Battlefield 1’s Anti-Cheat System Reportedly Banning Legit Players

Megalith

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Battlefield 1’s anti-cheat measure, FairFight, may be banning players for being too good. Rather than eliminating players based on the detection of cheat software, it could be doing so based on stats. I really suck at online FPS, so this has no effect on me and may even allow me to get a kill in.

…although kl-Spazmo may be a cheater, the issue here is that FairFight has reportedly banned him based on his stats, not effectively detecting a third-party cheating software as is often the case. This is part of FairFight’s model, but as he points out, other players such as Minidoracat have also fallen victim to the anti-cheat detector. Kl-Spazmo says he has gameplay and webcam footage of the time he got banned. After some back and forth with DICE, he was unbanned following further review of his case. Though the initial video has been made private, he did promise to upload more with better quality to his YouTube channel. Since then, other players have also shared their experience of getting caught doing nothing, but receiving a ban anyway.
 
That's what FairFight does. It's an algorithm based anti cheat service. It takes into account your personal stats over time and if it sees a strange spike in accuracy or headshots you get banned. I believe the game developer has the option to tighten the variables so there's less chance of a false positive but you'll still get a few that leak through. It's actually a TERRIBLE method of anti-cheat because the only thing FairFight stops are blatant hackers. Any other hacker just using their cheats in stealth mode easily sneak by it.
 
So if you suck at video games and then all of the sudden have a great round where you hit the top of the leader board does that mean you will get banned because you sucked previously?
 
Is bf1 any good for TDM? I never got into any of the other modes that much but bf4 TDM is pretty much dead now.
 
That's what FairFight does. It's an algorithm based anti cheat service. It takes into account your personal stats over time and if it sees a strange spike in accuracy or headshots you get banned. I believe the game developer has the option to tighten the variables so there's less chance of a false positive but you'll still get a few that leak through. It's actually a TERRIBLE method of anti-cheat because the only thing FairFight stops are blatant hackers. Any other hacker just using their cheats in stealth mode easily sneak by it.
While true, Fairfight has so far done a bit better than their other choice of Anti-Cheat software, Punkbuster. IIRC, Punkbuster did scan for overlays and other software running at same time as the game which would be a better way of doing things but it was never supported well and terribly out of date. Despite what Punkbuster claimed to do, apparently it was very easy to circumvent.

I've heard BattlEye works really well, and I wish EA/DICE would look into implementing it or something similar.
 
I never take reports like these seriously.

When cheaters get caught, especially high profile ones, they feel they have an image to uphd and will usually make a stink and continue their dishonesty to try to cover it up...
 
So if you suck at video games and then all of the sudden have a great round where you hit the top of the leader board does that mean you will get banned because you sucked previously?
This happens a lot due to the nature of P2P multiplayer. The host is always going to have an advantage.
 
I never take reports like these seriously.

When cheaters get caught, especially high profile ones, they feel they have an image to uphd and will usually make a stink and continue their dishonesty to try to cover it up...
I temper my reactions too because of this. Let's not forget the recent revelations of all the "professional" gamers out there that are cheating.
 
While true, Fairfight has so far done a bit better than their other choice of Anti-Cheat software, Punkbuster. IIRC, Punkbuster did scan for overlays and other software running at same time as the game which would be a better way of doing things but it was never supported well and terribly out of date. Despite what Punkbuster claimed to do, apparently it was very easy to circumvent.

I've heard BattlEye works really well, and I wish EA/DICE would look into implementing it or something similar.

BE works very well apparently, and what anti-cheat Planetside 2 was using is pretty good too. I follow some of the top profile cheat makers and both those games they stopped making hacks for because it wasn't worth the effort to circumvent.
 
They need this on bf3 and bf4. yeah they are both aged games, but people still play them and people still cheat. the admins that run the servers dont ban.
 
Battlefield always had stat padders who are cheaters they just don't use cheat programs they just use servers that encourage stat padding.
 
They need this on bf3 and bf4. yeah they are both aged games, but people still play them and people still cheat. the admins that run the servers dont ban.
Oh yes they do. You are either playing on crappy servers, playing when there is no admin available, or there may be cases where you think someone is cheating but they aren't.

Since the communities for BF3 and BF4 are slowly dying off, I'm going to lean towards "no admin available" as the most likely situation. Most of those servers are running their best on ProCon scripts to keep them going and fix various issues that DICE never did well (e.g. team balancing). When BF3 and BF4 were big several years ago, I would see bannings all the time. Most of the big clans and servers would have an admin start actively watching the person in question to get video evidence first. Many times the banning wasn't immediate, but it did eventually happen.
 
