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EA is permanently banning Linux players on Battlefield V

• vectorEQ 7y ago
  :D only multi player games u should play is where players are admin on their own server. :') companies don't give a shit as long as sales are up. stop playing if it's so horrific and move to a proper game. then maybe battlefield XVIII will be playable.
• minedwiz 7y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20200103160938/https://forums.lutris.net/t/ea-banning-dxvk-on-battlefield-v/7810/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200103160938/https://forums.lu...
• jimbob45 7y ago
  Vulkan being around to compete with DirectX was supposed to break down the last big barrier stopping Linux from being able to game as well as Windows. I guess that only works if game companies are willing to code up the Linux version to begin with, though.
  • jandrese 7y ago
    More than not coding up a Linux version, some games will actively refuse to run under Wine.
  • sudosysgen 7y ago
    Wine and Proton are the last solution, and work exceedingly well, but companies such as EA are banning people that use those solutions for well no good reason.
    • Narishma 7y ago
      They do so for very good reasons as you can easily cheat in multiplayer games using those technologies.
      • sudosysgen 7y ago
        You can easily cheat in a multiplayer game no matter what. There is currently no counter to driver/ring 0 cheats. If you wanted to cheat there are much easier ways than a complete Linux install. Also there is an EAC version made for Wine. Obviously it can't counter cheats executing at Ring 0 or something similar, but it's the same for every OS.
  • uncle_j 7y ago
    Adding support for a Graphics API isn't that difficult. What is difficult is adding support for all your internal tooling. This can be anything from existing scripts, build processes to the tooling itself. It simply isn't worth it when the percentage of players that are using Desktop Linux to play PC games is ~1% of the player base.
    • disintegore 7y ago
      That 1% has consistently shown that they are willing to perform that extra work themselves. While less than ideal, the status quo is nothing to lament. It is so much to ask for these publishers not to go out of their way to sabotage it?
      • uncle_j 7y ago
        The game is supported on Windows not on Linux. I would wager their anti-cheat stuff detects "their OS looks weird, they are probably doing odd stuff so they are likely to be cheaters". If you want to play the game you should be running it on a supported operating system. If the software doesn't work (which is what is really happening here) with an unsupported configuration then that is on you not EA. Also buying games that aren't supported on your OS and jumping through the hoops is just telling companies like EA that they will get the Linux sales because the customer will do the effort of getting it working for them.
  • ryukafalz 7y ago
    Or even just willing to not interfere with Linux users - I think Vulkan software generally works pretty well through Wine.
  • DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
    It's more than just graphics APIs - Linux has long supported old-school OpenGL, so that wasn't really the problem. The state of audio libraries and systems on Linux is worse and OpenAL is now proprietary. Even if you're making a desktop-environment game (E.g. using GTK without SDL) there isn't a good, widely-supported Linux API for audio. Don't forget the other difficulties with porting Windows games (and software in general) to Linux that libraries like SDL can't help with, like file-system locations, deciding if you want to only support X or Wayland if you need window-manager integration, etc (granted, these concerns are less relevant today as games send to be filesystem-silod, single-window or exclusive-mode applications - but think about how games were in the mid-1990s with the multi-window SimCity 2000 or those desktop amusement minigames.
    • Tsarbomb 7y ago
      The difference between X and Wayland is way more than needing window-manager integration. You are forgetting that keyboard and mouse inputs run through Xorg so the problem goes way deeper.
      • cycloptic 7y ago
        You don't have to worry about that if you use GTK or SDL. They support both. The other really important thing in the age of console ports is support for game controllers, and that isn't handled by the display server at all. It has a separate API, which SDL provides a nice high-level interface for.
      • jessant 7y ago
        I think there are some similarities because libinput can be used on X as well as with Wayland.
    • coldpie 7y ago
      > Even if you're making a desktop-environment game (E.g. using GTK without SDL) there isn't a good, widely-supported Linux API for audio. Depending on PulseAudio is fine now. The amount of people not running PA is negligible. If you don't want to do that, use an intermediary API like SDL or PortAudio.
  • ahupp 7y ago
    "In the end [linux users] accounted for <0.1% of sales but >20% of auto reported crashes and support tickets (most gfx driver related)." -- https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760 https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760 Vulkan would plausibly help the driver instability issues, but I'd imagine the Linux support costs will still be higher just given how little consistency there is between distributions.
  • thrower123 7y ago
    The market-share just isn't there to justify any investment in Linux support. It's sad, but that's where things are. Even in cases where it should be low-friction (Unity/Unreal games) the friction is still too high to be really financially viable.
• halfcreative 7y ago
  I wish I understood better how anti-cheat works. When anti-cheat software gets flagged while running on linux, is the cause of the flag a viable route for other cheats? I'm so unfamiliar with the mechanics of anti-cheat that I'm not even sure if I'm asking a proper question.
  • jandrese 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure the mechanics of the anti-cheat are kept obscure to prevent cheat makers from adding anti-anti-cheat tech to their product.
    • swarnie_ 7y ago
      Pretty much this, its intentionally kept as a blackbox.
      • midnightclubbed 7y ago
        Some solution are a blackbox to the game development team (and run as a post process during the game link or as a separate executable monitoring the game and system). There is a huge and lucrative economy around cheat development that encourages a fair amount of paranoia from game developers.
    • saagarjha 7y ago
      They are but get promptly reverse engineered by modders and hack developers. Many of the core techniques remain the same.
  • fermenflo 7y ago
    The way I understand it (which isn't that well either tbh) is that most modern anti-cheat softwares run off of some Hardware ID (HWID). An amalgam of ids from your GPU, CPU, OS, Mac adress, and so on... that are somehow combined or hashed into some uniquely identifying ID. This is a bit harder to spoof than an IP address ban. And most are robust to gradual changes. Like Theseus' ship, if you change your GPU one day, OS the next, and so on... is it the same computer you should ban? Most HWIDs generated by games won't change until a certain number of those variables are messed around with. Once again, I'm no expert but I think that's at least helpful.
