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

So EA are breaking Steam Deck support for their back catalogue of games one by one?
Why would EA suddenly decide to add Anti Cheat to their back catalogue of old games?

I smell a big rat with that kind of behaviour.

I guess Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo has a hand in this. I guess one of them has new hardware on the way, A new handheld maybe.

I will put tinfoil away now.

I guess Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo has a hand in this. I guess one of them has new hardware on the way, A new handheld maybe.

I will put tinfoil away now.

Nintendo does, but it wouldn't be that - EA already doesn't support their hardware properly as it is.

Maybe EA just doesn't like handhelds.

So EA are breaking Steam Deck support for their back catalogue of games one by one?
Why would EA suddenly decide to add Anti Cheat to their back catalogue of old games?

I smell a big rat with that kind of behaviour.

I guess Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo has a hand in this. I guess one of them has new hardware on the way, A new handheld maybe.

I will put tinfoil away now.

Between those three, I'm picking Microsoft because of the recent rumors about them making a handheld and Nintendo can't do crap about EA because they're too busy finding other means to screw customers without resorting to kernel anti-cheat.

I guess EA took my $3.99 for this game during that sale of theirs on Steam and now, I can't play this on Steam Deck once they add this crappy anti-cheat. I just have to hope that this doesn't affect the single player portion of the game but I doubt it.

On top of that, the EA launcher is one of the worse ones out there for the Steam Deck and it tends to break so many times over that Valve has to fix it on their Proton updates.


Last edited by ToddL on 28 March 2024 at 2:10 am UTC

Proton 9.0 can repair EA anticheat?
These Microsoft puppets

Thankfully I dont own much MP games from them, not buying anymore till I see support

Anti-cheat will, of course, always be necessary as long as people continue to be c**ts. I'm sure people who play Battlefield V are having a horrible experience of it.

Is creating a good server-side anticheat solution even possible?

Bought SW Squadrons after whole decades not buying a single EA game, now I wonder if I'll be able to play it in the near future... Should have known better, I guess

And then making the program itself hard to decompile and analyze at runtime.

The other way 'round. Making the server side secure enough, that even if the whole game were open sourced cheating would be a non-issue.

I agree that security by obfuscation does not work but in a game it depends what we describe as secure enough.

Most of the time the server send a lot of data to the client then wait for the feedback so the cheating happen on the client side that send back a perfect hit (if we talk about FPS) then the server update the other clients.

So what should be secure? If the client data is changed directly in memory, the data itself would be ok but not the result.

We could avoid to send other players' position to the client until they are really visible (could be a huge load on the server and need a fast synchronous connection, the client cannot interpolate anything).

We could cypher and randomize the memory allocation on the client.

Or we can use AI server side to check super human behavior but sometime a lucky reflex can hit in the same area than a bot (but not in the long run indeed).

I think a lot of different tools/methods could be used together but computer resources consumption should also be kept low to be effective. The subject is vast.

Yeah, I was describing my ideal-case scenario, and it's certainly not an easy to solve problem.
If the client gets the information, the player can cheat. If the client does not get the information and has a lag spike, the player might get an unfair disadvantage as they don't see/hear a potential target in time to react...

The client would also need an approximate position in order to hear the targets, and they could still visualize that with a cheat tool to see through walls...

It's a shame and an EAsshole move.
But as i'm boycotting EA for many years already, it fortunately doesn't really affect me. One could say "that's what you get for supporting an insufferable asshole company" ^^

Weird question maybe, but does this also affect the single player story mode?

i don't think so

The best part? I spent a full year convincing my old friend to try the game, because it felt like our old stuff we used to play together. Yesterday he bought it and we played it for the very first time and it was crazy fun.


I’m not making this up, we ended the session, I went to bed, checked my phone and saw the news…


Guess I’m dualbooting windows for the first time in years then :/

Yeah it's this exact type of bs that made me sell my steam deck and get an ally and never look back,

Yeah it's this exact type of bs that made me sell my steam deck and get an ally and never look back,

This sounds angry, but perhaps at the wrong people. You're right, it is bs, but I prefer to tell EA to ram their bs, than be angry at Linux for being different from MS and not having the same anti-cheat options. EA made an explicit choice here, to exclude Linux/SteamDeck customers, even existing customers. It isn't the first time EA have flicked a finger at Valve - it's only recently that they caved on their origin-only stance and came crawling back to steam, so it's probably no surprise to see scummy moves like this from them.

