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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 eve

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
  - Thaxll 7y ago
    DICE doesn't just use FairFight obviously. They have their own in-house solution, also used by some other EA games. And TBH you're complaining about 380 people which is a drop in a bucket compare to the number of players on that game, yes cheating sucks but I can assure you there are people actively working on that problem at DICE.
    - noname120 7y ago
      Incorrect, FairFight is their in-house solution and this is the only tool that they use client-side for Battlefield V[1]. They've dropped the third-party PunkBuster anticheat tool since Battlefield 1. Other EA games use other anticheat tools for example Apex Legends uses Easy Anti-Cheat[2], which is much more efficient to track and ban cheaters. > And TBH you're complaining about 380 people which is a drop in a bucket compare to the number of players on that game The Firestorm mode has so few players now (I estimate 3-10 games running in parallel in the world depending on the time) that it has a huge negative impact on the game. You only need 1 cheater in a game to ruin it for everyone else. [1] https://www.ea.com/games/battlefield/battlefield-5/news/anti-cheat-in-battlefield-5 https://www.ea.com/games/battlefield/battlefield-5/news/anti... [2] https://www.easy.ac/en-us/ https://www.easy.ac/en-us/
      - swivelmaster 7y ago
        You're asking EA to devote hundreds of thousands of dollars of resources to maintaining a game mode that apparently only a few thousand people engage with now. I know it sucks for the people dealing with cheaters, but from a resource-allocation perspective it makes a lot more sense to focus on new games and (I assume) Battlefront 2.
        komali2 7y ago
        Ah, the American politician strategy. > Sure we defunded it, but look how crappy it is! Nobody uses it! Guess we don't need it.
- papreclip 7y ago
  No. What you're talking about is deliberately ignoring evidence generated by an anti-cheat so it has time to catch more players There are no circumstances where it makes sense to ignore player-submitted video proof of cheating. This should always be acted on quickly to reassure legitimate players and scare cheaters off. Cheaters know there are different ways to get banned. When one gets caught rage-hacking (abusing cheats in a flagrant manner, without any effort to conceal their cheating) and they return to warn the hive, all it does is discourage other cheaters from rage-hacking. Very few cheaters will do something that they know will get them banned quickly
  - Havoc 7y ago
    >No Yes. Google it. All the major companies do hax bans in wave patterns. Valve, blizzard etc >There are no circumstances where it makes sense to ignore player-submitted video proof of cheating. Agreed. Not sure why you're bring it up though. I wasnt talking about user submitted anything???
    - anonymousab 7y ago
      >I wasnt talking about user submitted anything The OP you responded to was talking about that. That's the context of the conversation. Of the cheaters not getting banned; of those bans not happening in waves. >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
      - zo1 7y ago
        This whole thread is like a bad case of broken telephones and one guy seems to be getting the bad end of the down vote stick. 1. Person A talks about submitting videos of hackers and being ignored. 2. Person B says that "detected hacks" are acted on in waves as part of arms race with hackers, says nothing of "user-submitted", instead generalizes about "detected hacks". 3. Person C gets uppity about companies ignoring hacks, irrespective of the potentially-valid reason as mentioned by person B. 4. Person B insists that the bans happens in waves. Says he wasn't talking about "user-submitted" stuff as he was talking in generalities. 5. Person D jumps in says "thread is absolutely about user-submitted stuff". I paraphrased and generalized too for a bit of dramatic effect, but the thread is definitely broken and if someone stares at it for a bit, they would probably see how it went bad and that probably no one is technically wrong. 6. Person E jumps in with meta-commentary about the discussion that led to this point. Edit: Formatting.
- duxup 7y ago
  It "could" be intentional. You don't know.
- ryanlol 7y ago
  > Thats intentional. It isn’t. An anticheat that bans months late is as good as no anticheat at all.
- JakeTheAndroid 7y ago
  Idk if I agree with this. When I think of ban waves I instantly think of CSGO, and the ban waves mean nothing. IDK what data they have collected and what specific things they mitigate before triggering a ban wave, but it's completely ineffective. People are spin botting in MM lobbies the very same day as a ban wave. Especially with Valve where they rarely if ever auto-ban and rely heavily on user-reported cheats and Overwatch where actual community members vote (which is already very imperfect because you don't retain audio to know what calls are made and the tick rate of GOTV makes things look sketch that maybe aren't). I could see waiting to ban a wave of people if you also release an update that addresses the exploit being used. But I don't know that I have ever seen that be the case. The hacks that existed before the ban wave are often equally effective if not the same exact cheats as the ones being used after the ban wave. The author updates a bit of detection bypass code, and they are done. So if it's intentional, it's not a very effective methodology in my experience.
- danShumway 7y ago
  > Companies let detected hacks slide silently and then do waves of mass bans to prevent hackers working out what exactly triggered the ban. The problem with this strategy is that it virtually guarantees that cheaters will get to have multiple months of fun before they get banned. Discouraging someone from doing a destructive behavior requires preventing it when it happens. You need consistent, immediate enforcement. If you get banned the same day you start cheating, then that's a discouragement. If you're guaranteed a few months of fun on an alt account, then that's an encouragement.
  - meheleventyone 7y ago
    The way to look at it are that cheaters are a constant factor of the player base that needs to be kept at an acceptably low level. Ban waves provide a trade off between hiding information and having a growing population of cheaters that will be occasionally culled. Most cheaters are buying their cheats, will look for ‘undetectable’ cheats to buy and will often find the most popular cheats. As such ban waves tend to catch up a lot of the cheating playerbase. There’s also not much functional difference between banning as soon as a cheat is detected in the population and banning a few weeks later. Some players will have just started using it and others will have been using it for months unless it was found as soon as it was released. The discouragement comes from losing progress, losing money (potentially having to rebuy an account and find and buy a new cheat) and distrust in the cheat author. The downside to banning already detected cheats immediately is that cheat authors have a nice simple, repeatable test to see if their cheat is still detectable which makes development much more straightforward for them.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jolly_batali 7y ago
We handle cheating in our Battlefield 1942 server by requiring players to submit their public IP to admins to be explicitly whitelisted. There have been numerous cheaters and trolls we have easily banned over the years. http://ea117.com/access http://ea117.com/access gets 20 players/night at 7PM.. It plays the “desert combat” mod — the makers of that mod were acquihired by DICE. It’s also really easy to reinstall... http://www.mediafire.com/file/v2dj55nwoxz84o8/BF1942DCF_setu.. http://www.mediafire.com/file/v2dj55nwoxz84o8/BF1942DCF_setu....
- johnchristopher 7y ago
  People are still playing the original BF ? Is Eod still being played ? Might be worth digging up the disc for an evening :-).
  - dvtrn 7y ago
    Yup. I'm in a gaming group, several members are modders and we have weekly "operations" every Saturday, complete with briefings, de-briefings, intelligence gathering...we get kinda ridiculous with it but yup
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    People are still playing half life 2 deathmatch.
    - fluffything 7y ago
      People are still playing half life 1 deathmatch.
      - SiempreViernes 7y ago
        Aren't people still playing quake?
        mrguyorama 7y ago
alkonaut 7y ago
This should be no surprise if you played the previous games in the series. I can only assume that it’s a high level business decision at EA to not do anything about cheaters. The only way to play the game is on a server with admins in the game 100% of the time, or at least votebans.
trekrich 7y ago
They dont care now the game is out, they are working on the next one. And will expect you to buy that one before its even finished.
whatsmyusername 7y ago
They’ll still buy the next game though so their outrage doesn’t matter.

