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

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,

Quoting: Genesis198Yeah 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.

Quoting: scaine

Quoting: Genesis198Yeah 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.

Quoting: FremenThis 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.

Quoting: hell0

Quoting: udekmp69

Quoting: KimyrielleMaybe 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.

Quoting: Genesis198Yeah 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.

Quoting: damarrinIs 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.

Quoting: Fremen

Quoting: scaine

Quoting: Genesis198Yeah 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.