EA anticheat arrives for Battlefield V in April, will break it on Linux / Steam Deck

Quoting: damarrinIs creating a good server-side anticheat solution even possible?

Story time, I used to run some private servers for fun. In case you don't know, private servers are emulators/leaked binaries which let you run servers for games which you are not meant to, WoW for example.

In one of the games I hosted, there were dungeons you had to go through to get your gear. In typical game code fashion, the server checked pretty much nothing. As a result, there was a popular cheat for this game which let you fly or go through walls. Of course using this cheat you could complete dungeons within minutes getting unfair advantages or even crashing the economy.

Sadly the code for this server was not fully available, hardening the server directly was not an option. However the server would log players' positions every few seconds. So I wrote a small program which would stream the log and constantly calculate the speed at which players were moving and check whether the coordinates were within normal values. When a player was producing suspicious data, I would check what they were actually doing. Within a few weeks of adding this system and refining it, cheaters would get banned within a couple minutes by the moderators.

Of course my small server was not a massively popular FPS, but I was a teenager with no access to the server code nor extensive programming knowledge. I believe companies likes EA or Valve would be perfectly capable of producing really good server-side anti-cheats.

i'm going to stop playing games at this point, i refuse to be a microsoft laboratory rat just to play battlefield

Quoting: Kirbyi'm going to stop playing games at this point, i refuse to be a microsoft laboratory rat just to play battlefield

You should definitely stop playing EA's games. Plenty of excellent alternatives still out there.

The more these kernel level and root kit based AntiCheats get used it just forces the cheaters to all use rootkits to cheat. This has been going on for years on a lot of the supper "secure" games using RootKits. so more kernel level AntiCheat and more rootkits is not going to fix the problem. But the only thing this does is prevent the game running on Linux and will dramatically increase piracy for solo play type games where the question of AntiCheat makes no sense. Besides rootkit based cheats there is a growing market using hardware hacks and AI will become a serous problem rather quickly. Its a Pandora's box of security.

I had enough reason to not buy the game before, this just adds to the pile. I'll stick with DRM free games.

good thing i stopped buying EA stuff a long time ago.

Sounds like a Steam Deck limitation.

Quoting: honestmaxxSounds like a Steam Deck limitation.

It's also a Linux desktop limitation as well because there are those that play on it that won't be able to enjoy the game for the same reasons as Steam Deck users.

Good thing I didn't care too much about the multiplayer parts of the game and completed the stories to get something out of it before the crappy anti-cheat gets added this week on the Steam Deck.

it's a shame gamers feel the need to cheat, if cheaters didn't exist EA wouldn't feel the need to implement things like this.

I'll only be supporting EA again when they bring out the next BurnOut game. :)

Welp, the update kicked in today (Battlefield V)…gives a similar error as Roblox; "The program encountered E111000B at 00001D9B during initialization. Wine is not supported!"

Thank EA… I mean… fuck yourselves.


Last edited by StalePopcorn on 4 April 2024 at 12:18 am UTC