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
- Thaxll 7y ago
  DICE doesn't just use FairFight obviously. They have their own in-house solution, also used by some other EA games. And TBH you're complaining about 380 people which is a drop in a bucket compare to the number of players on that game, yes cheating sucks but I can assure you there are people actively working on that problem at DICE.
  - noname120 7y ago
    Incorrect, FairFight is their in-house solution and this is the only tool that they use client-side for Battlefield V[1]. They've dropped the third-party PunkBuster anticheat tool since Battlefield 1. Other EA games use other anticheat tools for example Apex Legends uses Easy Anti-Cheat[2], which is much more efficient to track and ban cheaters. > And TBH you're complaining about 380 people which is a drop in a bucket compare to the number of players on that game The Firestorm mode has so few players now (I estimate 3-10 games running in parallel in the world depending on the time) that it has a huge negative impact on the game. You only need 1 cheater in a game to ruin it for everyone else. [1] https://www.ea.com/games/battlefield/battlefield-5/news/anti-cheat-in-battlefield-5 https://www.ea.com/games/battlefield/battlefield-5/news/anti... [2] https://www.easy.ac/en-us/ https://www.easy.ac/en-us/
    - swivelmaster 7y ago
      You're asking EA to devote hundreds of thousands of dollars of resources to maintaining a game mode that apparently only a few thousand people engage with now. I know it sucks for the people dealing with cheaters, but from a resource-allocation perspective it makes a lot more sense to focus on new games and (I assume) Battlefront 2.
      - komali2 7y ago
        Ah, the American politician strategy. > Sure we defunded it, but look how crappy it is! Nobody uses it! Guess we don't need it.
papreclip 7y ago
No. What you're talking about is deliberately ignoring evidence generated by an anti-cheat so it has time to catch more players There are no circumstances where it makes sense to ignore player-submitted video proof of cheating. This should always be acted on quickly to reassure legitimate players and scare cheaters off. Cheaters know there are different ways to get banned. When one gets caught rage-hacking (abusing cheats in a flagrant manner, without any effort to conceal their cheating) and they return to warn the hive, all it does is discourage other cheaters from rage-hacking. Very few cheaters will do something that they know will get them banned quickly
- Havoc 7y ago
  >No Yes. Google it. All the major companies do hax bans in wave patterns. Valve, blizzard etc >There are no circumstances where it makes sense to ignore player-submitted video proof of cheating. Agreed. Not sure why you're bring it up though. I wasnt talking about user submitted anything???
  - anonymousab 7y ago
    >I wasnt talking about user submitted anything The OP you responded to was talking about that. That's the context of the conversation. Of the cheaters not getting banned; of those bans not happening in waves. >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
    - zo1 7y ago
      This whole thread is like a bad case of broken telephones and one guy seems to be getting the bad end of the down vote stick. 1. Person A talks about submitting videos of hackers and being ignored. 2. Person B says that "detected hacks" are acted on in waves as part of arms race with hackers, says nothing of "user-submitted", instead generalizes about "detected hacks". 3. Person C gets uppity about companies ignoring hacks, irrespective of the potentially-valid reason as mentioned by person B. 4. Person B insists that the bans happens in waves. Says he wasn't talking about "user-submitted" stuff as he was talking in generalities. 5. Person D jumps in says "thread is absolutely about user-submitted stuff". I paraphrased and generalized too for a bit of dramatic effect, but the thread is definitely broken and if someone stares at it for a bit, they would probably see how it went bad and that probably no one is technically wrong. 6. Person E jumps in with meta-commentary about the discussion that led to this point. Edit: Formatting.
duxup 7y ago
It "could" be intentional. You don't know.
ryanlol 7y ago
> Thats intentional. It isn’t. An anticheat that bans months late is as good as no anticheat at all.
JakeTheAndroid 7y ago
Idk if I agree with this. When I think of ban waves I instantly think of CSGO, and the ban waves mean nothing. IDK what data they have collected and what specific things they mitigate before triggering a ban wave, but it's completely ineffective. People are spin botting in MM lobbies the very same day as a ban wave. Especially with Valve where they rarely if ever auto-ban and rely heavily on user-reported cheats and Overwatch where actual community members vote (which is already very imperfect because you don't retain audio to know what calls are made and the tick rate of GOTV makes things look sketch that maybe aren't). I could see waiting to ban a wave of people if you also release an update that addresses the exploit being used. But I don't know that I have ever seen that be the case. The hacks that existed before the ban wave are often equally effective if not the same exact cheats as the ones being used after the ban wave. The author updates a bit of detection bypass code, and they are done. So if it's intentional, it's not a very effective methodology in my experience.
danShumway 7y ago
> Companies let detected hacks slide silently and then do waves of mass bans to prevent hackers working out what exactly triggered the ban. The problem with this strategy is that it virtually guarantees that cheaters will get to have multiple months of fun before they get banned. Discouraging someone from doing a destructive behavior requires preventing it when it happens. You need consistent, immediate enforcement. If you get banned the same day you start cheating, then that's a discouragement. If you're guaranteed a few months of fun on an alt account, then that's an encouragement.
- meheleventyone 7y ago
  The way to look at it are that cheaters are a constant factor of the player base that needs to be kept at an acceptably low level. Ban waves provide a trade off between hiding information and having a growing population of cheaters that will be occasionally culled. Most cheaters are buying their cheats, will look for ‘undetectable’ cheats to buy and will often find the most popular cheats. As such ban waves tend to catch up a lot of the cheating playerbase. There’s also not much functional difference between banning as soon as a cheat is detected in the population and banning a few weeks later. Some players will have just started using it and others will have been using it for months unless it was found as soon as it was released. The discouragement comes from losing progress, losing money (potentially having to rebuy an account and find and buy a new cheat) and distrust in the cheat author. The downside to banning already detected cheats immediately is that cheat authors have a nice simple, repeatable test to see if their cheat is still detectable which makes development much more straightforward for them.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jolly_batali 7y ago

