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:
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.
> 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.
I recall facing map-hackers in BW, SC2, and WC3...it was very frustrating, but at the same time, they were generally correspondingly worse at every game mechanic. If you played a solid, standard, scouting-based, conservative style, you could beat these players despite their handicaps.
On the other hand, maphackers totally counter risk-taking players who play secretive strategies like DT rush, DT drop, high-tech rushes, players who love big drops, hidden bases...players like that would get slaughtered by map hackers.
So, if you l2p, you'd be able to beat them with superior skills. Can't say the same for shooters, though, those games are ruined by hackers.
It's all based on finger printing like shitty old virus scanners (that are themselves an attack surface). I know people who get by them by writing their own programs instead of using ones found online; naming them "Google Chrome" and running them as the system user so they can read/debug game processes.
> 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.
Or, stop buying games that are essentially rootkits...
I recently saw an interesting idea, put the game inside a lightweight container and give it a virtual GPU. The latency took a small but noticeable hit but you had verified code that you could verify that the game code hasn't been modified. Granted it wouldn't be perfect security since your threat model is someone with root access, but it makes the effort required to hack the game large though that it hopefully discourages some would be hackers
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.
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?
Since tools like DXVK (and ReShade on Windows) can allow people to see through walls, I would expect Valve to ban them, too. Even if they are not used in any blatantly obvious way, e.g. by shooting someone you shouldn't be able to see, they still give the cheating player a large advantage by letting them know where on the map the enemies are.
> 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.
That's literally wrong, the gameplay you see in OW is not based on recorded inputs of the player's client. You are watching a demo recorded by the server, which does not match the PoV of the player precisely. The demos are also 32 tick, which makes it hard to tell if the aiming of the player is legit [1], unless they are very blatant about it. Due to interpolation and lag compensation the PoV that the player saw is not what you see in the server's demo. If you record the player's PoV using screen capture and compare it to the demo recorded by the server, there are subtle and sometimes relevant differences.
tl;dr OW is only there to catch obvious cheaters.
[1] Because the server runs at 64 tick, but the demo is only 32, the crosshair snaps every time a shot is taken. The aim of everyone looks way snappier and suspicious in a 32 tick demo compared to their PoV.
> 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.
Not particularly correct. It only works for official matchmaking, because you will have your match game demo stored on Valve's server, for future reference to you maybe. Valve simply took advantage to replay these demo by allowing volunteering moderators to access the private demo and hiding the names of the others (but actually these name & steamid are accessable through cheat client); it does not record precise movement, as part of the engine limits, demos are sampled in 16 ticks, or 16fps that sometimes even creates wrong artifacts that misjudged people. You can see that in some pro CSGO matches there are some fishy kills but in fact thats due to 128 ticks -> 16 ticks illusions
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.
We handle cheating in our Battlefield 1942 server by requiring players to submit their public IP to admins to be explicitly whitelisted. There have been numerous cheaters and trolls we have easily banned over the years.
http://ea117.com/access gets 20 players/night at 7PM..
It plays the “desert combat” mod — the makers of that mod were acquihired by DICE.
It’s also really easy to reinstall... http://www.mediafire.com/file/v2dj55nwoxz84o8/BF1942DCF_setu....
This should be no surprise if you played the previous games in the series. I can only assume that it’s a high level business decision at EA to not do anything about cheaters.
The only way to play the game is on a server with admins in the game 100% of the time, or at least votebans.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Origin Client is no different than Steam or GOG really.
EA usually give away of put on sale a lot of their DOS / Win 9X library. Also the odd problem I've had with their store (I couldn't activate Crysis Warhead from a legit CD installer I had) It was resolved in about 15 minutes.
EA generally are bad. Don't get me wrong. But it isn't as terrible as many people make out tbh.
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.
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.
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.
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 sht.
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 fing work and not playing game.
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
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.
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.
I have a friend who plays most PC games on his Linux machine - we even play a weekly Divinity 2 session together and he runs the client on Linux, discord in his browser, and it's virtually identical to other windows-running players.
Valve's compatibility layer, Proton, is pretty freaking amazing for even very recent games on steam; but, it often fails when the game is administered by additional layers of DRM or another store's launcher. I bought and exclusively played Sekiro on linux from launch day without any issues, but have trouble with Age of Empires Definitive Edition.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] jchw|6 years ago|reply
This has happened on multiple occasions with Blizzard:
- https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Blizzard...
