
EA is permanently banning Linux players on Battlefield V - WoodenKatana
https://forums.lutris.net/t/ea-banning-dxvk-on-battlefield-v/7810/#
======
jchw
Anti-cheat software is an absolute shit show of cat-and-mouse tactics. It’s
often difficult to distinguish anti-cheat software from rootkits or spyware.
They’re invasive and user hostile, and they frequently cause collateral damage
that is swept under the rug and that support tacitly refuses to acknowledge.

This has happened on multiple occasions with Blizzard:

\-
[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Blizzard...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Blizzard-
Banning-DXVK-Wine)

\- [https://m.slashdot.org/story/75350](https://m.slashdot.org/story/75350)

Of course, although Blizzards initial response was to claim that the users
cheated and were lying, they did eventually fix the problem the first time
(although IIRC they never reversed all of the bans for the very first WoW Wine
ban wave.) Now they have a bit more experience with the issue so it seems it
is getting more attention.

However with EA I don’t really have utmost confidence they will pay any
attention to this, so I’d guess it’s time to get loud if you want any hope of
this being fixed.

~~~
coldpie
> Anti-cheat software is an absolute shit show of cat-and-mouse tactics. It’s
> often difficult to distinguish anti-cheat software from rootkits or spyware.
> They’re invasive and user hostile, and they frequently cause collateral
> damage that is swept under the rug and that support tacitly refuses to
> acknowledge.

Sure, but I don't see a good alternative. Cheating is a real problem and will
quickly destroy your online community (see other comments in this thread).
Sacrificing a small percent of your playerbase in the name of having a
functioning online system at all seems like a reasonable solution to me. It's
unfortunate that it is necessary, but people are jerks.

~~~
anonymousab
>Sure, but I don't see a good alternative

Allow users to votekick and voteban. Provide the server software for players
to host their own servers and provide their own solutions to these problems.

These are tools and approaches that we had in past games and while they are
not perfect, they are better than these black box invasive anticheat solutions
born from a desire to avoid giving community control to users.

>Sacrificing a small percent of your playerbase in the name of having a
functioning online system at all seems like a reasonable solution to me

Only if you provide a robust and empowered support staff to quickly unban and
resolve false positives. That is, actually take responsibility, which is
something game developers and major publishers seem allergic to.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Seems to me the shift to "Matchmaking" style online multiplayer has caused a
whole lot of problems that weren't that big a deal back in the "community
server" days. I personally think one can blame the rampant toxicity of players
on this removal of the community aspect.

~~~
danShumway
My hot-take as a smaller game designer is that I am skeptical that global
competitive ladders are good design. I admit that's fringe, and I'm not going
to fight people over it. But I can't imagine myself ever designing a system
like that for any of my games.

First, I think these systems ignore technical realities, and design has to pay
attention to real-world constraints. Blocking cheaters is insanely hard, and
almost no real-time games that I know of do it at what I believe is an
acceptable level.

It's a nice idea that I don't think is technically supported, in the same way
that it would be a nice idea if my photorealistic MMO didn't have loading
screens anywhere and loaded everything instantly. It's not good design to
spend a bunch of effort hinging your game design on something that's not
technically possible for you to do.

Second, I think these systems ignore player incentives. I think that global
competitive ranking encourages the worst of playerbases, that skill is an
arbitrary mechanism to optimize on instead of something like how close each
match was, or player-reported satisfaction levels, or variety of play-styles,
or any other of a dozen other metrics.

Third, caring about bots radically shrinks your design space. You can't have
exploits, players have to have a "right" way to play, modding has to be more
limited. It shrinks the game not only in the sense that it makes your systems
more complicated -- it fundamentally shrinks what your game can do as a _game_
, and how your game can evolve with the rest of the medium.

Finally, not only is skill not a particularly rewarding metric to optimize on
when what you really want is for your players to have fun, most of the
problems with automation explicitly only are a problem for competitive
matchmaking. If you're optimizing for player-reported satisfaction, you
probably don't _care_ if people are botting your game, because successful bots
will be optimizing for creating good matches instead of for just winning[0].

Personal plug, with my current project, Loop Thesis, LAN play is the only
multiplayer. I only want people to play with friends, and I'm not trying to
build some kind of community or network. That decision has simplified my
architecture _so much_ , the game is so much more modder friendly, the
networking code is so much simpler, everything is nicer, and more stable, and
more player friendly, because I don't have to care about bots and cheaters.

Future games that I make, even if they include global matchmaking, will not
have global competitive rankings. My personal take now has become that 90% of
the time these systems are a design antipattern.

It's counterproductive. I want players playing my game to have fun. I have to
ban bots because they make the game not fun. The reason the bots make the game
not fun is because all of my design hinges fun on giving players an
optimization problem that I explicitly don't want them to solve in creative
ways. The bots are solving the optimization problem _too well_. So getting rid
of that optimization problem, getting rid of the rankings, makes so many other
design/engineering problems go away. The bots aren't the problem, the
optimization problem is the problem.

[0]: [https://xkcd.com/810/](https://xkcd.com/810/)

~~~
drivebycomment
League of Legends doesn't seem to suffer from bots - if you don't want to
believe me, check out
[https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/eieyz2/why...](https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/eieyz2/why_are_there_less_cheaters_and_hackers_in_league/)
, and their regional rank system works well enough and not only useful and
provide good values to the players, it is absolutely necessary at higher
ranks.

Likewise, AFAIK, dota2 doesn't seem to suffer much from bots, and their rank
system seems to work ok.

Arguably Fortnite / Overwatch / PUBG style games do suffer from aimbots, but
whatever downside they bring, those games seem wildly successful. And the
regional / global ranking system seems integral to their success.