• Scuds 7y ago
  Any context would be nice. This is a modified/wrapped client, right? edit: any forums software I ever write is going to use a 'fallback to static rendering' circuit breaker setup in the case of slashdotting.
  • Nerdfest 7y ago
    The game client would be unmodified, with it running on an API layer that maps windows system calls to to their Linux equivalents. Their ant-cheat software finds this "suspicious" and boots the players.
• Pfhreak 7y ago
  Is there any more details than a couple people being banned complaining in a forum post? Cause this looks like textbook posts by people who were caught cheating.
  • dx87 7y ago
    It's probably similar to Bungie banning people playing on Linux. They count Proton/Wine as an emulator, and playing the game through an emulator is a bannable offense. The store page mentions nothing about this though, so people would try to play on Linux, get banned, and not even be able to play on Windows any more. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/dcu7pb/bungie_will_permanently_ban_anyone_who_plays/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/dcu7pb/bungie_will_p...
    • mroche 7y ago
      > They count Proton/Wine as an emulator, and playing the game through an emulator is a bannable offense. This is a misrepresentation of the Bungie issue. Users had to patch Proton itself to disable the in-game anti-cheat just to get the game to launch. Disabling anti-cheat is the bannable offense.
  • pugworthy 7y ago
    Definitely this. It's hard to extrapolate from 10 posts by a few people who claim they weren't cheating all the way to "permanently banning Linux players".
• whatsmyusername 7y ago
  I added EA to the 'ignore all their products' list 10 years ago. Nothing since then has made me feel this was a poor decision.
  • swarnie_ 7y ago
    Same here. I found Sim City 5 to be awful at best and a total fraud at worst. Since i wasn't able to get a refund from support i had to charge back via my credit card provider. The people who still bankroll these companies cause me massive confusion.
    • whatsmyusername 7y ago
      Cities Skylines is okay for that, though their dlc model is a little papega.
  • akersten 7y ago
    Same. And it's a shame too - the new Jedi game looks really nice. But it's got that scarlet EA on it, and that's an automatic no from me. Stories like these reassure me that my boycotting is justified.
    • ronald_dregan 7y ago
      it is a really fun game, in spite of EA. just pirate it, or buy a used physical copy.
      • whatsmyusername 7y ago
        I watched someone play it on the hardest difficulty, which plays like Jedi Dark Souls. It didn't look like a game with any real replay-ability. I find catching those games on twitch is way more fun than playing them myself.
    • tmpz22 7y ago
      I bit the bullet and was disappointed by fallen order. It combines a lot of genres and doesn't do any of them well. The story telling you might expect in a star wars game isn't there, the puzzles are frustrating, the pathing through the map will make you pull your hair out. The graphics are amazing though.
• mapcars 7y ago
  Honestly that's rather expected from EA :D
• z9e 7y ago
  I can only comment on this from the perspective of a very active Battlefield 1 and 5 player, the current use of cheats is pretty much an epidemic right now on all of the PC servers. There are cheat programs that you can use on the Windows clients, carpet banning based on what OS you are using is totally the wrong approach here and continues to show EA & DICE have no handle on this. Instead of doing this, they should just add a vote to kick feature on the servers which would solve a lot of the frustration.
  • SubiculumCode 7y ago
    I play BF 1, Salty Noob servers seem to have fewer cheats because the server admins responds. The DICE servers are crap though. Auto-aim, invisibility, etc. Frustrating.
  • OGWhales 7y ago
    > they should just add a vote to kick feature on the servers Wish this was more common. Seems to work well in all the games I've played with this feature.
    • cooljacob204 7y ago
      It also tends to get abused against really good players. Servers need more active admins.
      • sethammons 7y ago
        Was going to say this. I recall getting regularly booted from Day of Defeat games for alleged cheating. Nope, I just happened to be pretty dang good at that game.
      • Skunkleton 7y ago
        Servers would have more admins if players could run their own servers.
      • utopian3 7y ago
        In my experience, it generally turned out those "really good" players were taking advantage of a glitch, and were kicked for that.. not for being really good. (server rules generally have a "no glitching" rule). Again, this is all anecdotal experience
• noname120 7y ago
  I'm part of a Battlefield V community and the state of anticheat on this game is absolutely horrific. We see players blatantly cheating for weeks, sometimes even months without getting banned. This has made one of the game modes (Firestorm) almost unplayable and drove most players away from this mode. The shocking part is that we've compiled a list[1][2] of 380+ cheaters with video proofs and we've transmitted this list to some DICE community managers and employees. For a few months they checked this list from time to time and banned the offending people but they stopped looking at it entirely since around summer. We've tried to get in touch with other people but without any success. The whole community is outraged by the apparent lack of care given to the cheating issues, and the fact that they seem to ignore all the reports made by the players through the platform Origin. [1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/172J_dqCTZpDpOBbhgvtTi_cC6I_c0IHJVkfkdwmREgo/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/172J_dqCTZpDpOBbhgvtT... [2] https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScmXAY-Q-QrfflsHrFX-pyfy1eCINCx9RCuuEOuFsYgEd1Lcg/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScmXAY-Q-QrfflsHrFX...
  • Havoc 7y ago
    >sometimes even months without getting banned Thats intentional. Companies let detected hacks slide silently and then do waves of mass bans to prevent hackers working out what exactly triggered the ban. That cat and mouse game has moved well beyond a simple "omg why can't ea ban this obv hack"
    • dwnvoted2hell 7y ago
      The unfortunate truth is that if you show precisely when someone is caught, they can mine that information to determine how to keep from getting caught. If you let it go blatantly and then enforce a crack down, it's much less possible to know when they found out, or what the methodology was in making determinations.