What's funny is that if you know anything about how these cheat makers work, they circumvent this shit all the time. You can even tell the cheats what headshot % you want so that you don't raise any red flags. So someone can easily cheat by just wall hacking and "mild" aim botting.

Recently I was playing Ghost in the Shell Online and it's a game with built in wall-hack as a "perk". When an enemy uses theirs the game warns you. I had mine up and I watched a guy aiming/following me through the wall. The game never said they were using their thermal scanner so I knew the dude was blatantly cheating. Kind of a funny anecdote about how often and blatantly people cheat without even realizing they could try to hide it better. Anyways, never saw the guy get kicked even though you can literally feel the cheat service scan the server because your ping jumps and your fps drop for a few seconds.
 
Cheating really has ruined online FPS for me. It sucks.
yup, its become to big an issue on PC now, I just game on my consoles for MP FPS now. My PC still gets played with other games though, one nice thing is Microsoft having the play anywhere system so I can buy a game like gears of war 4 and enjoy it on my PC if I choose.
 
BF1 was fun when it came out then they started patching it and then cheaters poured in, almost unplayable now with the lameness.
The only way to fix this issue is with your pocket book, I won't buy another game like this until they fix this chating issue. Time to get the million gamer petition up.
I have never been against cheating, I always thought they should have servers where people could go cheat and exploit, some people enjoy that and even look at cheating like a mod.
We could study the cheating servers and then have anti cheating pure servers with proper software to thwart them.... or just cut there thumbs off.
 
I used to be an admin on one of the longest lasting clan servers in the COD series. The best anti-cheat was always the admins. My favorite was when I played COD all day long at work for a few years, and I had videos of me sent in for "hacking". And every time they were able to point out exactly the chain of events that led to my kills.

Good servers were always around, you just had to find them.
 
Fairfight's certainly come a long way. When it first showed up in town, just testing on high population servers in BF3 I really feared for the worse. This was when they were just getting their feet wet, they would kick and kill for shotgun kills because they didn't understand the accuracy calculation in BF with multiple rounds hitting the same target and having >100% accuracy. Three Battlefield games later, and DICE completely dropped Punkbuster, So they must be doing something right. Fairfight also takes screenshots. Real screenshots! Punkbuster/Evenbalance took a lot of heat because they've been limited 400 x 204 for the longest time, they played games to get larger junks of the screen by capturing every other pixel and such, but their SS tech was never updated as far as I know for at least the last 5 years.

Punkbuster really helped when there was nothing else but I guess just got long in the tooth. Though they did have the benefit of an established community, and at least methods to check global ban lists. Now what do we have? I'm a huge Battlefield multiplayer fan, have done low level competitive play, and I'm not sure Punkbuster or Fairfight has ever caught anyone that cheated at that level. It's always been the league's own anticheat that caught them, that was required to be used during matches. CEVO has their own anticheat client, ESL has their own etc.
 
Kyle,

Why have you taken it as a matter of faith that the players in question are innocent? I'm not saying they are or they aren't, but your headline proclaims they are simply because they have videos. Streaming/shadowplay does not prove innocence anymore.

Clever from Rainbow Six: Siege taught us that much when he was caught cheating while livestreaming and running fairfight and esl wire:



The above clip may be a bit esoteric. This puts it into simple terms:



This is a disjointed (and exceedingly long) explanation, but here it is:



For sure Fairfight is garbage and easily bypassed, as evidenced by SW: Battlefront, RS6: Siege (pre battleeye), and BF1; all games that employ Fairfight only.

The solution isn't to proclaim these players were victims; the solution is for EA/DICE to implement BattleEye.

**edit**

That said, thank you for bringing this issue the attention it deserves. Cheating is a real problem in EA/DICE games expressly because they rely on Fairfight only and have been ignoring all the pleas to use a better system.
 
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looking at his stats, no one is that good, he's clearly cheating
 
The problem with cheating is that most people don't know what cheating looks like. I'll certainly admit I'm not good in this area either. But in that reddit thread, there were a few things the people did to prove their innocence, which really do nothing of the sort, other than convince people who don't know what cheating looks like that they're not cheating.

A) Make a long post about how Fair Fight works on purely stats, when it really doesn't. Keep spreading misinformation, and people will believe it.
B) The person had a video which showed which services were running before he started Battlefield. Let's say he was cheating. He could have always edited the videos. Also, you're not going to have your cheat be labeled cheat.exe. You can write a Windows Service with pretty much any name you want to use. (*EDIT* Process, not service. But that doesn't change anything, as it's not like you can't hide processes from Task Manager too.)
C) One of the people mentioned a video where now he's showing his computer playing the game. Not all cheats use overlays. Some are silent. And it's happened in pro gaming too.
D) Being a good player does not make you immune from cheating. The worst types of cheaters in my opinion are not the spastastic epileptic seizure causing aimbotters. You know those people are cheating. It's the good players who use cheats to give them that edge to become even better. Yes, not every cheater is an idiot.

