Rocket League

Toxicity is the complaint that comes up most often, in positive reviews as well as negative ones. Players describe teammates who forfeit after one goal, sit AFK, score own goals on purpose or "throw" after a mistake, plus "What a save!" spam after every miss and abuse in chat. One returning player counted: "In those 15 games someone quit or started trolling after 1 bad play in 11/15 games." The standard advice is to mute everything: "mute all in game chat. Even the quick chat. It's 95% toxic." Several reviewers add that reports seem to do nothing to the worst offenders.

Players describe the ball teleporting, cars passing through the ball, rubber-banding, packet loss and disconnects, often at ping that should be fine: "Even with a ping of around 20, the ball often behaves erratic, teleporting from one place to another". A few players in the Middle East add high ping, and a couple say the servers can't cope on new season days.

Players at every level say ranked is distorted by smurfs (strong players on new free accounts), boosters and derankers, and some blame the switch to free to play. Players report opponents several ranks above them in their lobbies, returning players get placed against vastly better opponents, and solo players complain that they are matched against coordinated parties. Some ask for a separate solo queue: "I would absolutely love for solo queue to come back, i hate having to adjust to massive skill gaps from one game to the next." A few say casual lobbies have the same problem.

The players who raise this mostly have thousands of hours, and those who name a rank tend to be Champion, Grand Champion or Supersonic Legend. The reviews appear throughout the period, with a cluster in February and March 2026. They describe machine-learning bots that play near-perfectly in high ranked lobbies, opponents who DDoS the server or use lag switches when they are losing, and the same problems in tournaments. "Now ruined by AI bots, every lobby, every rank," wrote one player who then uninstalled, and a few others say they quit over it. Some later reviews say they understand the anti-cheat as a response to bots while still disliking its side effects.

The removal of player-to-player trading still comes up often, sometimes as a bare "bring back trading" in positive and negative reviews alike. Long-time players say trading gave their item collections a purpose and built a community around them, and that locking items after years of trading felt like a loss: "locking items after people spent years trading is freaking audacious." A few add that their duplicate items now have no use.

Players who bought the game on Steam object to needing an Epic account to play it, and some describe being locked out: login loops, a forced "create a new account" page with no way to sign in to an existing one, lost accounts and progress, being sent out to the browser to log in, and being unable to even train offline when Epic's services are down. Complaints about logging in peaked in December 2025. One player who briefly switched to a thumbs down after an update stopped the game working wrote: "Forcing you to have an Epic account to play a game you originally bought on Steam is completely messed up." Others say the game can no longer be bought on Steam, and a few family-share players say they can't play competitive.

Complaints from Linux, Mac and some Steam Deck players rose through the first half of 2026 and were still arriving in September. They say online play was removed for their platforms, some say even through Proton, although "the game ran fine". One September 2026 review read, in full: "Fully removed Mac and Linux support on September 18th." A long-time Linux player wrote that leaving meant abandoning a profile full of rare items and an early-player tag. Reports conflict, though: a few positive reviews from July to September 2026 say the game still runs online on Linux through Proton.

Players describe chat bans for mild words or sarcasm and long matchmaking bans after leaving a match their teammates had already abandoned; one detailed review calls the hidden trust score behind it "completely broken". Several players say they got bans for crashes or disconnects they didn't cause. Reviewers on this topic feel that mild players get punished while persistent abusers and quitters keep playing.

Reviews about Easy Anti-Cheat jumped at the end of April 2026 and continued into the summer. Long-time players object that it ended BakkesMod, custom ball and car looks and community training tools overnight: "adding EAC is the final nail in the coffin". Others reported serious frame drops ("dropping from 165 fps to 20 fps for a split second is unacceptable"), stutter, authentication waits, false "anti-cheat violation" kicks, blocked virtual machines and privacy concerns about kernel-level software. A few, including the player with the frame drops, say they understand why it was added given the bots.

Separate from servers, a steady trickle of players report crashes, freezes, stuttering and error 71 disconnects in tournaments. After a September 2026 update, a keyboard-and-mouse player reported that extra mouse buttons stopped binding: "September 22nd Update for the Keyboard cameras settings broke my sidemouse buttons functionality". A controller player wrote that the latest update routes all controls through Steam and added input delay.

A few returning players complain about being sent through tutorials and new-driver challenges before ranked unlocks, and about placement matches against far stronger players. Combined with the Epic login, some gave up before playing a match.