    • noname120 7y ago
      No, the sad truth is that the current anticheat is FairFight. FairFight mainly operates by monitoring the behavior of a player and it takes a screenshot if they are suspicious. Cheating tools[1] are aware of this and disable any visual effects (ESP hack e.g. see through walls, etc.) when it takes a screenshot and reenables them right after[2]. [1] https://overlayhack.com/battlefield-5-v-hacks https://overlayhack.com/battlefield-5-v-hacks [2] https://overlayhack.com/battlefield-5-v-hacks#509 https://overlayhack.com/battlefield-5-v-hacks#509
• vardump 7y ago
  It's been a really really long time since EA last made a game I enjoyed. Like the Command and Conquer series, even Generals and Zero Hour, as much as they were a departure from the "real" C&C series. I wonder if there'll ever be such a time as the nineties when it comes to new interesting game genres. Nowadays it's just same FPS games with different graphics. Monorail with quick time events or battlefields of some sort. And of course same golden goose EA sports games every year. Cookie cutter. Or maybe new interesting games come out all the time and I'm just too old.
  • throwanem 7y ago
    Stop paying attention to the AAA industry that's making the compost you accurately describe. Indie is where all the innovation is any more, and has been for a good few years now.
    • whatisthiseven 7y ago
      I agree with your post, but describing it as "indie" is weird as there is a huuuuge market of non-AAA that is not indie, and yet that market also produces interesting and innovative games. There are over 30,000 games on Steam. If you ignore the AAA publishers you'll find tons of excellent games regardless of indie status.
      • giancarlostoro 7y ago
        What do you consider as not AAA but technically not indie? I can only think of something like Minecraft? Is Minecraft technically AAA now or are they neither indie or AAA despite originally being indie? Do you have some other games you can mention? How does that work, genuinely curious.
        • whatisthiseven 7y ago
          AAA to me are the publishers that are buying TV ads to promote their games regularly and operate with revenues into the billions with hundreds or thousands of employees. But this is a bit of a misnomer, as AAA can also mean the kind of design the game takes and its monetization model. This is an important distinction because AAA studios always design their games with particular monetization schemes or design their games in a particular way with lots of money behind their visuals. AAA studios can absorb multiple failures in either design or whole games without much loss. While it might seem pedantic to define AAA first, I feel like this is necessary to help focus down what isn't AAA. Smaller studios, like Zachtronics, Daedalic Entertainment, or Coffee Stain have a respectable library and are medium sized companies that can afford the occasional flop in their production line up. They all started as indie studios which had produced their first game with very little. But they have clearly evolved passed the indie stage and now develop, design and build their games with their niche in mind but with the budget and operating maturity of companies that know what they are doing. True indies, in my mind, have many or all of these characteristics: 1) tiny library or even a single game 2) small team funded independently or through small scale funding 3) very niche game design and approach to mechanics and play 4) Will fail entirely if any game they put out fails 5) Little to no business acumen 6) focused entirely on the game as an artistic expression of play rather than a business function. To be indie doesn't mean you have all these things, or don't contradict some of them. Just this is a loose guide I think helps to identify differences. For example, Stardew Valley is an excellent example of a game which is indie, but it is the most extreme form of "indie game", being made by literally one guy and financially supported by his wife. Minecraft was indie, but is now owned by a major publisher (Microsoft). Zachtronics I used to consider indie, but they now regularly put out games and are financially quite secure. Their first games were Flash games that had little appeal and were quite artistically lacking. Their first commercial success, SpaceChem, was a huge breakthrough for the indie studio in establishing itself. Over the course of its future releases it would transform out of the indie space and into a comfortable sized gaming company. SpaceChem is so obviously indie when you first play it that you can feel and see the history behind its development as a team that used to work with flash games. MOLEK-SYNTEZ, the latest game from Zachtronics (which followed EXAPUNKS) are clearly creations of a company that understands its market segment and knows how to execute on its brand and create games that fill that segment at a high quality of art, polish, and aesthetic. AAA studios do something similar, but they don't have a "niche" or market segment outside of the most bland description: gamers that want shooters or cinematic RPGs. Pummel Party, from the studio Rebuilt, also very much feels indie. It tried to apply a different formula to the "Mario Party" genre of games and make it more "take that" oriented in its design and presentation of absurdist mechanics. That kind of design philosophy worked well for Goat Simulator in a similar vein. I think these distinctions are important because nearly all games organize themselves behind a publishing title of some kind, and delineating a game as "AAA" because it has a big name publisher or "indie" because it isn't well known doesn't allow us to analyze the market and the wide variety of game companies out there, or understand the kinds of games and how/why they were made. I find taking this more nuanced approach to analyzing game development allows for a much more rich view of game development and its history and is a better indicator of the kinds of games that will be created, as well as the development path studios will take as they get past their initial successes and become established within the industry. As an aside: maybe I didn't come up with a particularly good categorization scheme, as I hadn't thought about this as deeply and I had to look up example games/studios to ensure I had something more lucid over my hazy memories, but I hope my post helped to at least illuminate the kind of overall thinking and philosophy I applied in segmenting the game development space.
• Mikeb85 7y ago
  I'll never understand why people still buy EA products. They're easily among the most anti-consumer of all companies. Between their Origin client, microtransactions in AAA games, yearly releases with no appreciable changes and now shit like this I could never buy a product from them.
  • MrZongle2 7y ago
    The most amazing thing is that after all of this hullabaloo... a good number of these frustrated players will still purchase a Battlefield 6 game.
  • stOneskull 7y ago
    They find the game fun, I suppose. I still really love Fifa and will keep playing it
  • asutekku 7y ago
    I enjoy the games. It is as simple as that. They are fun to play and you don’t need to buy the MTXs to enjoy the game despite multiple people crying about them. Games are also more and more expensive to develop so you kind of need to add MTX to the AAA games to cover the costs, especially when BFV didn’t have any DLCs. It is not 2000’s anympre.
    • benologist 7y ago
      Shouldn't really dismiss the people complaining as they are forcing EA to be less horrible to you whether you purchase the MTX or not. > Some gamers calculated that it would take six years of playing two hours a day to unlock all the features in Battlefront II without handing over any real money. Paying for everything, meanwhile, would cost over $2,000. https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/16/technology/battlefront-ii-star-wars-game-ea-costs/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/16/technology/battlefront-ii-s...