Short of forcing people to use machines which aren't theirs while spectating them live, you can never truly remove the doubt that a person is cheating.

Do I believe he's cheating? I don't know, as I already stated, I'm not good enough to spot many cheats. But I've become far too jaded with these types of posts claiming innocence, and 99 times out of 100, they'll be definitively proven to have been cheaters all along.
 
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Cheating really has ruined online FPS for me. It sucks.

I really can't understand comments like this. never once, with any game, has cheating pissed me off for more then leaving a game here or there. Not to mention the amount of people that assume someone is cheating when they're not. I have 90 hours in BF1 and I've seen 1 blatant hacker the entire time, and never once was killed any other time by any shot I couldn't make myself.

I'm east coast US. I'd expect more cheaters in different regions of the globe so maybe that has some to do with it.

I just can't understand someone saying cheaters have ruined FPS games for them. I'd venture to say you think a lot of good players are cheaters if you feel like you're constsntly surrounded by them. Unless you're in Asia or somewhere else where there's more of it. I've been accused of cheating on multiple occasions in BF1 alone. All I can do is laugh.
 
I really can't understand comments like this. never once, with any game, has cheating pissed me off for more then leaving a game here or there. Not to mention the amount of people that assume someone is cheating when they're not. I have 90 hours in BF1 and I've seen 1 blatant hacker the entire time, and never once was killed any other time by any shot I couldn't make myself.

I'm east coast US. I'd expect more cheaters in different regions of the globe so maybe that has some to do with it.

I just can't understand someone saying cheaters have ruined FPS games for them. I'd venture to say you think a lot of good players are cheaters if you feel like you're constsntly surrounded by them. Unless you're in Asia or somewhere else where there's more of it. I've been accused of cheating on multiple occasions in BF1 alone. All I can do is laugh.
As said above, you have to know what to look for. I'm sure a lot of people blame their lack of skill on cheating, however cheats have become more complex to try and hide themselves from onlookers. All in all I'd say in my experience the rate of real cheaters has doubled in the past decade, but I put much of that blame on the advent of peer-to-peer in multiplayer games. Putting game calculations player-side was always going to result in more maliciousness.
 
As said above, you have to know what to look for. I'm sure a lot of people blame their lack of skill on cheating,

That's the really insidious aspect of cheating that people don't normally address. You could be playing against perfectly upstanding individuals who are legitimately good, but when they kill you in ways you can't explain or seem "too good," in the back of your mind you get angry because you wonder if it was cheating.

You don't get better, you don't grow as a player, and, most importantly, you don't shrug and enjoy the game.

It's a festering wound on a player's psyche when he knows that cheating goes on and he assumes he was a victim of it. It takes a heavy toll on even games with good anti-cheat.
 
My nephew keeps getting banned on cs:go because he is so good. Steam vac ban n other client bans.

I'm a moderator on a cod world at war server.

We look out for wallers, botters, glitchers, and exploits being used. We take a demo of it, post it on the forums under moderator ban section, admins take a look at the demo and decide to ban or not. Its almost like a vote between the mods and admins.

Some moron admins jump the gun and ban instant if a player is good, example, my nephew keeps getting banned and I seen him play, he's really good. Better than me.
 
Like everyone in prison, they're innocent.

Colour me shocked.

GTAV is notorious for banning innocent people so you are wrong. Just go look up the Steam reviews for GTAV and you will see the no.1 complaint is unwarranted bans. And Rockstar won't even consider unbanning them. Yea, that's right, I won't ever be buying GTAV.
 
I really can't understand comments like this. never once, with any game, has cheating pissed me off for more then leaving a game here or there. Not to mention the amount of people that assume someone is cheating when they're not. I have 90 hours in BF1 and I've seen 1 blatant hacker the entire time, and never once was killed any other time by any shot I couldn't make myself.

I'm east coast US. I'd expect more cheaters in different regions of the globe so maybe that has some to do with it.

I just can't understand someone saying cheaters have ruined FPS games for them. I'd venture to say you think a lot of good players are cheaters if you feel like you're constsntly surrounded by them. Unless you're in Asia or somewhere else where there's more of it. I've been accused of cheating on multiple occasions in BF1 alone. All I can do is laugh.

It might be that I stopped playing the online FPS quite awhile ago when cheating was easier to get away with. Perhaps I should pick up BF1 and give it a try!
 
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