Given that a large number of highly successful games do have it, I don't think
your argument has much of a merit - it's surely a challenge to implement them
but it seems like a worthwhile problem to solve, rather than avoid, at least
if your goal includes global / regional success beyond small niche.

~~~
danShumway
Not going to argue get into an argument on this, but I believe a large portion
of both League and Dota's widespread community toxicity problems have their
roots in the global ranking systems that they use. I also think that their
ranking systems make them much, much less accessible to new players, and
encourage their existing playerbase to experiment less.

To the extent that some games can legitimately get away with global
competitive ranks without suffering bots, that doesn't mean it's a healthy
choice for every (or even most) other games. Of course, no design rule is
absolute, we're just speaking in generalities.

That being said, both League and Dota are investing massive resources to
prevent botting on a system that arguably would be just as if not more
enjoyable if it was redesigned. I feel the same way about games like
Overwatch, even some inherently globalized systems like Pokemon Go that would
be difficult to change -- I don't personally believe the ranking systems are
making them better. I think they're there because they're expected to be
there, not because they're reinforcing the core design of the game.

~~~
nwallin
If you think DotA2's matchmaking is unfriendly to new players, I don't think
you ever experienced DotA1 matches. Every single game was wildly unbalanced,
and as a result of one or so players, every single game was an absolute stomp
where the losing team never had a chance.

The skill gap between good and bad players is ludicrous. It's like putting
LeBron James against middle schoolers. There simply isn't a fun game when the
game is determined by the singular best player, and the other nine players are
being carried to victory regardless of their contribution, or being pounded
into the dirt because they're less than exceptional.

I could never go back to random matchmaking after experiencing global
rankings.

~~~
danShumway
Of course, using a bad metric is often better than using no metric at all, but
it doesn't follow that the current strategy is optimal.

It especially doesn't follow that global rankings should be a user-visible
metric, or an explicit player motivator (a la seasonal rankings). People don't
bot because they're unhappy with the players they're matched against. They bot
because they want a publicly visible number to get bigger and because player
rewards are locked behind competitive rankings.

~~~
Mirioron
But there are no bots available that can play the game for you competently.
Even deepmind had to have quite a few restrictions to do so and such a system
most likely can't even learn an evolving metagame.

People who join ranked want to compete. If you don't want to then there is
another queue available that's not a public ranking.

~~~
danShumway
> But there are no bots available that can play the game for you competently.

Then who cares whether or not players bot? Let them. Heck, go all the way and
actively support it if it's not an issue.

On the design side, I'm seeing a number of people commenting on here that
getting rid of a publicly-facing global ladder would mean that these games
couldn't be competitive. I don't believe that's true. We have wildly
competitive games in the physical space that don't use global ladders, and
they don't suffer for it.

Global ladders are a very specific, very narrow mechanic -- they have some
advantages for competitive play, and a whole lot of downsides. And we have
options. At the very least, even if we do nothing else, we can shrink the size
and make them regional. Or because things are digital we can throw out
geography entirely and base them off clans.

Competition in small groups is often preferable to competition in large groups
anyway, since that can foster rivalries, and because repeat matchups between
competitive players are usually more interesting than random ones.

------
oliwarner
Some context. This is running through Wine (and DXVK, a DX9-11 → Vulkan layer)
on Linux.

Seems EA is doing —like a lot of very lazy anti-cheats— balls-simple stack
inspection. They determine whether people are cheating by looking for known
signed drivers, known hardware, known bad processes and input drivers. It's
cheap and scales well but it's brainless. They have to know about a hack to
detect it in the future. Version checks are constantly slackened off because
legitimate updates come out all the time.

Battlefield is seeing Wine and the drivers Wine reports (which are a mix of
real and fake) and baulking out. It's to be expected from such plastic anti-
cheat software. Many games do this.

There are better options.

CSGO's overwatch allows the community to self-moderate by _replaying_ a
player's gameplay. They literally record the player's input and rebuild what
the player could see in the reviewer's client. Reviewer determines whether or
not their gameplay was possible. It sounds hardcore but it's simple, and adds
no latency because it's done after-the-fact. Makes it super-simple to detect
most wall-hacks and aim helpers.

So why isn't it everywhere? Logging data costs money. And EA, for all their
moneybags are cheapskates.

And you could automate this. You could do a server-side render to determine
whether or not a user is tracking players that are not physically visible to
the player, or tracking impossibly tight hitboxes, or is triggering massive
killcounts far too regularly (ie exploiting a bug). But that's more money.

But I'd expect a better response shouting into the wind than asking EA to be
better. They're a trash company.

~~~
ssully
You are also comparing two different games in terms of popularity.

CS:GO is usually in the top 3 of most popular games on steam. Last time I
checked, it was number 1. I would be surprised if Battlefield V has a quarter
of the amount of players (across all platforms) versus CS:GO (which is just on
PC).

I am not trying to make excuses for EA (Which has been nothing but a trash
fire of a company for the last few years), but how could they justify putting
those kind of resources behind a game like BFV?

~~~
oliwarner
CSGO is absolutely a bigger game, and there's money in it but I don't think
BF's smaller scale would hinder efficacy at all. It takes a tiny fraction of
players to review suspicious actions and collectively remove players from the
community. This scales pretty linearly with your player count. From dozens, to
millions.

Doing nothing, or doing the wrong thing has _atrocious_ effects on the
community. Just read some of the other threads in this post. Seasoned players
who wait weeks for flagrant cheaters to be removed. It kills a game quickly.

Maybe _that 's_ actually what EA wants.

~~~
asutekku
Saving the replay costs data though. It’s not only the reviewing.

~~~
deadbunny
We are talking a couple of hundred kB here. They store more in analytics.

~~~
oliwarner
For CSGO it's about 80MB/hour at 32Hz (apparently the current OW rate). Many
servers run at 128Hz.