We handle cheating in our Battlefield 1942 server by requiring players to submit their public IP to admins to be explicitly whitelisted. There have been numerous cheaters and trolls we have easily banned over the years. http://ea117.com/access http://ea117.com/access gets 20 players/night at 7PM.. It plays the “desert combat” mod — the makers of that mod were acquihired by DICE. It’s also really easy to reinstall... http://www.mediafire.com/file/v2dj55nwoxz84o8/BF1942DCF_setu.. http://www.mediafire.com/file/v2dj55nwoxz84o8/BF1942DCF_setu....

johnchristopher 7y ago
People are still playing the original BF ? Is Eod still being played ? Might be worth digging up the disc for an evening :-).
- dvtrn 7y ago
  Yup. I'm in a gaming group, several members are modders and we have weekly "operations" every Saturday, complete with briefings, de-briefings, intelligence gathering...we get kinda ridiculous with it but yup
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  People are still playing half life 2 deathmatch.
  - fluffything 7y ago
    People are still playing half life 1 deathmatch.
    - SiempreViernes 7y ago
      Aren't people still playing quake?
      - mrguyorama 7y ago

alkonaut 7y ago

This should be no surprise if you played the previous games in the series. I can only assume that it’s a high level business decision at EA to not do anything about cheaters. The only way to play the game is on a server with admins in the game 100% of the time, or at least votebans.

trekrich 7y ago

They dont care now the game is out, they are working on the next one. And will expect you to buy that one before its even finished.

whatsmyusername 7y ago

They’ll still buy the next game though so their outrage doesn’t matter.