I guess I can take the high road because I recognised EA for the dross it is back in the early 2010's and barely bought anything they touched for over a decade. Titanfall 2 is the primary exception. That was released in 2016, so it's real mystery why we don't have Titanfall 10 by now. I also picked up Mass Effect, mainly for sentimental reasons. Anything else I own has been through Humble Choice, so hey ho. Nothing lost there.

This is bad news, as more and more companies port their games to "kernel level anticheat" rather than linux compatible EAC or BattlEye, we will just end up having fewer playable games. Until we get kernel level EAC support in Wine, we will start losing games on linux. Very bad news. Prepare for Apex to go the way of kernel level AC too.

You won't get Kernel-level AC in WINE as the Windows Kernel is not available, most Kernel-level AC won't allow virtualized or emulated kernels, and AC devs find MacOS kernel too closed and Linux kernel too open. It's about control and you have to give the AC full control of your system and how you may use it to play said games. Some Kernel-level AC require you to not even have certain Windows features installed or even require development tools to not exist at all. At that point, might as well buy a console.

Maybe one day the developers of shooters will figure out how to design cheat-resilience into the game itself, instead of trying to take control over their customers systems, which won't ever work.

I think they need to stop focusing on client-side and develop a decent server-side solution.

Now that's something "AI" (aka neural networks) could be useful for, rather than spitting out humongous piles of somewhat believable texts or images.

They don't even need that. Just hire a team who's entire job is to analyze the cheats all the way down to the assembly, if necessary, and build heuristics-based detection on it. It works really well, but it costs money, so they won't do it.

Yeah it's this exact type of bs that made me sell my steam deck and get an ally and never look back,

I . . . think you might be on the wrong website then. Check the name.

Is creating a good server-side anticheat solution even possible?

The server is the only place where you can even reasonably put anti-cheat. The idea to make an untrusted system (the customer's PC) trusted by installing rootkits on it is hilariously idiotic to begin with. It has never worked and won't ever work. The only systems you can ever trust are the ones you operate and control. Which from the perspective of the game studio is the server.

And yes, it's possible and has been done before. A good example of such a design is Guild Wars 1. The basic idea is to make the client as dumb as possible and let the server do everything, including verifying user input for validity and sanity.

Yeah it's this exact type of bs that made me sell my steam deck and get an ally and never look back,

This sounds angry, but perhaps at the wrong people. You're right, it is bs, but I prefer to tell EA to ram their bs, than be angry at Linux for being different from MS and not having the same anti-cheat options. EA made an explicit choice here, to exclude Linux/SteamDeck customers, even existing customers. It isn't the first time EA have flicked a finger at Valve - it's only recently that they caved on their origin-only stance and came crawling back to steam, so it's probably no surprise to see scummy moves like this from them.

I guess I can take the high road because I recognised EA for the dross it is back in the early 2010's and barely bought anything they touched for over a decade. Titanfall 2 is the primary exception. That was released in 2016, so it's real mystery why we don't have Titanfall 10 by now. I also picked up Mass Effect, mainly for sentimental reasons. Anything else I own has been through Humble Choice, so hey ho. Nothing lost there.

Fam this move is not about linux. It's just about EA implementing anticheat solutions they deem as "better" and "their own" into their games. I'm pretty sure Linux isn't even a consideration for them.

Their motivation might not be particularly driven by Linux, but this is very much about Linux, clearly. Valve sell a Linux-based console, and EA have just cut those consoles off from their games.

Is creating a good server-side anticheat solution even possible?

Yes, it is. Rather than just spout that it's the only way or anything else vague, the appropriate solution would be to hire a team to reverse engineer the cheats, tear them down to their basic components and build heuristics on that.... but it costs money and likely a new team dedicated to doing that.... and it's not cheap, so the money is in picking the easiest option that makes it LOOK like the business side cares.

Is creating a good server-side anticheat solution even possible?

Yes, it is. Rather than just spout that it's the only way or anything else vague, the appropriate solution would be to hire a team to reverse engineer the cheats, tear them down to their basic components and build heuristics on that.... but it costs money and likely a new team dedicated to doing that.... and it's not cheap, so the money is in picking the easiest option that makes it LOOK like the business side cares.

What if someone writes new cheats?