Logging a rolling week's activity at that higher rate requires 53GB but you
could dramatically reduce the burden by only keeping things with in-game
reports and then deleting recordings after the last issue was dealt with.

My point is it's not nothing, but it's nothing by modern standards if you've
got more than two brain cells to rub together.

~~~
hutzlibu
Then something is wrong with the logging.

If you only record player input: mouse movement, clicks and keystrokes, it
should be much lower.

~~~
clarry
It's probably recording what amounts to a demo record, which basically
contains everything you would need to reconstruct the player's point of view
as if you were spectating them. This means the record must contain everything
the server sends to that player (other players' locations, sounds, map state
changes, chat, etc.).

Technically you could record only the players' inputs but to play back such a
recording, you would then have to deterministically reconstruct the entire
match from all players' inputs. That's a bit more complicated than just
replaying the local part of the simulation that your client already does with
what data the server sends to players during normal course of gameplay.

oliwarner's numbers amount to about 45 bytes per frame per player, which is
not unreasonable.

------
noname120
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_dqCTZpDpOBbhgvtT...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/172J_dqCTZpDpOBbhgvtTi_cC6I_c0IHJVkfkdwmREgo/edit?usp=sharing)

[2] [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScmXAY-Q-
QrfflsHrFX...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScmXAY-Q-QrfflsHrFX-
pyfy1eCINCx9RCuuEOuFsYgEd1Lcg/viewform)

~~~
Havoc
>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"

~~~
papreclip
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
>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???

~~~
NikolaNovak
>>Not sure why you're bring it up though. I wasnt talking about user submitted
anything???

Then, respectfully... what did you think you were responding to? That's pretty
much entirely what the OP & thread are about :-)

~~~
Havoc
>what did you think you were responding to?

The part I was quoting. OP wrote multiple paragraphs.

I mean we can argue about whether "the state of anticheat on this game is
absolutely horrific" refers to automated or reports but given article I was
pretty certain the section I quote was automated. Anticheat is generally not
understood to mean manual reports as best as I can tell. Its the well
anticheat software

Besides the Linux bans are probably not user reports Driven..

~~~
cheeze
> Anticheat is generally not understood to mean manual reports as best as I
> can tell. Its the well anticheat software

That's the thing though. Good games (CS comes to mind) do have some sort of
ability to have human intervention.

Building a hack that can't be detected isn't easy, but it's also not _that_
hard with determination.

------
z9e
I can only comment on this from the perspective of a very active Battlefield 1
and 5 player, the current use of cheats is pretty much an epidemic right now
on all of the PC servers. There are cheat programs that you can use on the
Windows clients, carpet banning based on what OS you are using is totally the
wrong approach here and continues to show EA & DICE have no handle on this.

Instead of doing this, they should just add a vote to kick feature on the
servers which would solve a lot of the frustration.

~~~
OGWhales
> they should just add a vote to kick feature on the servers

Wish this was more common. Seems to work well in all the games I've played
with this feature.

~~~
cooljacob204
It also tends to get abused against really good players. Servers need more
active admins.

~~~
maeln
Team Fortress 2 is going through a nasty bot invasion right now (mostly on EU
servers) and the community has been using the vote kick in a very good manner.

Most cheaters/bots are really easy to spot since they don't even try to be
sneaky about it. You will see their view port instantly change, they never
miss a shot, their cross hair always stays on a player model even behind wall,
...

Most people recognized the difference between a cheater and a good player
fairly easily. It is even more blatant in a game like TF2 were most shots are
actual projectile and not hitscan which mean that most cheater use a specific
class/load out that is compatible with a basic aimbot.

Another way to see it is with cosmetics. Most cheater use throwaway account,
they don't want their account with valuable items getting banned, so they only
rock the basic cosmetics.

All of these combined make it so that I never saw an actual good player
getting kicked. I don't know if Battlefield V has similar system, but making
player care more about their account actually provide a good filter for this
kinds of situations.

~~~
strbean
> Most cheaters/bots are really easy to spot since they don't even try to be
> sneaky about it.

This could very well be a case of selection bias. I think there is a
significant portion of cheaters who just want to get a leg up, rather than
ragehack and pwn everyone.

When I was 13 trying to play CS, for example, I used a multihack with crappy
'humanizing' aimbot and wall/esp hacks. I could still barely get a kill, but
it changed my gameplay experience from "run across them map, instantly die,
wait for next round" to something a little more fun. I actually feel like it
improved my gameplay because I could learn what to expect from other players,
what routes and timings were common, faster than I could through regular play.
Of course, now I would just watch demos / pro play to get the same value.

~~~
ngold
What I always did since cs 1.6 is, follow the best player and don't get in
their way. They know the map layouts better than anyone. You don't have to
cheat to kick it.

~~~
zo1
That and you're actively helping/backing-up an already skilled player. The
definition of teamwork. Everyone plays a role, and they don't necessarily have
to be rockstars to do it.

------
dcow
I think the title is misleading. They are not permanently banning Linux
players. Some Linux players with a certain set of software installed are being
banned. They’re opening cases with EA. One person confirmed their was case was
not overturned and their ban stands.

The players banned are using Lutris, a third party game launcher which is
likely against the TOS. I most certainly it don’t agree with EA, but there’s
more color than flat out Linux bans.

EDIT: it also looks like they’re using dkvs, the vulkan gl implementation
which allows users to swap shaders which would obviously constitute cheating.
Probably they caught some cheaters using dkvs, added it to the list of
disallowed software without fully understanding what it was and now it’s
flagging a lot of false positives.

------
pkulak
Just reading through these comments, I had no idea the current state of PC
gaming. Just so I have this right, you pay for a game, but you are running the
entire thing locally, so your machine knows everything. Like, people behind
walls, it can auto aim at people who aren't, etc. So, now you are also forced
to install these spyware-like sidecars to the game that monitor you and try to
figure out if you are doing any of this?

What a nightmare. I have huge cleanliness issues with my machines. I don't
even like using anything that needs an installer to run, and tend to run
things I don't totally understand and trust in VMs. I don't think I could do
this.