- 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|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] WhompingWindows|6 years ago|reply
On the other hand, maphackers totally counter risk-taking players who play secretive strategies like DT rush, DT drop, high-tech rushes, players who love big drops, hidden bases...players like that would get slaughtered by map hackers.
So, if you l2p, you'd be able to beat them with superior skills. Can't say the same for shooters, though, those games are ruined by hackers.
[+] [-] djsumdog|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nerdponx|6 years ago|reply
This is really depressing. I can't imagine working on an anti-cheat moderation team would be a pleasant job.
[+] [-] utopian3|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryandrake|6 years ago|reply
Or, stop buying games that are essentially rootkits...
[+] [-] matthewfcarlson|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oliwarner|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] lathiat|6 years ago|reply
It also doesn’t launch on Linux for the same reason. Is at least a touch more user friendly than getting bans I guess.
[+] [-] fxtentacle|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arrivance|6 years ago|reply
Some information in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc
[+] [-] blattimwind|6 years ago|reply
That's literally wrong, the gameplay you see in OW is not based on recorded inputs of the player's client. You are watching a demo recorded by the server, which does not match the PoV of the player precisely. The demos are also 32 tick, which makes it hard to tell if the aiming of the player is legit [1], unless they are very blatant about it. Due to interpolation and lag compensation the PoV that the player saw is not what you see in the server's demo. If you record the player's PoV using screen capture and compare it to the demo recorded by the server, there are subtle and sometimes relevant differences.
tl;dr OW is only there to catch obvious cheaters.
[1] Because the server runs at 64 tick, but the demo is only 32, the crosshair snaps every time a shot is taken. The aim of everyone looks way snappier and suspicious in a 32 tick demo compared to their PoV.
[+] [-] stevefan1999|6 years ago|reply
Not particularly correct. It only works for official matchmaking, because you will have your match game demo stored on Valve's server, for future reference to you maybe. Valve simply took advantage to replay these demo by allowing volunteering moderators to access the private demo and hiding the names of the others (but actually these name & steamid are accessable through cheat client); it does not record precise movement, as part of the engine limits, demos are sampled in 16 ticks, or 16fps that sometimes even creates wrong artifacts that misjudged people. You can see that in some pro CSGO matches there are some fishy kills but in fact thats due to 128 ticks -> 16 ticks illusions
[+] [-] noname120|6 years ago|reply
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...
[2] https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScmXAY-Q-QrfflsHrFX...
[+] [-] jolly_batali|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trekrich|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alkonaut|6 years ago|reply
The only way to play the game is on a server with admins in the game 100% of the time, or at least votebans.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] whatsmyusername|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Havoc|6 years ago|reply
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"
[+] [-] z9e|6 years ago|reply
Instead of doing this, they should just add a vote to kick feature on the servers which would solve a lot of the frustration.
[+] [-] dcow|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Mikeb85|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uncle_j|6 years ago|reply
EA usually give away of put on sale a lot of their DOS / Win 9X library. Also the odd problem I've had with their store (I couldn't activate Crysis Warhead from a legit CD installer I had) It was resolved in about 15 minutes.
EA generally are bad. Don't get me wrong. But it isn't as terrible as many people make out tbh.
[+] [-] stOneskull|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrZongle2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asutekku|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Pfhreak|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dx87|6 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/dcu7pb/bungie_will_p...
[+] [-] pugworthy|6 years ago|reply
It's hard to extrapolate from 10 posts by a few people who claim they weren't cheating all the way to "permanently banning Linux players".
[+] [-] mrbonner|6 years ago|reply
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 sht.
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 fing work and not playing game.
[+] [-] thebigspacefuck|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fxtentacle|6 years ago|reply
Replacing shaders is what people use to do shady things like wallhacks, outlining moving enemies, or providing targeting data for aimbots.
[+] [-] tmpz22|6 years ago|reply
[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|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nextgrid|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wjoe|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gambiting|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilikehurdles|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minedwiz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Thaxll|6 years ago|reply
I can tell you that DICE ( Shield ~~ ) have a dedicated team of people and it's not an easy problem to solve.
[+] [-] Andrew_nenakhov|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seattle_spring|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] halfcreative|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimbob45|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dijit|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scuds|6 years ago|reply
edit: any forums software I ever write is going to use a 'fallback to static rendering' circuit breaker setup in the case of slashdotting.