Easy Anti-Cheat arrives in Rocket League and marks the end of the game’s most popular mod: ‘The right time to bring things to a close’

Epic has made Easy Anti-Cheat a requirement to play Rocket League online, hopefully bringing an end to the era of bots whizzing around in high rank matches and endlessly XP farming. The software comes as part of the game’s latest update, and does include an option to play the game offline without EAC running.

The majority of players probably won’t notice much difference, but one big change for the more committed Rocketeers out there is the end of Bakkesmod. Bakkesmod is a kind of all-in-one bolt-on that adds a tonne of useful quality of life features to Rocket League: things like automatic replay saves, a more varied training mode, stats during matches, fan-made items, and support for an even wider range of community plugins.

EAC does not play nice with mods, and the main man behind the project has announced that this feels like a natural endpoint. “It is absolutely incredible to see how well liked and commonly used BakkesMod is to this day,” writes Bakkes. “There have been over 800 published community submitted plugins in the last few years. Over 750,000 people use the mod on a daily basis, and over 1.5 million of you use it every week!

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“With that being said, I’ve made the decision to stop actively updating the mod. The introduction of EAC feels like the right time to bring things to a close. Both I and the team of core contributors who have helped over the years have moved on from the game, and while we’ve kept things running, the passion and drive to properly support the project just aren’t there anymore. This means that BakkesMod will not work on game versions released on April 28th and later.”

Older versions will remain available on GitHub, while the Patreon that has supported the mod is closing. Over on the Rocket League subreddit, the reaction is just sadness: alongside a feeling that maybe, just maybe, Psyonix and Epic could have done a better job at stealing some of BakkesMod’s most popular ideas.

That’s all, folks from r/RocketLeague

To return to the topic of EAC itself, some players are reporting performance issues which they believe to be linked to EAC, though most seem to have noticed no impact on performance. I played last night and noticed no impact with the naked eye, and have just tested with a frame-counter and am seeing no drops in performance.

Other players are just delighted that EAC seems to have instantly nixed some problem areas for Rocket League.

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“It completely cleared out the win trading bots,” writes tbrockl337. “Which were making it difficult to get one fair game let alone two in a row. And having to also deal with the impacts of swapping back and forth from trying to beat bots to trying to beat people. The game feels real and natural again. We should be thrilled. I certainly am.”

The arrival of EAC has seen a small spike in negative reviews for the game, which is perhaps to be expected, though I doubt the sentiment will persist: and Epic has added this to fix some specific problems, so it feels incredibly unlikely the decision will be reversed. Which is unfortunate for BakkesMod above all else, though perhaps there the creator is right. Some things do have a natural end point.