      • asutekku 7y ago
        But the thing is those are purely cosmetic. There’s no reason why one should be able to get them for free, especially when it is a multiplayer game.
• caymanjim 7y ago
  That their anti-cheat software is able to detect this is a good thing. So many games are ruined by cheaters and bots. In this case, I don't think the intent was to ban Linux players; rather their anti-cheat software detects any sort of virtualization of video or input devices, because that could facilitate cheating software. It likely can't tell the difference between harmless virtualization and the injection of cheating software. I sympathize with Linux gamers, as I wish I could game from Linux. I'm typing this from Windows right now, and the only reason I ever run Windows is to play games. I don't like dual booting—and Linux runs so amazingly-well in Hyper-V—that I'm fine having Windows as my primary OS (at home, anyway). That EA's software can't tell the difference is annoying. Their PR response and lack of clarity is annoying. If, for technical reasons, they can't secure the Linux-emulated version, they should make it clear that Linux isn't supported, and offer refunds to the (surely tiny number of) people who bought it for Linux play. If the number of Linux users is large enough, they should create a proper Linux port themselves. In summary, I sympathize with their goals regarding cheat prevention. It's not like someone at EA said "I hate Linux, let's accuse them of cheating and ban their accounts!" This is a technical problem and a minor PR failure. A reasoned response is atypical from gamers who feel slighted, though, so I don't expect one.
  • the8472 7y ago
    > That their anti-cheat software is able to detect this is a good thing. No, it's not a good thing. If a website did it we would call it invasive tracking. And you didn't even pay for a website, unlike the game.
• dijit 7y ago
  Doesn’t surprise me. Back in 2006 I was playing counterstrike through wine and i got banned. VAC bans are permanent so that account was gone, despite appeals. I learned my lesson, now I don’t run multiplayer games through wine.
  • artiscode 7y ago
    I have a weird experience when it comes to playing Counter Strike on Linux. It was back in 2004 when most non-Valve Counter Strike servers in my region(EU) used anti-cheat software called CheatingDeath. I was using Linux on my desktop for all tasks, which included playing Counter Strike, as I was a 15 year old kid. Needless to say, not only CheatingDeath did not work under Wine, it outright refused to play the game altogether, blocking the UI and informing server admins that I was cheating, which led to me getting banned. I had paid for a reserved slot on my favorite servers, so getting permanently banned was devastating. Luckily there was also cheat software called CheatingDeathDeath that emulated CheatingDeath, run perfectly fine under Wine and came with a variety of cheats built-in. It also spoofed fingerprinting part, making my machine appear as normal. So I could play CS on Linux(with actual cheats disabled) and didn't have to worry about getting banned because anti-cheat software would mark me as a false positive. Thanks, cheat developers! P.S. I got better performance playing CS with Wine and cheat software as it didn't hog system resources so much. I recall getting a maximum of 75 FPS under Windows running genuine CheatingDeath and stable 100 FPS under Linux and CheatingDeathDeath.
• jchw 7y ago
  Anti-cheat software is an absolute shit show of cat-and-mouse tactics. It’s often difficult to distinguish anti-cheat software from rootkits or spyware. They’re invasive and user hostile, and they frequently cause collateral damage that is swept under the rug and that support tacitly refuses to acknowledge. This has happened on multiple occasions with Blizzard: - https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Blizzard-Banning-DXVK-Wine https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Blizzard... - https://m.slashdot.org/story/75350 https://m.slashdot.org/story/75350 Of course, although Blizzards initial response was to claim that the users cheated and were lying, they did eventually fix the problem the first time (although IIRC they never reversed all of the bans for the very first WoW Wine ban wave.) Now they have a bit more experience with the issue so it seems it is getting more attention. However with EA I don’t really have utmost confidence they will pay any attention to this, so I’d guess it’s time to get loud if you want any hope of this being fixed.
  • coldpie 7y ago
    > Anti-cheat software is an absolute shit show of cat-and-mouse tactics. It’s often difficult to distinguish anti-cheat software from rootkits or spyware. They’re invasive and user hostile, and they frequently cause collateral damage that is swept under the rug and that support tacitly refuses to acknowledge. Sure, but I don't see a good alternative. Cheating is a real problem and will quickly destroy your online community (see other comments in this thread). Sacrificing a small percent of your playerbase in the name of having a functioning online system at all seems like a reasonable solution to me. It's unfortunate that it is necessary, but people are jerks.
    • alkonaut 7y ago
      Don’t join a server without an admin. Problem solved. I wouldn’t join some random server hosted by the game publisher where there are no admins and no votebans.
    • anonymousab 7y ago
      >Sure, but I don't see a good alternative Allow users to votekick and voteban. Provide the server software for players to host their own servers and provide their own solutions to these problems. These are tools and approaches that we had in past games and while they are not perfect, they are better than these black box invasive anticheat solutions born from a desire to avoid giving community control to users. >Sacrificing a small percent of your playerbase in the name of having a functioning online system at all seems like a reasonable solution to me Only if you provide a robust and empowered support staff to quickly unban and resolve false positives. That is, actually take responsibility, which is something game developers and major publishers seem allergic to.
• cooljacob204 7y ago
  Are there any cases of games banning people using virtual machines with videocard passthrough? I was strongly considering going this route but kinda worried game developers will start cracking down on it.
• jolly_batali 7y ago
  PSA: the original, Battlefield 1942, is still alive and well, and Linux players are welcome. About 20 players/night at 7PM PST join on EA117 server. It plays the “desert combat” mod — the makers of that mod were acquihired by DICE to make BF2. ea117.com/access It’s also really easy to reinstall... http://www.mediafire.com/file/v2dj55nwoxz84o8/BF1942DCF_setup.exe http://www.mediafire.com/file/v2dj55nwoxz84o8/BF1942DCF_setu... If you’re lazy.
