which the rulebook says are identical to the Ranked Mode Settings of the live game. Section 5.1 states that all settings remain at their defaults unless the rulebook says otherwise, and it gives the administration the right to change in-game settings at any time, including temporary changes to work around a bug. The maps are Erangel, Miramar, Taego and Rondo.

The fixed patch, v2606, means the whole tournament is played on one version of the game. A team cannot gain from a balance change released during the event, and a bug that appears in that version is handled by the rules on bugs rather than by a mid-event update.

Those rules are strict. Section 5.4.2.12 says that no rematch or remedy is given for a bug that affects a player. A bug must be reported at once; hiding one is treated as abuse, and exploiting one on purpose is treated as cheating.

Voice, observers and the replay

Team communication runs through the solution the organizer provides, and any other is prohibited. Section 8.2 says that the voices in official scrims and matches are recorded. Scrims are practice matches; section 5.5 allows the administration to hold testing and rehearsal scrims on Media Day and on official tournament days, attendance at scheduled scrim blocks is required, and an absence may lead to sanctions.

During a match, section 5.4.2.3 lets each team keep at most one person who is not a player on stage to listen to team communications. Once the match starts, only the four active players may speak, and anyone else on the channel is muted. Section 5.4.2.4 has players wear their own in-ear buds under the organizer's headsets and lets them remove the headsets only once every member of their team has been eliminated.

The game server is closed to everyone but the competitors and the broadcast crew. Observers are the operators who move the camera through the match for the stream, and section 5.4.2.10 limits them in one sentence: "Only the observers who the Administration has explicitly authorized will be allowed to join the game server."

Section 5.4.2.11 requires every player to have the in-game replay feature and to activate it. A replay records a match from inside the game, so that it can be watched again afterwards. The rule sits under the heading Replay and Match Data, and it means every client in the lobby keeps its own record of every match.

When a match restarts after a disconnection

A dropped connection in a 64-player lobby is not a small matter: one player's fall can hand a fight to an opponent. Section 5.4.2.8 first forbids intentional disconnection, then sets out the cases where a match starts over. The moment that decides most of them is the landing, when every player has parachuted to the ground.

The administration also keeps a wider power under section 5.4.2.7. It may call a rematch when lag or glitches hit several players, when the server is unstable, when the power fails, or in any other case where a restart is needed to protect the integrity of the competition.

A player may not turn off the computer or restart the game client without a referee's permission, under section 5.4.2.6. A problem is reported by raising a hand to a referee, and players stay seated until a referee lets them leave at the end of a match. Referee and Head Referee rulings given during a match must be followed.

Compensation points for a lost player

A restart does not always save a player. When a match is officially restarted and a player is eliminated while still reconnecting, section 5.4.2.9 allows the administration to award Compensation Points, which make up for the eliminations that player might have scored.

The calculation is set in the rule. The administration totals the player's kills in that day's matches, leaving out the lowest-kill match, or as many matches as there were critical disconnections, and divides the total by the number of matches played without a critical disconnection. A result below one is raised to one, and any other is rounded to the nearest whole number. That figure is multiplied by the number of critical disconnections. Each critical disconnection is worth at least one point and at most four, and the points are added only to the team's total at the end of the day, not to the result of the match in which the disconnection happened.

The rule ties the compensation to the player's own form on the day rather than to a fixed figure. A player who has been scoring well receives more than one who has not, within the floor of one point and the ceiling of four.

Check-in, breaks and lateness fines

The match-day routine in section 5.4 is short, and the timings around it are fixed.

During the matches and the breaks, team officials and players may not move or stay in places they are not authorized to be. Lateness has a price set by section 6.2: a first offense costs US$100 per player and a second US$500 per player. From the third, the team receives one penalty point, plus one more for every five minutes of delay.

After a match, official results are posted on the event website, and section 5.4.3.2 lets the administration set interview duties. Interviews are public worldwide, and the rulebook warns that indecent, discriminatory or violent conduct in them can be penalized.

Sanctions follow section 6.1. Participants are notified of a sanction by email, and only the team representative or a designated spokesperson may appeal, within a timeframe given with the decision.

How these rules compare with the live game

On the Paris stage, the organizer controls the machine. Anything that is not a mouse, a keyboard, a pair of in-ear buds, a maker's driver or the game itself stays out unless the administration approves it, and the computer has no internet connection.

The rulebook still ties the competition to the live game where it can. The Esports Mode Settings match Ranked Mode, the cheat rule defers to what the publisher allows, and a player whose PUBG account carries an active ban cannot be fielded.

On a tournament PC, fairness is set before the first parachute opens: the same machine, a short list of drivers and nothing that plays the game for the player.

Whether a given piece of gear or software passes depends on the case and on the administration's approval, which the rulebook keeps for itself at each step. What the text fixes in advance is the frame: the organizer's hardware, the player's own mouse and keyboard working offline, maker drivers checked before the match day starts, no macros, no picture-tuning tools, a recorded voice channel, authorized observers only and a replay running on every client.

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