~~~
theandrewbailey
> So, now you are also forced to install these spyware-like sidecars to the
> game that monitor you and try to figure out if you are doing any of this?

I'm pretty sure the anti-cheat is just a library/module/etc. that's installed
with the game. I can't imagine that it's a completely separate program that
you install (unless it happens to be the game launcher).

~~~
dylz
They're usually shipped with the game, but often will _remain after you
uninstall the game_.

Some install permanent rootkits that are completely uninstallable (see:
GameGuard‡, XIGNCODE⸸, AhnLab Hackshield†)

⸸ God awful basically malware. Sends a ton of data home to bare IPs overseas.
No TLS. Incredibly invasive.

† This one was particularly interesting, malware could use the rootkit to hide
their files based on specific names. It is horrendously shittily written.
AhnLab itself is also interesting, as the founder tried to run for president
of South Korea or something, and SK either still does or used to mandate some
of their "anti keylogging rootkit" software as required by law. Sends a ton of
data home to bare IPs overseas. No TLS. Incredibly invasive.

‡ This does not uninstall after you uninstall the game, it runs persistently,
and would make windows non-genuine or toggle on unsafe mode for unsigned
force-installed ring0 drivers. Sends a ton of data home to bare IPs overseas.
No TLS. Best part: did not sign version updates or demand they be higher.
Cheaters could run a webserver on localhost with empty 0-byte signature
detection files, and it would "patch" itself down to uselessness at launch and
detect nothing. Incredibly invasive.

------
Mikeb85
I'll never understand why people still buy EA products. They're easily among
the most anti-consumer of all companies. Between their Origin client,
microtransactions in AAA games, yearly releases with no appreciable changes
and now shit like this I could never buy a product from them.

~~~
asutekku
I enjoy the games. It is as simple as that. They are fun to play and you don’t
need to buy the MTXs to enjoy the game despite multiple people crying about
them.

Games are also more and more expensive to develop so you kind of need to add
MTX to the AAA games to cover the costs, especially when BFV didn’t have any
DLCs. It is not 2000’s anympre.

~~~
benologist
Shouldn't really dismiss the people complaining as they are forcing EA to be
less horrible to you whether you purchase the MTX or not.

> Some gamers calculated that it would take six years of playing two hours a
> day to unlock all the features in Battlefront II without handing over any
> real money. Paying for everything, meanwhile, would cost over $2,000.

[https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/16/technology/battlefront-
ii-s...](https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/16/technology/battlefront-ii-star-wars-
game-ea-costs/index.html)

~~~
asutekku
But the thing is those are purely cosmetic. There’s no reason why one should
be able to get them for free, especially when it is a multiplayer game.

~~~
hutzlibu
Why do you think the unlocks are purely cosmetic? You unlock better equipment
characters and equipment.

So if you pay more money, you have an advantage = pay to win

------
Pfhreak
Is there any more details than a couple people being banned complaining in a
forum post? Cause this looks like textbook posts by people who were caught
cheating.

~~~
dx87
It's probably similar to Bungie banning people playing on Linux. They count
Proton/Wine as an emulator, and playing the game through an emulator is a
bannable offense. The store page mentions nothing about this though, so people
would try to play on Linux, get banned, and not even be able to play on
Windows any more.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/dcu7pb/bungie_will_p...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/dcu7pb/bungie_will_permanently_ban_anyone_who_plays/)

~~~
mroche
> They count Proton/Wine as an emulator, and playing the game through an
> emulator is a bannable offense.

This is a misrepresentation of the Bungie issue. Users had to patch Proton
itself to disable the in-game anti-cheat just to get the game to launch.
Disabling anti-cheat is the bannable offense.

------
mrbonner
Rant ahead:

I gave up gaming on a PC in 2013 and decided to get a PS3 instead. I did this
because I got fed up with the constant upgrades (OS, drivers, game patches,
etc..) that sometimes required me to spend a few hours of maintenance to play
games. The only game I owned in that PS3 system was BF3! I played BF3 in the
PC up until the level 70s so you probably have an idea how much fed up I felt
to give up.

I feel like BF3 is the peak of the franchise. It was executed nicely in the PC
as well as other console platforms. I was afraid the graphics quality would
dip too much in the PS3 comparing to the PC but realize the decline is
justified giving the fact that I don't have to constantly upgrade sh _t.

BF4 on the PS4 was a-okay. BF1 is just meh. BF5 is an abomination. Having
played BF since 1942 in the early 2000s I am not a BF novice. But, BF5 is the
worst of all.

Then, I switched to Modern Warfare 2019. Sure, the maps are smaller with 6v6
multiplayer. But, comparing to BF5 I don't have to wait 5 minutes in the lobby
to play a game. And when I want to leave the game, it doesn't take another 5
minutes. The most important thing is with MW2019, I feel fun playing with my
limited time available for gaming. With BF5 I feel like f_ing work and not
playing game.

~~~
thebigspacefuck
BF 5 is awesome on PC, especially with the Pacific maps. It definitely has
some issues and a lot of people hated the 5.2 patch, but they seem to be
trying to address them. I've never had an issue finding a server

~~~
slenk
Finding a breakthrough server in the US before 7pm EST is impossible, even on
the weekends.

------
fxtentacle
As long as DXVK allows people to replace shaders, EA has to treat DXVK like a
cheat tool.

Replacing shaders is what people use to do shady things like wallhacks,
outlining moving enemies, or providing targeting data for aimbots.