• Nextgrid 7y ago
  I am more impressed that it's actually possible to run BF5 on Linux well enough to be able to log into a multiplayer game.
  • gambiting 7y ago
    I have a friend who plays most PC games on his Linux machine - we even play a weekly Divinity 2 session together and he runs the client on Linux, discord in his browser, and it's virtually identical to other windows-running players.
  • ilikehurdles 7y ago
    Valve's compatibility layer, Proton, is pretty freaking amazing for even very recent games on steam; but, it often fails when the game is administered by additional layers of DRM or another store's launcher. I bought and exclusively played Sekiro on linux from launch day without any issues, but have trouble with Age of Empires Definitive Edition.
  • wjoe 7y ago
    Wine has come a long way in the last few years, in large part thanks to DXVK (translates DX11 to Vulkan) and Valve funding and pulling together a few Wine related projects. The vast majority of offline Windows games run well on Linux these days, even a lot of high end AAA games often run well on launch day with a relatively minor hit to performance. Online multiplayer games are the exception, for this very reason here - anti-cheat systems. Since these are designed specifically to make sure the game is running in the exact way they were built, and often are very intrusive in looking at what's running on your system, Wine is unsurprisingly seen as something "not normal". Most games with anti-cheat won't start at all or won't let you into the online servers - this is the case with EAC and BattlEye, which are the most widely used anti-cheat these days.
• shadowtree 7y ago
  I'd love them to switch to a paid subscription model, like WoW. Would help them justify the long tail of updates, patches, etc. and make a ban easier to enforce - block the cheater's credit card. Make it a premium service for all I care, with premium only servers. Origin Premium doesn't do crap.
  • watermelon0 7y ago
    You can get prepaid debit cards in many countries, and many banks (especially modern, mobile-based) offer disposable virtual debit cards. They could require debit/credit cards backed by a bank account (not completely sure how those differ to disposable/prepaid ones), but that would prevent some legitimate users from buying the subscription.
  • seattle_spring 7y ago
    WoW Classic is dealing with a huge botting and cheating problem, and the only response from Activision-Blizzard has been to do periodic ban waves maybe once every other month.
• oliwarner 7y ago
  Some context. This is running through Wine (and DXVK, a DX9-11 → Vulkan layer) on Linux. Seems EA is doing —like a lot of very lazy anti-cheats— balls-simple stack inspection. They determine whether people are cheating by looking for known signed drivers, known hardware, known bad processes and input drivers. It's cheap and scales well but it's brainless. They have to know about a hack to detect it in the future. Version checks are constantly slackened off because legitimate updates come out all the time. Battlefield is seeing Wine and the drivers Wine reports (which are a mix of real and fake) and baulking out. It's to be expected from such plastic anti-cheat software. Many games do this. There are better options. CSGO's overwatch allows the community to self-moderate by replaying a player's gameplay. They literally record the player's input and rebuild what the player could see in the reviewer's client. Reviewer determines whether or not their gameplay was possible. It sounds hardcore but it's simple, and adds no latency because it's done after-the-fact. Makes it super-simple to detect most wall-hacks and aim helpers. So why isn't it everywhere? Logging data costs money. And EA, for all their moneybags are cheapskates. And you could automate this. You could do a server-side render to determine whether or not a user is tracking players that are not physically visible to the player, or tracking impossibly tight hitboxes, or is triggering massive killcounts far too regularly (ie exploiting a bug). But that's more money. But I'd expect a better response shouting into the wind than asking EA to be better. They're a trash company.
  • ssully 7y ago
    You are also comparing two different games in terms of popularity. CS:GO is usually in the top 3 of most popular games on steam. Last time I checked, it was number 1. I would be surprised if Battlefield V has a quarter of the amount of players (across all platforms) versus CS:GO (which is just on PC). I am not trying to make excuses for EA (Which has been nothing but a trash fire of a company for the last few years), but how could they justify putting those kind of resources behind a game like BFV?
    • ilikehurdles 7y ago
      Actually, CS:GO is also on Xbox 360!
    • 7y ago
• maruko 7y ago
  aaaa
• pkulak 7y ago
  Just reading through these comments, I had no idea the current state of PC gaming. Just so I have this right, you pay for a game, but you are running the entire thing locally, so your machine knows everything. Like, people behind walls, it can auto aim at people who aren't, etc. So, now you are also forced to install these spyware-like sidecars to the game that monitor you and try to figure out if you are doing any of this? What a nightmare. I have huge cleanliness issues with my machines. I don't even like using anything that needs an installer to run, and tend to run things I don't totally understand and trust in VMs. I don't think I could do this.
  • theandrewbailey 7y ago
    > So, now you are also forced to install these spyware-like sidecars to the game that monitor you and try to figure out if you are doing any of this? I'm pretty sure the anti-cheat is just a library/module/etc. that's installed with the game. I can't imagine that it's a completely separate program that you install (unless it happens to be the game launcher).
    • anonymousab 7y ago
      Some anticheats are separate binaries/executables. Punkbuster and maybe Blizzard's Warden and its successor. They're usually packaged with the game, but run separately. They often run when the game is inactive.
    • dylz 7y ago
      They're usually shipped with the game, but often will _remain after you uninstall the game_. Some install permanent rootkits that are completely uninstallable (see: GameGuard‡, XIGNCODE⸸, AhnLab Hackshield†) ⸸ God awful basically malware. Sends a ton of data home to bare IPs overseas. No TLS. Incredibly invasive. † This one was particularly interesting, malware could use the rootkit to hide their files based on specific names. It is horrendously shittily written. AhnLab itself is also interesting, as the founder tried to run for president of South Korea or something, and SK either still does or used to mandate some of their "anti keylogging rootkit" software as required by law. Sends a ton of data home to bare IPs overseas. No TLS. Incredibly invasive. ‡ This does not uninstall after you uninstall the game, it runs persistently, and would make windows non-genuine or toggle on unsafe mode for unsigned force-installed ring0 drivers. Sends a ton of data home to bare IPs overseas. No TLS. Best part: did not sign version updates or demand they be higher. Cheaters could run a webserver on localhost with empty 0-byte signature detection files, and it would "patch" itself down to uselessness at launch and detect nothing. Incredibly invasive.
