Rocket League now requires Easy Anti-Cheat for online play on PC

Online play in Rocket League on PC now goes through an anti-cheat system. The game's official site announced on April 28, 2026, that Easy Anti-Cheat, the anti-cheat service of Epic Online Services, is required for online play on PC from that day, with Steam Deck and Linux also supported.

The change had been coming for ten weeks. In February, Psyonix, the studio that makes Rocket League, said it would bring the system to the PC versions sold on Steam and on the Epic Games Store, and Dot Esports reported the plan on February 17. What arrived on April 28 adds the details: how a match is handled when the system finds a violation, what becomes of the community mods that PC players use, and two new tools for the people who build tournament broadcasts.

Rocket League is a game of soccer played with cars. Its competitive scene is built around the Rocket League Championship Series, the official circuit known as the RLCS.

What the system does in a match

An anti-cheat is software that runs beside a game and looks for programs or behavior that break its rules. The official announcement describes Easy Anti-Cheat in Rocket League as running in the background and using behavioral analysis and proactive detection against cheating and botting, which means accounts played by automated programs rather than by people.

The announcement sets out what happens when it finds something during a game. "If EAC spots a violation mid-match, it cancels the match without any impact on your Matchmaking Rating (MMR)." The Matchmaking Rating is the number that measures each player's level and decides who they are matched against in ranked play. A cancelled match therefore does not cost the honest players in it any rating.

The game's site adds that the system flags repeat offenders and players who try to come back after a ban, and that it is meant to improve over time from two inputs: the reports players send and its own findings. The announcement gives no figure for how many accounts have been caught or banned, and no rate of cheating before or after the launch.

Bots and account abuse

Easy Anti-Cheat is one part of a wider set of measures listed in the same post. When the plan was first announced, Dot Esports reported Psyonix's stated goals as detecting and banning cheaters in real time, within broader work on bot detection and protection against DDoS attacks. Waves of bans against bots are now more frequent, according to the announcement, and a new method of detecting bots, which the game's site calls significantly more accurate, is due to ship this quarter. The post does not name the month.

It also restates a rule against two kinds of account abuse. Smurfing is when a strong player uses a second, low-ranked account to play against weaker opponents; account selling is the trade in accounts that already carry a high rank. The announcement says that the game will keep removing Competitive Rewards, the items handed out each season according to the rank a player reached, from accounts found doing either.

Those rewards are tied to the season calendar. When Season 22 went live on March 11, 2026, the patch notes said that Season 21's ranked rewards would follow the highest tier a player reached in the ranked playlists, and only for players who had won ten matches at that tier. The same update applied a soft reset to every ranked playlist, moved the four-against-four mode out of Ranked, brought back Ranked Dropshot and added Heatseeker for two-player teams, so the new anti-cheat arrived about seven weeks into a season whose ranks were being rebuilt.

What players can still do with the system off

Much of the February report turned on mods: small programs made by the community that change the game on a player's own machine, adding training tools or extra information on screen. One of them is BakkesMod, which has its own volunteer developers writing plugins for it.

The answer on April 28 is a split between online and offline play. The game's site states that community mods will not run when Easy Anti-Cheat is enabled. With the system turned off, the same post lists where they still work. Dot Esports reported in February that players would be able to launch the game with the system on or off, and that only online play would require it.

A LAN match is one played on a local network, with the machines in the same room. Steam Workshop maps are custom maps made by players and shared through Steam; the post says they can be played either way, but any mod run on top of them needs the anti-cheat off.

The February report carried two further points that the April post does not repeat. According to Dot Esports, Psyonix said it would let certain partner accounts play online with the system disabled, case by case, and that private matches and tournaments played online would require it like matchmaking.

Features borrowed from the mods

Part of what mods offered is now built into the game itself. The April 28 announcement names three such features: a native display of the Matchmaking Rating, randomization options in Custom Training, the mode where players practice shots set up by others, and team colors in Free Play, the open practice mode.

The Season 22 presentation, published on March 6, had already said that a player's matchmaking rating, the visible recharge of boost pads and the status of flip resets were coming. A flip reset is an advanced move in which a car touches the ball with all four wheels in the air and earns a fresh jump.

The announcement thanks Bakkes, the creator of BakkesMod, and the volunteer developers who make plugins for it. The mod's place in the scene goes beyond practice. Dot Esports reported in February that BakkesMod supports the work of tournament organizers and media, such as the RLCS banners and ball textures, and quoted Yota, a Rocket League content creator for Gen.G, on the plan. "Bakkesmod is a core feature of Rocket League as we know it today."

New tools for broadcasts

The update answers that point with two tools of its own. The first is a StatsAPI, a programming interface that lets creators and tournament organizers pull data directly from the game to customize their broadcasts. The announcement addresses it to the organizers and creators who have built broadcasts with community overlay plugins.

The second is a new setting in the options menu that hides the game's own heads-up display, the scoreboard and meters drawn on screen, so that a broadcaster can place its own graphics over a clean picture.

The update moves several tools that PC players and broadcasters took from mods into the game itself.

Both tools arrive in the same update as the anti-cheat requirement, which keeps community mods from running in online play.

Earlier work on servers and what comes next

Easy Anti-Cheat is not the first time the game has had to protect its online matches. In August 2024, the game's site said that players had suffered poor match quality that summer because of DDoS attacks, in which a server is flooded with traffic or connections until it fails. The fixes it described changed how incoming connections are handled and how servers are set up, so that a targeted match is far less likely to be hit. When an attack does break a match, all players are disconnected together and the game is recorded as a No Contest, so victims lose no rating and attackers gain none. The cancelled-match rule announced on April 28 applies the same protection of rating to matches hit by cheating.

The timeline that led to the April launch ran across the first months of the season.

What it means for PC players

The April 28 announcement names no console. The requirement covers online play on PC, on both stores where the game is sold, and it extends to the Steam Deck and to Linux, which run the game through Proton, the compatibility layer that Dot Esports said would keep working with the system on.

For a PC player who wants to keep using mods, the choice is now one of two modes rather than one game: launch with the anti-cheat on to play online, or launch with it off to train, play offline or edit replays with community tools. The game's site gives no date for any further step in its anti-cheat work beyond the bot detection method announced for this quarter.

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