~~~
gpm
Or they could just take a screenshot and check if it looks right?

~~~
fxtentacle
Many cheating tools actually render to a secondary back-buffer. Much more
convenient for the cheater, because they can even live-stream their play and
everything will look clean.

It's usually not that difficult to hook the DirectX binding calls to bind an
additional G-buffer, because games tend to do render to multiple G-buffer
targets already for things like post-processing reflections, depth of field or
motion blur. Then you patch the shaders to write the info you want/need to
your new G-buffer. The game will continue to work with its (unmodified)
G-buffers while you can work with your (invisible to the game) private buffer.
In a gist, that's how you invisibly collect aimbot hitboxes using DXVK.

The last step then would be to smoothly nudge the player's aim onto your
detected hitbox. Depending on how you do that, it may or may not be detect-
able, not even to onlookers.

So the only real protection is to block the data collection in the first
place, which means you need to block any kind of virtualization and any kind
of 3rd party graphics API drivers, such as home-compiled DXVK binaries.

~~~
curiousshoelace
couldn't a cheater intercept their own client with a man-in-the-middle-attack,
pull out the data like player positions and stuff, and simulate the game on
another PC?

you could even do aimbot by finding the client's input packets and replacing
them.

i suppose if the game's connection was encrypted or something you would still
need to access the client PC's memory

------
tmpz22
The Battlefield series is a fantastic lesson in product development,
especially BFV the most recent edition.

[1]: Despite being a very popular franchise and BF5 being a very popular theme
(WW2) the game was received negatively from its very first trailer, in part
due to a sudden focus on cosmetics and shirking of historical accuracy.

[2]: Vitriol over the trailer lead to twitter drama where the executives among
other things told players not to buy the game if they didn't like it.

[3]: The development team defined a release schedule of drip feeding content
over the next few years for free, instead of paid DLC. This sounds great to
the user until you realize funding for future content will be predicated on
launch success.

[4]: BF5 announced Firestorm, a battle-royale game mode which would be
embedded inside the BF5 game. This would be the first BR mode in the series
and would have the largest map ever made for a battlefield game. This mode and
map would be developed by an additional studio and not eat into the
development time of the original game

[5]: The game flopped at launch, EA was already having a horrific Q3 that
year. The game launched with a large number of bugs, server crashes, and very
few initial multiplayer maps.

[6]: Immediately after launch there was a large number of game balancing
issues which the community and the game developers disagreed as to its cause.
Eventually they got it right a few months later.

[7]: 5 months after launch Firestorm (the BR mode) released. It was a pretty
interesting experience but guffawed in several key categories for a Battle-
royale game, including horrific user interfaces and looting systems.

[8]: In order to fix issues with the initial launch of firestorm, Dice diverts
resources from the main development team to work on the BR game mode.

[9]: Firestorm begins to lose player count, leading to very long queue times
for players trying to play a game.

[10]: The rate of post-launch content (especially new maps) was slower than
any battlefield game ever.

[11]: Unsolicited, the game developers rebalance many key weapons leading to
the same large game balancing issues which has been "fixed" a year ago

[12]: Cheating issues, huge thematic settings of WW2 left out of the game, a
near dead Firestorm mode, and now we can have a thread like this

\-------

My final take away is that this game could have been a 10/10 but was a 5/10
and a sign that publishers like EA really suck the life out of every product
line they touch.

~~~
whoisnnamdi
Great summary - thank you

------
Nextgrid
I am more impressed that it's actually possible to run BF5 on Linux well
enough to be able to log into a multiplayer game.

~~~
wjoe
Wine has come a long way in the last few years, in large part thanks to DXVK
(translates DX11 to Vulkan) and Valve funding and pulling together a few Wine
related projects. The vast majority of offline Windows games run well on Linux
these days, even a lot of high end AAA games often run well on launch day with
a relatively minor hit to performance.

Online multiplayer games are the exception, for this very reason here - anti-
cheat systems. Since these are designed specifically to make sure the game is
running in the exact way they were built, and often are very intrusive in
looking at what's running on your system, Wine is unsurprisingly seen as
something "not normal". Most games with anti-cheat won't start at all or won't
let you into the online servers - this is the case with EAC and BattlEye,
which are the most widely used anti-cheat these days.

------
minedwiz
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200103160938/https://forums.lu...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200103160938/https://forums.lutris.net/t/ea-
banning-dxvk-on-battlefield-v/7810/)

------
Thaxll
Having working in the anti-cheat field, lot of people here have no ideas how
it really works and the implications of banning people.

I can tell you that DICE ( Shield ~~ ) have a dedicated team of people and
it's not an easy problem to solve.

------
Andrew_nenakhov
Game community is needing a KYC-type solution. That would require tying
accounts to real identities, and if someone performs way above the field, his
account is temporarily suspended, until he/she visits the authorized
verification center where gaming skill can be verified by a neutral party. If
a gamer can prove his skill, an account is unsuspended.

~~~
janoc
Uh a privacy nightmare (giving out your identity to a random, unaccountable
company to be able to play a game? Yay what a splendid idea!) and perfect
recipe for killing the game, because now you aren't punishing cheaters but
anyone who is playing better than the others (for whatever reason).

So players are actually motivated to play at a mediocre/average level instead
of trying to get better, because then they could stick out of the crowd and
get punished/hassled.

What a wonderful thing to incentivize ... _facepalm_

------
seattle_spring
I genuinely do not understand why cheating in video games is not taken more
seriously. If you go and disrupt 200 paying customers at a movie, you'll be
kicked out and everyone will get refunded if your behavior is bad enough.

But if you cheat in a video game and ruin the experience for potentially
_millions_ of paying customers? You might, MAYBE, get banned in a few months
as part of a ban wave, but not after making thousands of dollars.