• sebow 7y ago
  Frankly, EA and its games are pretty shit for the industry. I'm even surprised linux folks play battlefield.There are a lot of good games with communities that don't take such a shitty approach towards a whole platform.
• tmpz22 7y ago
  The Battlefield series is a fantastic lesson in product development, especially BFV the most recent edition. [1]: Despite being a very popular franchise and BF5 being a very popular theme (WW2) the game was received negatively from its very first trailer, in part due to a sudden focus on cosmetics and shirking of historical accuracy. [2]: Vitriol over the trailer lead to twitter drama where the executives among other things told players not to buy the game if they didn't like it. [3]: The development team defined a release schedule of drip feeding content over the next few years for free, instead of paid DLC. This sounds great to the user until you realize funding for future content will be predicated on launch success. [4]: BF5 announced Firestorm, a battle-royale game mode which would be embedded inside the BF5 game. This would be the first BR mode in the series and would have the largest map ever made for a battlefield game. This mode and map would be developed by an additional studio and not eat into the development time of the original game [5]: The game flopped at launch, EA was already having a horrific Q3 that year. The game launched with a large number of bugs, server crashes, and very few initial multiplayer maps. [6]: Immediately after launch there was a large number of game balancing issues which the community and the game developers disagreed as to its cause. Eventually they got it right a few months later. [7]: 5 months after launch Firestorm (the BR mode) released. It was a pretty interesting experience but guffawed in several key categories for a Battle-royale game, including horrific user interfaces and looting systems. [8]: In order to fix issues with the initial launch of firestorm, Dice diverts resources from the main development team to work on the BR game mode. [9]: Firestorm begins to lose player count, leading to very long queue times for players trying to play a game. [10]: The rate of post-launch content (especially new maps) was slower than any battlefield game ever. [11]: Unsolicited, the game developers rebalance many key weapons leading to the same large game balancing issues which has been "fixed" a year ago [12]: Cheating issues, huge thematic settings of WW2 left out of the game, a near dead Firestorm mode, and now we can have a thread like this ------- My final take away is that this game could have been a 10/10 but was a 5/10 and a sign that publishers like EA really suck the life out of every product line they touch.
  • whoisnnamdi 7y ago
    Great summary - thank you
• airstrike 7y ago
  Honest but perhaps naive question: why is it that anti-cheat needs to be conducted through technology only? Back in the day, online communities had admins with near unlimited power (I'm thinking IRC and community Counter-Strike servers) and they solved that problem proactively. EA could have a few employees do this work but also let such employees appoint long-standing, well known community members have a limited set of powers to act upon the most blatant offenders in real time. Similar to how IRC had network and channel OPs
  • rcfox 7y ago
    One reason is that volunteers in these moderation positions begin to see it as a symbol of status and the power goes to their heads. About this time last year, Digital Extremes had to pretty much fire all of the Warframe chat moderators for abusing their power. There's also the issue of scale. Back in the day, online communities were much smaller. There were fewer online gamers, and network latency often restricted the range of a community geographically.
• dhimes 7y ago
  I'm getting the feeling reading this thread that gaming may have replaced porn as the internet use spurring the most rapid innovation. Is this an accurate assessment? I'm not involved with either, but in the very early days it was the adult industry that solved problems of massive use and payments etc.
  • _wzsf 7y ago
    Replaced? Don't make me laugh. Gaming has always been bigger.
    • dhimes 7y ago
      You might find this interesting. http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2015/01/history-of-internet-porn/ http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2015/01/history-of-int...
    • tomc1985 7y ago
      Gaming on the web was tiny til broadband became mainstream. There were lots of dial-up services (DJANGO, MSN gaming, etc) but latencies over the web were not so great. I remember getting pings of 700+ trying to play Jedi Knight deathmatch on AOL
• fxtentacle 7y ago
  As long as DXVK allows people to replace shaders, EA has to treat DXVK like a cheat tool. Replacing shaders is what people use to do shady things like wallhacks, outlining moving enemies, or providing targeting data for aimbots.
  • gpm 7y ago
    Or they could just take a screenshot and check if it looks right?
    • pitaj 7y ago
      Cheats detect that and change things back just before the screenshot is executed.
    • fxtentacle 7y ago
      Many cheating tools actually render to a secondary back-buffer. Much more convenient for the cheater, because they can even live-stream their play and everything will look clean. It's usually not that difficult to hook the DirectX binding calls to bind an additional G-buffer, because games tend to do render to multiple G-buffer targets already for things like post-processing reflections, depth of field or motion blur. Then you patch the shaders to write the info you want/need to your new G-buffer. The game will continue to work with its (unmodified) G-buffers while you can work with your (invisible to the game) private buffer. In a gist, that's how you invisibly collect aimbot hitboxes using DXVK. The last step then would be to smoothly nudge the player's aim onto your detected hitbox. Depending on how you do that, it may or may not be detect-able, not even to onlookers. So the only real protection is to block the data collection in the first place, which means you need to block any kind of virtualization and any kind of 3rd party graphics API drivers, such as home-compiled DXVK binaries.
      • curiousshoelace 7y ago
        couldn't a cheater intercept their own client with a man-in-the-middle-attack, pull out the data like player positions and stuff, and simulate the game on another PC? you could even do aimbot by finding the client's input packets and replacing them. i suppose if the game's connection was encrypted or something you would still need to access the client PC's memory
• lonelappde 7y ago
  If you aren't playing for money, why does anti-cheat matter? Just use ELO matchmaking and/or play with friends.
