Battlefield 5 anti-cheat

Battlefield V General Discussion
61

I disagree. The reason punkbuster was dropped because it was ineffective. No other games use FF. Battlefield Hardline was the last game to do it. They don’t have a good reputation and hackers have openly bragged on their platforms about compromising punkbuster. They want it to come back just as much as you do.

I don’t believe fairfight is giving the full narrative of what their anticheat can do and I also think developers have to work with anticheat developers to get an effective thing going. I think ff did a better job doing that with ea then say punk buster. I still read comments about how archaic punkbuster’s updating was for previous titles. How some people had to manually update the punkbuster client. The punkbuster client is on the computer, not the server and that can easily be compromised as well.

Your instincts are probably not wrong. There are still cheaters in BF1. Some of them togglers. I just don’t think its at a point to where its an epidemic like it is in other titles. You look at all the popular shooters right now, Its probably one of the few with cheating epidemics plaguing their game.

PUBG, CSGO, COD(PC) would all probably like to get their cheating % as low as battlefield 1.

62

@LOLGotYerTags can a mod rescue my comment.

63

@LOLGotYerTags can a mod rescue my comment.

64

I rescued it, but its better to message a mod than post, it leaves less clutter

65

Ok thank you. I will do that next time.

66

We have different views what cheat epidemic means.
To me it’s still “epidemic” when you can run cheats, and not banned, by not over do it.
To you, it seems to be pure selling arguments, we reduce until it looks good, “not to see it as an epidemic”
The fact is that you have not reduced any cheating at all with that approach, only taught cheaters how to play “neatly”

67

Just my 2 cents here. In the alpha, EA gathered all kinds of data. Data that included but not limited to, what weapon a player(s) used, where players were at on the map at any given time and what they were doing. These are just a few of the things EA monitored durring every game durring the a;pha. So EA could easily catch cheaters if they really wanted to!

68

I could not have said it better.
I can already imagine the next apologist answer, like: “If cheaters have to play with more caution then cheating is not much of a problem anymore” or something like that.

69

I’d honestly be more willing to “accept” or “tolerate” cheaters/hackers being an issue if it meant that the game/servers were as open to modding as BF1942-2142 were.
If Modding goes away, however, and server options are more and more locked down with admins being more and more restrained; I would hope the anticheat would be better in proportion.

Which isn’t to say a hypothetical mod-able server would be, or should be, open season for hackers.. merely that I’m more willing to tolerate people slipping by the anticheat if it means that the game and gameplay can be experimented with or have custom content added to it.

so In a way I do agree with you;

if there’s significant amounts of “sneaky” or “subtle”-hacking/cheating going on, in a game where servers and server-files are tightly controlled, that is unacceptable.

70

And so fair fight will get him for clearly having an impossible number of spot assists, no?

71

I think FairFight looks for something about a player’s gameplay that can’t be done. Simultaneously targeting lots of players, non-existent cooldowns etc.

If we were spotting players we could spot a lot of players at once. I get this sometimes when I’m in a plane. It could be a bug that needs fixing that the cheats are exploiting.

I’m not sure what procedures FairFight follows for that sort of stuff or how long it would take to fix.

There is absolutely loads of cheating at the moment. In the Operations matches I play there is anyway.

72

It’s not really about the anti-cheat used, but I’d like to see a different approach from EA on this.

Before I make the points, I’d like to agree with lolgotyatags (as much as it pains me ;)) that BF1 is the cleanest game to date. As someone who has played them all for long hours on multiple systems, I can tell you that BF1 is by far the cleanest streets we’ve had in BF. However, the anti-cheat in BF1 has some issues, and most of it is to do with EA’s policy.

1) There is insufficient transparency with regards to what actually is allowed and what is not.

I use Reshade to add more vibrant colour to BF1’s completely drab asethetic and slightly sharpen the image so I can use the TAA without feeling like I have Vaseline smeared on my screen. Am I going to get banned because this extra colour / sharpness is maybe a so-called “advantage” by some (ignorant) people? Many players have used a crosshair overlay to replace the crosshair in the game. The game even allows you to make the crosshair (and soon red dot retical on optical sights) invisible, perhaps implying to allow for this purpose, but is this bannable? I personally don’t think you should ban for something you can easily also accomplish by physically drawing a dot on the centre of your screen, and wouldn’t consider a player I was playing against who was doing it a cheater, but again it’s debatable. But again, there is no transparency here from EA either.

So the message to EA here is, tell us what is OK, and tell us what is not. Be specific - the current EULA is too vague. Saying “all 3rd party apps at your own risk” is a complete cop out - Am I supposed to feel nervous about using the msi afterburner overlay?!

2) Fairfight makes mistakes.

It’s very easy to put on your tinfoil hat and say that everyone who has been banned is a cheater, but the reality is that within the community of verified high level players of which I have talked to most of them in the EU scene on various discords etc, there are multiple instances of people being false positive’d. With a stat based system, this is always going to be an issue, especially while the game is in it’s infancy and the true scope of what is achievable legitimately is yet to be defined by the FF rule set for the specific game. This is more of a problem than it should be, because EA’s appeal system is frankly completely broken and doesn’t allow for genuine false positives to be overturned. The few I know of that have been rescinded are where people literally had to tweet at devs to get it overturned, when all they got from the official EA channel was auto-responses. This is frankly not good enough. If you are banned for cheating with a stat based system, there needs to be an open dialogue about what you were banned for and the opportunity for you to “prove” otherwise. It’s like having a trial where you go to court and the judge just says “guilty” without you even hearing any evidence of a crime yourself or having a chance proof otherwise. Exactly, completely ridiculous.