~~~
screengames
Kind of feel the opposite. It's just a game and cheating is pretty funny.

~~~
deadbunny
It can be funny sometimes depending on the cheater (and the cheats) but more
often than not it's some preteen edgelord just ruining the game for everyone.

Air dropping a platoon of parachute equipped cows over Cherno during the
zombie apocalypse? Pretty funny.

Teleporting behind the enemy team as they spawn and instantly headhotting
everyone in 1/2 a second during a competitive FPS? Not fun.

When you have a couple of hours a week to play your favourite game only to
have it ruined by cheaters for your entire play time it is the definition of
not fun.

I have zero problem with people cheating in single player games but when you
start negatively affecting others experiences that's where the line should be
drawn.

------
halfcreative
I wish I understood better how anti-cheat works. When anti-cheat software gets
flagged while running on linux, is the cause of the flag a viable route for
other cheats? I'm so unfamiliar with the mechanics of anti-cheat that I'm not
even sure if I'm asking a proper question.

~~~
jandrese
I'm pretty sure the mechanics of the anti-cheat are kept obscure to prevent
cheat makers from adding anti-anti-cheat tech to their product.

~~~
swarnie_
Pretty much this, its intentionally kept as a blackbox.

~~~
midnightclubbed
Some solution are a blackbox to the game development team (and run as a post
process during the game link or as a separate executable monitoring the game
and system).

There is a huge and lucrative economy around cheat development that encourages
a fair amount of paranoia from game developers.

------
jimbob45
Vulkan being around to compete with DirectX was supposed to break down the
last big barrier stopping Linux from being able to game as well as Windows. I
guess that only works if game companies are willing to code up the Linux
version to begin with, though.

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
It's more than just graphics APIs - Linux has long supported old-school
OpenGL, so that wasn't really the problem.

The state of audio libraries and systems on Linux is worse and OpenAL is now
proprietary. Even if you're making a desktop-environment game (E.g. using GTK
without SDL) there isn't a good, widely-supported Linux API for audio.

Don't forget the other difficulties with porting Windows games (and software
in general) to Linux that libraries like SDL can't help with, like file-system
locations, deciding if you want to only support X or Wayland if you need
window-manager integration, etc (granted, these concerns are less relevant
today as games send to be filesystem-silod, single-window or exclusive-mode
applications - but think about how games were in the mid-1990s with the multi-
window SimCity 2000 or those desktop amusement minigames.

~~~
Tsarbomb
The difference between X and Wayland is way more than needing window-manager
integration. You are forgetting that keyboard and mouse inputs run through
Xorg so the problem goes way deeper.

~~~
cycloptic
You don't have to worry about that if you use GTK or SDL. They support both.
The other really important thing in the age of console ports is support for
game controllers, and that isn't handled by the display server at all. It has
a separate API, which SDL provides a nice high-level interface for.

------
dijit
Doesn’t surprise me. Back in 2006 I was playing counterstrike through wine and
i got banned. VAC bans are permanent so that account was gone, despite
appeals. I learned my lesson, now I don’t run multiplayer games through wine.

~~~
artiscode
I have a weird experience when it comes to playing Counter Strike on Linux. It
was back in 2004 when most non-Valve Counter Strike servers in my region(EU)
used anti-cheat software called CheatingDeath. I was using Linux on my desktop
for all tasks, which included playing Counter Strike, as I was a 15 year old
kid. Needless to say, not only CheatingDeath did not work under Wine, it
outright refused to play the game altogether, blocking the UI and informing
server admins that I was cheating, which led to me getting banned. I had paid
for a reserved slot on my favorite servers, so getting permanently banned was
devastating. Luckily there was also cheat software called CheatingDeathDeath
that emulated CheatingDeath, run perfectly fine under Wine and came with a
variety of cheats built-in. It also spoofed fingerprinting part, making my
machine appear as normal. So I could play CS on Linux(with actual cheats
disabled) and didn't have to worry about getting banned because anti-cheat
software would mark me as a false positive. Thanks, cheat developers!

P.S. I got better performance playing CS with Wine and cheat software as it
didn't hog system resources so much. I recall getting a maximum of 75 FPS
under Windows running genuine CheatingDeath and stable 100 FPS under Linux and
CheatingDeathDeath.

------
alkonaut
Did EA ever officially support running on Linux? Shitty customer treatment
aside, running a game on an unknown graphics stack isn’t really viable to
allow if you want to e.g ensure users can’t replace shaders etc.

I don’t think this kind of anticheat is a good idea to begin with but if you
want to use it, it means that when you detect a shady stack you have to assume
a user is a potential cheater.

What EA should do is just reverse the bans if players want to run them on
Windows, or refund the games (Origin credit) for those that aren’t interested
if they can’t run on Linux.

------
Scuds
Any context would be nice. This is a modified/wrapped client, right?

edit: any forums software I ever write is going to use a 'fallback to static
rendering' circuit breaker setup in the case of slashdotting.

~~~
Nerdfest
The game client would be unmodified, with it running on an API layer that maps
windows system calls to to their Linux equivalents. Their ant-cheat software
finds this "suspicious" and boots the players.

------
airstrike
Honest but perhaps naive question: why is it that anti-cheat needs to be
conducted through technology only? Back in the day, online communities had
admins with near unlimited power (I'm thinking IRC and community Counter-
Strike servers) and they solved that problem proactively.

EA could have a few employees do this work but also let such employees appoint
long-standing, well known community members have a limited set of powers to
act upon the most blatant offenders in real time. Similar to how IRC had
network and channel OPs

~~~
rcfox
One reason is that volunteers in these moderation positions begin to see it as
a symbol of status and the power goes to their heads. About this time last
year, Digital Extremes had to pretty much fire all of the Warframe chat
moderators for abusing their power.

There's also the issue of scale. Back in the day, online communities were much
smaller. There were fewer online gamers, and network latency often restricted
the range of a community geographically.

------
bitwize
Yeah? And? Battlefield V multiplayer is an online service. You either use the
configuration supported by the service provider or expect to get btfo'd.

------
tlobes
Apex Legends, a property from Respawn Entertainment though technically under
the EA/Origin umbrella, has a different approach on cheating by using a
combination of deep learning from previous matches and shadow-banning cheaters
to play among themselves. I've yet to encounter identifiable cheating since
the start of the second season (mid 2019)

~~~
vecter
I don’t know what level you’re playing at, but at the Diamond+ level, I run
into cheaters almost every night. They’re blatant and 30s of spectating will
prove that. I also watch a lot of pro streams and they have the same
experience.