  • jandrese 7y ago
    It's not so much fun when you're getting sniped from across the map beyond your draw distance the instant you spawn by some dude who isn't even looking in your direction.
• LoSboccacc 7y ago
  in which a new generation relearns that if you are not paying a subscription you are a center of cost
• Yizahi 7y ago
  I'm not buying, playing, pirating or otherwise touching EA products on any platform since 2011 (or 2012) and recommend you do the same. This is truly anti-consumer company and it deserves to die forgotten in a ditch.
• Justsignedup 7y ago
  I mean the first mistake is paying EA anything. That company is a plague.
• ryuukk_ 7y ago
  proton is cancer, thanks to Valve, you can cheat without VAC issues on CS:GO, as long as you are playing with proton, you are safe to cheat
• Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
  Game community is needing a KYC-type solution. That would require tying accounts to real identities, and if someone performs way above the field, his account is temporarily suspended, until he/she visits the authorized verification center where gaming skill can be verified by a neutral party. If a gamer can prove his skill, an account is unsuspended.
  • justincredible 7y ago
    Please prove to our totally impartial inquisitors that you did not commit this crime.
  • gpm 7y ago
    I really doubt that is worth it at anything less than the professional level. Too much friction for customers, too costly for companies to run, and too little at stake. At the professional level everything is already done in person anyways.
  • janoc 7y ago
    Uh a privacy nightmare (giving out your identity to a random, unaccountable company to be able to play a game? Yay what a splendid idea!) and perfect recipe for killing the game, because now you aren't punishing cheaters but anyone who is playing better than the others (for whatever reason). So players are actually motivated to play at a mediocre/average level instead of trying to get better, because then they could stick out of the crowd and get punished/hassled. What a wonderful thing to incentivize ... facepalm
    • simooooo 7y ago
      You often see overwatch cheaters firing at the ground between kills to keep their accuracy stats from looking abnormally high
• pugworthy 7y ago
  I see no information on this 10 post thread that they are "banning Linux players". I just see a few people saying they weren't cheating who got banned. A little Occam's razor here implies it's just a few people who got caught cheating and won't admit it.
  • penagwin 7y ago
    It could be either. It's not at all far-fetched that the anti-cheat looks at it's environment and realizes that things ARE NOT normal - different tricks and layers are used to make the game run at all. Then again you could certainly be right, and it's just a few cheaters crying trying to cause a fuss to get unbanned.
    • pugworthy 7y ago
      As the original admin for the Steam forums at launch and an active participant there for years, I have seen my share of " I'm innocent!" cheater posts. That's a lot of the basis of my opinion on this.
• tlobes 7y ago
  Apex Legends, a property from Respawn Entertainment though technically under the EA/Origin umbrella, has a different approach on cheating by using a combination of deep learning from previous matches and shadow-banning cheaters to play among themselves. I've yet to encounter identifiable cheating since the start of the second season (mid 2019)
  • omnimus 7y ago
    I like the idea of cheaters raging because they play against each other (i guess it could be legit competition lol). But works only if all the gaming is centralized. We loose the beauty of self-host games which is how some of the games survived more than decade.
  • vecter 7y ago
    I don’t know what level you’re playing at, but at the Diamond+ level, I run into cheaters almost every night. They’re blatant and 30s of spectating will prove that. I also watch a lot of pro streams and they have the same experience.
  • pugwash 7y ago
    I was banned from Apex Legends because I was playing it via Steam Remote Play. I raised a ticket with EA explaining that I was using Remote Play but they upheld the ban.
• Thaxll 7y ago
  Having working in the anti-cheat field, lot of people here have no ideas how it really works and the implications of banning people. I can tell you that DICE ( Shield ~~ ) have a dedicated team of people and it's not an easy problem to solve.
• GuB-42 7y ago
  I don't think that Linux is the problem. Companies don't like banning players, that's lost revenue and bad press. I suspect that a lot of cheaters use Linux as a cover up. In fact, if I wanted to cheat, I would do exactly that. Not only the more open nature of Linux makes it harder to detect cheats but it also gives me a reason to complain. So I'm sure there are false positives for Linux gamers (it has happened), but I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority were actual cheaters. And BTW, why play Battlefield V on Linux? Maybe I am wrong but from a technical perspective, it is a lot of hassle just to avoid running Windows, and performance is likely to be worse. And from a philosophical perspective, Battlefield V and EA are not exactly in line with the ideals of free software, so if that's your reason for not using Windows, why are you giving your money to EA?
  • gpm 7y ago
    Primarily, I run games on linux because I'm already on linux and rebooting is a pain if I have a lot of things open. Performance on Linux is often as good as or better than windows. Linux as an OS is just plain faster, so that's fighting with whatever performance penalty is introduced by translation layers like wine/dxvk. These days it's usually not much hassle to run things on linux... certainly less than rebooting for a commonly used item.
• dcow 7y ago
  I think the title is misleading. They are not permanently banning Linux players. Some Linux players with a certain set of software installed are being banned. They’re opening cases with EA. One person confirmed their was case was not overturned and their ban stands. The players banned are using Lutris, a third party game launcher which is likely against the TOS. I most certainly it don’t agree with EA, but there’s more color than flat out Linux bans. EDIT: it also looks like they’re using dkvs, the vulkan gl implementation which allows users to swap shaders which would obviously constitute cheating. Probably they caught some cheaters using dkvs, added it to the list of disallowed software without fully understanding what it was and now it’s flagging a lot of false positives.
• danilocesar 7y ago
  Talking about Battlefield V cheaters on consoles... Now there's a ridiculous amount of players using those chronusmax/titan two/strikepack devices that modify the input of real controllers and do things like anti-recoil, rapid fire, auto burst, drop shoot, quickscope, etc. Wallhacks and autoaim are obvious (and, luckly, not common on consoles), but those devices are getting very popular and they provide subtle ways of cheating that are harder to detect.