3) Fairfight instils no confidence in either good players or bad players.

Ignoring the obvious rage cheaters of people flying in the sky, or doing 100 damage with a pistol across the map…It’s only really easy to tell a good player or a closet cheater when you get to a high level yourself. It’s frankly impossible until you have played at that level, that’s just the reality. It’s about how players move, flank, communicate, understand the game dynamic of each game mode etc. Most of the hackusations in this game come from people who just see a high score and experience someone killing them “instantly”, and immediately cry hacks and report. Well, guess what, I played the BFV alpha against Rela and his score was freaking insane, he killed me 4 times in this round, and it all instances it felt like insta-kill, and like he shot me from out of nowhere, exactly the sort of experience that a earlier, less informed version of myself would have just cried cheater and reported him. Of course. this was completely legit and he was even playing at a DICE computer in Stockholm at the time.

Basically, because below average players don’t trust Fairfight due to it not having client-side elements, it makes people more on edge and paranoid. This makes below average players more inclined to believe everyone better than them is simply a cheater. This is not their fault, it’s human nature.

For good players, the lack of a client-side element that would verifiy a cheat or not actually being there, instils no confidence that they are not, for whatever reason that is never disclosed, going to get unfairly banned.

So to sum up… yes, Fairfight has “worked” in BF1 better than any other system we’ve had, They’ve improved it overtime certainly, but I still don’t like it right now. I think with an improvement with EA’s policy, removal of things like the free trial which are obvious cheater exploits, better transparency for players and also a less lenient punishment system for 100% confirmed cheaters, things can get a lot better without needing a completely new system.

73

I concur with this and give a fitting anecdote.

Later yesterday on the same RSP server where we both got hackusated, joined a rank 80ish player that did particularly well and taunted others. His performance was no better than mine, but how he played made me suspicious enough to check his stats midgame. Nothing there that would be out of line for great players, expect that he had significant discrepancies weapon-wise, going from a 1KPM player to a 3KPM player in a short period of time. Three games later he was banned live. This was not a trial account, and most likely not a free public cheat.

So FairFight is effective to a degree, but it’s not reliable enough to instill confidence in the playerbase. Most of the extraordinarily well performing suspicious players that I’ve tracked have seized playing, but a few are still active. Perhaps they are legit, perhaps not. However they are so few (in EU) that I leave servers due to avoiding them maybe once a month. Not a problem for me in practice.

74

Yes agreed, stat discrepancy red-flags are very important and is something you can only gain insight of from having many hours experience in the game. I had a player a while ago that I knew was cheating simply by watching how he moved in the kill cam compared to how he was killing everyone. He just moved like a terrible player, and he played medic for a bit, and was doing that thing where they cycle through inventory for 5 seconds trying to figure out where the syringe is while stood over a body etc.

I decided to spectate him just for fun, and sure enough it was totally obvious, bordering on rage cheating to me. I checked his weapon stats and his most used weapon with just 23% accuracy was the SMLE MK3 and 0.2 KPM, but with the gun he was using in the server, the ROSS MK3, he had 75% accuracy and 7.5 KPM(!) and by the end of the round had double the kills after just one play session. There were many other similar discrepancies, but clearly the difference in ability with just those two practically identical weapons is irreconcilable with a “clean” reality.

The most interesting thing though, was while I was spectating I was explaining to the players in the chat (as was amazed people weren’t leaving the server), about the KPM and accuracy differences etc, and how they don’t think that’s suspicious someone can go from being in the bottom 1% of players ability, to the top 0.000001% overnight…and people were clueless, saying things like “well, maybe he just likes that gun more” etc.

This is why reporting is completely pointless for EA to use, and why I never even both doing it. A working anti-cheat doesn’t need or warrant a reporting function at all as far as I’m concerned. They will get as many more reports of non-cheaters as actual cheaters, so how is that useful?

75

That’s your opinion and I have mine. Agree to disagree.

76

@TheNoobPolice well the report function does more than report cheats but I agree on most you written. Its as Ive stated earlier a matter of communication towards the community as well as a working AC ingame. Simple proof that FF doesnt work is the amount of cheaters being banned by 3.party AC in BF4 and also 3. those players cheating isnt caught by FF and they can keep playing on official servers because only PB and FF works there. Lots of other games using FF posts banlists with all info, but not DICE/EA ? why ? If it comes to not hurting a cheaters feelings …

77

All cheaters are bad at the beginning, but they learn to play according to current rules. There should be many examples of it in the e-sport, and it’s not rage-hacking idiots we talking about that come so far, its people who learned to master the art of cheating.
There Fairfight falls completely. Maybe Fairfight catch someone who goes rage sometimes, but that can a community made plugin also do, but much faster.

I actually have a solution, add Battleye as a complement to Fairfight, it works reasonably.
Do not argue that games with Battleye have cheating epedemy, how is it in the BF series then that lacks BE and only has FF?
And why have not these “big” other games companies sent a request to Fairfight if it works so well and can reduce cheating to “acceptable” level?

78

BF5 cheats are already out! cancel your preorder now

[link + all caps removed]

79

Er, What does it matter?

It’s an Alpha, There has never been an active anticheat for Alpha’s / Beta’s, At least not in any of Battlefields Alpha/Beta tests.

80

Sounds like someone got killed one too many times.