------
GuB-42
I don't think that Linux is the problem. Companies don't like banning players,
that's lost revenue and bad press.

I suspect that a lot of cheaters use Linux as a cover up. In fact, if I wanted
to cheat, I would do exactly that. Not only the more open nature of Linux
makes it harder to detect cheats but it also gives me a reason to complain.

So I'm sure there are false positives for Linux gamers (it has happened), but
I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority were actual cheaters.

And BTW, why play Battlefield V on Linux? Maybe I am wrong but from a
technical perspective, it is a lot of hassle just to avoid running Windows,
and performance is likely to be worse. And from a philosophical perspective,
Battlefield V and EA are not exactly in line with the ideals of free software,
so if that's your reason for not using Windows, why are you giving your money
to EA?

~~~
gpm
Primarily, I run games on linux because I'm already on linux and rebooting is
a pain if I have a lot of things open.

Performance on Linux is often as good as or better than windows. Linux as an
OS is just plain faster, so that's fighting with whatever performance penalty
is introduced by translation layers like wine/dxvk. These days it's usually
not much hassle to run things on linux... certainly less than rebooting for a
commonly used item.

------
shadowtree
I'd love them to switch to a paid subscription model, like WoW.

Would help them justify the long tail of updates, patches, etc. and make a ban
easier to enforce - block the cheater's credit card.

Make it a premium service for all I care, with premium only servers. Origin
Premium doesn't do crap.

~~~
watermelon0
You can get prepaid debit cards in many countries, and many banks (especially
modern, mobile-based) offer disposable virtual debit cards.

They could require debit/credit cards backed by a bank account (not completely
sure how those differ to disposable/prepaid ones), but that would prevent some
legitimate users from buying the subscription.

------
vardump
It's been a really really long time since EA last made a game I enjoyed. Like
the Command and Conquer series, even Generals and Zero Hour, as much as they
were a departure from the "real" C&C series.

I wonder if there'll ever be such a time as the nineties when it comes to new
interesting game genres.

Nowadays it's just same FPS games with different graphics. Monorail with quick
time events or battlefields of some sort. And of course same golden goose EA
sports games every year. Cookie cutter.

Or maybe new interesting games come out all the time and I'm just too old.

~~~
throwanem
Stop paying attention to the AAA industry that's making the compost you
accurately describe. Indie is where all the innovation is any more, and has
been for a good few years now.

~~~
whatisthiseven
I agree with your post, but describing it as "indie" is weird as there is a
huuuuge market of non-AAA that is not indie, and yet that market also produces
interesting and innovative games.

There are over 30,000 games on Steam. If you ignore the AAA publishers you'll
find tons of excellent games regardless of indie status.

~~~
Agathos
Yeah, a lot of "indie" studios today are as big as Westwood was when it made
Command & Conquer.

~~~
bowlich
I've started noticing people call a game "AA" lately to distinguish a big-
budget independently produced game from big-budget titles coming from
traditional publishers. Not sure if that one will take off or not...

------
cooljacob204
Are there any cases of games banning people using virtual machines with
videocard passthrough?

I was strongly considering going this route but kinda worried game developers
will start cracking down on it.

------
danilocesar
Talking about Battlefield V cheaters on consoles...

Now there's a ridiculous amount of players using those chronusmax/titan
two/strikepack devices that modify the input of real controllers and do things
like anti-recoil, rapid fire, auto burst, drop shoot, quickscope, etc.

Wallhacks and autoaim are obvious (and, luckly, not common on consoles), but
those devices are getting very popular and they provide subtle ways of
cheating that are harder to detect.

~~~
slenk
I have never heard of this before. Very interesting

~~~
danilocesar
it's so bad that some players are recording lives with a camera pointing to
their controls to show that they are not using it (they all require cable)

------
z3t4
Some businesses targeting the mainstream market seem to actively sabotage
users on minority platforms. I wonder how much they get paid by Microsoft.

------
sfgweilr4f
Do these same customers intend on buying the next EA product? I bet they
probably will. Regardless of how loud they protest now. I feel that the game
playing public doesn't find EA reprehensible _enough_ to let it impact their
future sales.

Other industries have customers drop them for a decade or permanently. "I'll
never shop here again" is something people actually say.

So strange.

------
caymanjim
That their anti-cheat software is able to detect this is a good thing. So many
games are ruined by cheaters and bots. In this case, I don't think the intent
was to ban Linux players; rather their anti-cheat software detects any sort of
virtualization of video or input devices, because that could facilitate
cheating software. It likely can't tell the difference between harmless
virtualization and the injection of cheating software.

I sympathize with Linux gamers, as I wish I could game from Linux. I'm typing
this from Windows right now, and the only reason I ever run Windows is to play
games. I don't like dual booting—and Linux runs so amazingly-well in
Hyper-V—that I'm fine having Windows as my primary OS (at home, anyway).

That EA's software can't tell the difference is annoying. Their PR response
and lack of clarity is annoying. If, for technical reasons, they can't secure
the Linux-emulated version, they should make it clear that Linux isn't
supported, and offer refunds to the (surely tiny number of) people who bought
it for Linux play. If the number of Linux users is large enough, they should
create a proper Linux port themselves.

