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No, the sad truth is that the current anticheat is FairFight. FairFight mainly operates by monitoring the behavior of a player and it takes a screenshot if they are suspicious. Cheating tools[1] are aware of this and disable any visual effects (ESP hack e.g. see through walls, etc.) when it takes a screenshot and reenables them right after[2].

[1] https://overlayhack.com/battlefield-5-v-hacks

[2] https://overlayhack.com/battlefield-5-v-hacks#509

DICE doesn't just use FairFight obviously. They have their own in-house solution, also used by some other EA games.

And TBH you're complaining about 380 people which is a drop in a bucket compare to the number of players on that game, yes cheating sucks but I can assure you there are people actively working on that problem at DICE.

Incorrect, FairFight is their in-house solution and this is the only tool that they use client-side for Battlefield V[1]. They've dropped the third-party PunkBuster anticheat tool since Battlefield 1.

Other EA games use other anticheat tools for example Apex Legends uses Easy Anti-Cheat[2], which is much more efficient to track and ban cheaters.

> And TBH you're complaining about 380 people which is a drop in a bucket compare to the number of players on that game

The Firestorm mode has so few players now (I estimate 3-10 games running in parallel in the world depending on the time) that it has a huge negative impact on the game. You only need 1 cheater in a game to ruin it for everyone else.

[1] https://www.ea.com/games/battlefield/battlefield-5/news/anti...

[2] https://www.easy.ac/en-us/

You're asking EA to devote hundreds of thousands of dollars of resources to maintaining a game mode that apparently only a few thousand people engage with now. I know it sucks for the people dealing with cheaters, but from a resource-allocation perspective it makes a lot more sense to focus on new games and (I assume) Battlefront 2.

Ah, the American politician strategy.

> Sure we defunded it, but look how crappy it is! Nobody uses it! Guess we don't need it.

How is this an american strategy?

I’m sure it’s not uniquely American. It’s just a standard strategy for the GOP. Defund, then complain regulation doesn’t work and deregulate or allow regulatory capture.

Maybe, but the other side of the coin is "it's not working, so let's just blame lack of funding", irrespective of if there is actually enough funding to do something worthwhile or not. The goals are always nebulous and allows both sides to complain.

Can’t argue with that. Unfortunately there is no agile/“fail fast” in government.

This isn't government we're talking about here, this is a company that has every incentive to do their best to make money from the games they release.

I agree about the GOP though.

You don't know what you're talking about, FairFight is a third party solution that EA pays for but it's not the only anticheat technology used by DICE.

You're right my mistake. FairFight is a product of GameBlocks, which seems to be unaffiliated with DICE: https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_ca/201221610239

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

>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???

>I wasnt talking about user submitted anything

The OP you responded to was talking about that. That's the context of the conversation. Of the cheaters not getting banned; of those bans not happening in waves.

>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

This whole thread is like a bad case of broken telephones and one guy seems to be getting the bad end of the down vote stick.

1. Person A talks about submitting videos of hackers and being ignored.

2. Person B says that "detected hacks" are acted on in waves as part of arms race with hackers, says nothing of "user-submitted", instead generalizes about "detected hacks".

3. Person C gets uppity about companies ignoring hacks, irrespective of the potentially-valid reason as mentioned by person B.

4. Person B insists that the bans happens in waves. Says he wasn't talking about "user-submitted" stuff as he was talking in generalities.

5. Person D jumps in says "thread is absolutely about user-submitted stuff".

I paraphrased and generalized too for a bit of dramatic effect, but the thread is definitely broken and if someone stares at it for a bit, they would probably see how it went bad and that probably no one is technically wrong.

6. Person E jumps in with meta-commentary about the discussion that led to this point.

Edit: Formatting.

>>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 :-)

>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..

> 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.

A curious idea, act on user submitted data or not. A recent reddit post[0] in their classic wow has a video linked where a group decided to take down known and obvious bot driven players that have been reported many times.

So they used in game mechanics that abused how the bots are known to operate; where certain dialog boxes pop and how they move and react to threats; to force the bot to join a group, accept being teleported, and then they sacrificed another of the groups score to drag down the bots score.

the current comment thread includes the cynic but likely true claim that blizzard would ban these players for harassment before banning the bot for cheating/breaking eula

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/ej3l10/because_...

> 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.

And if the net result of that strategy is that it catches many fewer cheaters? That wouldn't make much sense, and the community, far from being reassured, would be more frustrated because they would encounter many more instances of cheating that occurred because players were able to deduce the loop holes.

You have to balance "catch the most cheaters" vs. "catch cheating immediately". Especially when it may take many instances of suspicious behavior to make a confident decision to ban.

The net result would be that there is less blatant cheating, since that form is quickly found, which seems like a good outcome? Cheating that is only suspected is not at all as bad for the game experience, which is what matters.

But I'm guessing they catch more cheaters with a batch approach. I could be wrong,but if I'm right isn't the the better way?

It "could" be intentional.

You don't know.

> Thats intentional.

It isn’t. An anticheat that bans months late is as good as no anticheat at all.

Idk if I agree with this. When I think of ban waves I instantly think of CSGO, and the ban waves mean nothing. IDK what data they have collected and what specific things they mitigate before triggering a ban wave, but it's completely ineffective. People are spin botting in MM lobbies the very same day as a ban wave. Especially with Valve where they rarely if ever auto-ban and rely heavily on user-reported cheats and Overwatch where actual community members vote (which is already very imperfect because you don't retain audio to know what calls are made and the tick rate of GOTV makes things look sketch that maybe aren't).

I could see waiting to ban a wave of people if you also release an update that addresses the exploit being used. But I don't know that I have ever seen that be the case. The hacks that existed before the ban wave are often equally effective if not the same exact cheats as the ones being used after the ban wave. The author updates a bit of detection bypass code, and they are done.

So if it's intentional, it's not a very effective methodology in my experience.

> Companies let detected hacks slide silently and then do waves of mass bans to prevent hackers working out what exactly triggered the ban.

The problem with this strategy is that it virtually guarantees that cheaters will get to have multiple months of fun before they get banned.

Discouraging someone from doing a destructive behavior requires preventing it when it happens. You need consistent, immediate enforcement. If you get banned the same day you start cheating, then that's a discouragement. If you're guaranteed a few months of fun on an alt account, then that's an encouragement.

The way to look at it are that cheaters are a constant factor of the player base that needs to be kept at an acceptably low level. Ban waves provide a trade off between hiding information and having a growing population of cheaters that will be occasionally culled. Most cheaters are buying their cheats, will look for ‘undetectable’ cheats to buy and will often find the most popular cheats. As such ban waves tend to catch up a lot of the cheating playerbase.

There’s also not much functional difference between banning as soon as a cheat is detected in the population and banning a few weeks later. Some players will have just started using it and others will have been using it for months unless it was found as soon as it was released.

The discouragement comes from losing progress, losing money (potentially having to rebuy an account and find and buy a new cheat) and distrust in the cheat author.

The downside to banning already detected cheats immediately is that cheat authors have a nice simple, repeatable test to see if their cheat is still detectable which makes development much more straightforward for them.