  • slenk 7y ago
    I have never heard of this before. Very interesting
    • danilocesar 7y ago
      it's so bad that some players are recording lives with a camera pointing to their controls to show that they are not using it (they all require cable)
• fredsanford 7y ago
  Start disputing credit card charges involving EA and watch how fast they start talking to the player base. They cannot easily outsource employees to deal with that.
  • tomc1985 7y ago
    Or, they ban your entire account because you contested a charge Game companies don't fuck around with chargebacks
    • fredsanford 7y ago
      This is true... There are a few that will never accept you as a customer again if you do a chargeback (Arenanet comes to mind). However, with EA, that would probably make me happy.
      • tomc1985 7y ago
        My original Xbox Live account was banned permanently because I thought it'd be easier to do a chargeback than cancel my subscription and ask for a refund of the most recent billing cycle
• bitwize 7y ago
  Yeah? And? Battlefield V multiplayer is an online service. You either use the configuration supported by the service provider or expect to get btfo'd.
• mrbonner 7y ago
  Rant ahead: I gave up gaming on a PC in 2013 and decided to get a PS3 instead. I did this because I got fed up with the constant upgrades (OS, drivers, game patches, etc..) that sometimes required me to spend a few hours of maintenance to play games. The only game I owned in that PS3 system was BF3! I played BF3 in the PC up until the level 70s so you probably have an idea how much fed up I felt to give up. I feel like BF3 is the peak of the franchise. It was executed nicely in the PC as well as other console platforms. I was afraid the graphics quality would dip too much in the PS3 comparing to the PC but realize the decline is justified giving the fact that I don't have to constantly upgrade sht. BF4 on the PS4 was a-okay. BF1 is just meh. BF5 is an abomination. Having played BF since 1942 in the early 2000s I am not a BF novice. But, BF5 is the worst of all. Then, I switched to Modern Warfare 2019. Sure, the maps are smaller with 6v6 multiplayer. But, comparing to BF5 I don't have to wait 5 minutes in the lobby to play a game. And when I want to leave the game, it doesn't take another 5 minutes. The most important thing is with MW2019, I feel fun playing with my limited time available for gaming. With BF5 I feel like fing work and not playing game.
  • thebigspacefuck 7y ago
    BF 5 is awesome on PC, especially with the Pacific maps. It definitely has some issues and a lot of people hated the 5.2 patch, but they seem to be trying to address them. I've never had an issue finding a server
    • slenk 7y ago
      Finding a breakthrough server in the US before 7pm EST is impossible, even on the weekends.
• AcerbicZero 7y ago
  After the flop that was BF5 I don't expect EA to be putting much effort into anything other than keeping some servers up so they can pump and dump BF6 on whoever is dumb enough to buy it.
• alkonaut 7y ago
  Did EA ever officially support running on Linux? Shitty customer treatment aside, running a game on an unknown graphics stack isn’t really viable to allow if you want to e.g ensure users can’t replace shaders etc. I don’t think this kind of anticheat is a good idea to begin with but if you want to use it, it means that when you detect a shady stack you have to assume a user is a potential cheater. What EA should do is just reverse the bans if players want to run them on Windows, or refund the games (Origin credit) for those that aren’t interested if they can’t run on Linux.
• seattle_spring 7y ago
  I genuinely do not understand why cheating in video games is not taken more seriously. If you go and disrupt 200 paying customers at a movie, you'll be kicked out and everyone will get refunded if your behavior is bad enough. But if you cheat in a video game and ruin the experience for potentially millions of paying customers? You might, MAYBE, get banned in a few months as part of a ban wave, but not after making thousands of dollars.
  • screengames 7y ago
    Kind of feel the opposite. It's just a game and cheating is pretty funny.
    • deadbunny 7y ago
      It can be funny sometimes depending on the cheater (and the cheats) but more often than not it's some preteen edgelord just ruining the game for everyone. Air dropping a platoon of parachute equipped cows over Cherno during the zombie apocalypse? Pretty funny. Teleporting behind the enemy team as they spawn and instantly headhotting everyone in 1/2 a second during a competitive FPS? Not fun. When you have a couple of hours a week to play your favourite game only to have it ruined by cheaters for your entire play time it is the definition of not fun. I have zero problem with people cheating in single player games but when you start negatively affecting others experiences that's where the line should be drawn.
    • seattle_spring 7y ago
      What do you do for fun? How would you feel if someone ruined it for you, and you had absolutely no recourse?
• z3t4 7y ago
  Some businesses targeting the mainstream market seem to actively sabotage users on minority platforms. I wonder how much they get paid by Microsoft.
• acd 7y ago
  Challenge for Linux users, make an open source better anti-cheat for Linux than in Windows that connects to the Linux kernel through a kmod to inspect the whole stack. Then Linux would be a better gaming platform than Windows. In many ways it is already better.
  • thenewnewguy 7y ago
    Wouldn't help here, this is a Windows game being run under wine.
• hi41 7y ago
  I visited major bank websites on Linux but I couldn’t login and got the error “agent not supported”. Why do banks prevent logins from Linus even though I am using Google Chrome. Can someone please tell why this happens.
  • Laforet 7y ago
    The browser sends a UA string to the website in every http request in which the OS you have is indicated. https://www.whatismybrowser.com/detect/what-is-my-user-agent https://www.whatismybrowser.com/detect/what-is-my-user-agent
    • hi41 7y ago
      Thank you. However, why do the bank websites allow Google Chrome on windows but do not allow Google Chrome on Linux.
      • Laforet 7y ago
        It's hard to say without knowing more about the website. Some desktop features such as pepperflash were never ported to Android chrome however it's more likely a business decision to push mobile users to use their dedicated app.
• sacman08 7y ago
  People still buy EA games?!?!
• sfgweilr4f 7y ago
  Do these same customers intend on buying the next EA product? I bet they probably will. Regardless of how loud they protest now. I feel that the game playing public doesn't find EA reprehensible enough to let it impact their future sales. Other industries have customers drop them for a decade or permanently. "I'll never shop here again" is something people actually say. So strange.