In summary, I sympathize with their goals regarding cheat prevention. It's not
like someone at EA said "I hate Linux, let's accuse them of cheating and ban
their accounts!" This is a technical problem and a minor PR failure. A
reasoned response is atypical from gamers who feel slighted, though, so I
don't expect one.

~~~
the8472
> That their anti-cheat software is able to detect this is a good thing.

No, it's not a good thing. If a website did it we would call it invasive
tracking. And you didn't even pay for a website, unlike the game.

------
dhimes
I'm getting the feeling reading this thread that gaming may have replaced porn
as the internet use spurring the most rapid innovation. Is this an accurate
assessment? I'm not involved with either, but in the very early days it was
the adult industry that solved problems of massive use and payments etc.

~~~
_wzsf
Replaced? Don't make me laugh. Gaming has always been bigger.

~~~
tomc1985
Gaming on the web was tiny til broadband became mainstream. There were lots of
dial-up services (DJANGO, MSN gaming, etc) but latencies over the web were not
so great. I remember getting pings of 700+ trying to play Jedi Knight
deathmatch on AOL

------
vectorEQ
:D only multi player games u should play is where players are admin on their
own server. :') companies don't give a shit as long as sales are up. stop
playing if it's so horrific and move to a proper game. then maybe battlefield
XVIII will be playable.

------
acd
Challenge for Linux users, make an open source better anti-cheat for Linux
than in Windows that connects to the Linux kernel through a kmod to inspect
the whole stack.

Then Linux would be a better gaming platform than Windows. In many ways it is
already better.

~~~
thenewnewguy
Wouldn't help here, this is a Windows game being run under wine.

------
hi41
I visited major bank websites on Linux but I couldn’t login and got the error
“agent not supported”. Why do banks prevent logins from Linus even though I am
using Google Chrome. Can someone please tell why this happens.

~~~
Laforet
The browser sends a UA string to the website in every http request in which
the OS you have is indicated.

[https://www.whatismybrowser.com/detect/what-is-my-user-
agent](https://www.whatismybrowser.com/detect/what-is-my-user-agent)

~~~
hi41
Thank you. However, why do the bank websites allow Google Chrome on windows
but do not allow Google Chrome on Linux.

~~~
Laforet
It's hard to say without knowing more about the website. Some desktop features
such as pepperflash were never ported to Android chrome however it's more
likely a business decision to push mobile users to use their dedicated app.

------
AcerbicZero
After the flop that was BF5 I don't expect EA to be putting much effort into
anything other than keeping some servers up so they can pump and dump BF6 on
whoever is dumb enough to buy it.

------
mapcars
Honestly that's rather expected from EA :D

------
pugworthy
I see no information on this 10 post thread that they are "banning Linux
players". I just see a few people saying they weren't cheating who got banned.

A little Occam's razor here implies it's just a few people who got caught
cheating and won't admit it.

~~~
penagwin
It could be either. It's not at all far-fetched that the anti-cheat looks at
it's environment and realizes that things ARE NOT normal - different tricks
and layers are used to make the game run at all.

Then again you could certainly be right, and it's just a few cheaters crying
trying to cause a fuss to get unbanned.

~~~
pugworthy
As the original admin for the Steam forums at launch and an active participant
there for years, I have seen my share of " I'm innocent!" cheater posts.
That's a lot of the basis of my opinion on this.

------
Yizahi
I'm not buying, playing, pirating or otherwise touching EA products on any
platform since 2011 (or 2012) and recommend you do the same. This is truly
anti-consumer company and it deserves to die forgotten in a ditch.

------
fredsanford
Start disputing credit card charges involving EA and watch how fast they start
talking to the player base.

They cannot easily outsource employees to deal with that.

~~~
tomc1985
Or, they ban your entire account because you contested a charge

Game companies don't fuck around with chargebacks

~~~
fredsanford
This is true...

There are a few that will never accept you as a customer again if you do a
chargeback (Arenanet comes to mind). However, with EA, that would probably
make me happy.

~~~
tomc1985
My original Xbox Live account was banned permanently because I thought it'd be
easier to do a chargeback than cancel my subscription and ask for a refund of
the most recent billing cycle

------
Justsignedup
I mean the first mistake is paying EA anything. That company is a plague.

------
LoSboccacc
in which a new generation relearns that if you are not paying a subscription
you are a center of cost

------
sacman08
People still buy EA games?!?!

------
maruko
aaaa

------
lonelappde
If you aren't playing for money, why does anti-cheat matter?

Just use ELO matchmaking and/or play with friends.

~~~
jandrese
It's not so much fun when you're getting sniped from across the map beyond
your draw distance the instant you spawn by some dude who isn't even looking
in your direction.

------
whatsmyusername
I added EA to the 'ignore all their products' list 10 years ago. Nothing since
then has made me feel this was a poor decision.

~~~
akersten
Same. And it's a shame too - the new Jedi game looks really nice. But it's got
that scarlet EA on it, and that's an automatic no from me.

Stories like these reassure me that my boycotting is justified.

~~~
ronald_dregan
it is a really fun game, in spite of EA.

just pirate it, or buy a used physical copy.

~~~
whatsmyusername
I watched someone play it on the hardest difficulty, which plays like Jedi
Dark Souls. It didn't look like a game with any real replay-ability. I find
catching those games on twitch is way more fun than playing them myself.

------
jolly_batali
PSA: the original, Battlefield 1942, is still alive and well, and Linux
players are welcome.

About 20 players/night at 7PM PST join on EA117 server. It plays the “desert
combat” mod — the makers of that mod were acquihired by DICE to make BF2.
ea117.com/access

It’s also really easy to reinstall...
[http://www.mediafire.com/file/v2dj55nwoxz84o8/BF1942DCF_setu...](http://www.mediafire.com/file/v2dj55nwoxz84o8/BF1942DCF_setup.exe)
If you’re lazy.

