Battlefield 6 - Anticheat Update - Season 1

Battlefield 6 is officially live — and what a launch it’s been! Over the record-breaking Launch and its initial weeks, players around the world dove in for millions of matches and a lot of conversation about our battle against cheaters.

In a past Javelin blog, we’ve talked about measuring cheating through what we call Match Infection Rate (MIR) — our measure of confidence that at least one cheater impacted any particular match. You can interpret this as the chance that you as a player would encounter a cheater in your matches. We prefer using this to know whether we are being successful or not as opposed to just volumes of enforcement such bans because even though we’ve been busy blocking, kicking, suspending and banning cheaters, it doesn’t mean much if we haven’t protected your play experience. This helps make sure we focus not just on catching cheaters after they have already cheated and ruined your match, but that we are effectively keeping them from ever producing an impact to begin with.

We’re proud to share that ~98% of all matches were fair and free of cheater impacts during the week following launch — meaning our average Match Infection Rate (MIR) was ~2%. That means almost every player who jumped into the Battlefield enjoyed a level playing field.

A Quick Look Back: What We Learned in the Open Beta

The Open Beta was invaluable for tuning our detection systems, operations workflows, and compatibility processes. We took those learnings and enhanced them for launch, directly contributing to the stability and strength you’ve all experienced so far.

Throughout Open Beta, we had the opportunity to put our anti-cheat technology and operations teams to the test:

• Over 1.2 million cheat attempts were blocked — we removed tens of thousands of cheaters. We even banned some over-confident cheaters who were live-streaming their cheats in real time.
• We drove a significant increase in fair matches — from 93.1% at the start to nearly 98% by the end of the final day.
• Secure Boot adoption jumped from 62.5% to 92.5% — we wanted to thank you for getting this enabled so quickly and share that this enabled us to leverage it in various ways at launch with confidence. You should have seen a tank decal in your inbox in-game as a thank you if you were part of those players enabling the feature.

Since Launch: Results & Impact Month 1

Over the launch weekend, EA Javelin Anticheat prevented more than 367,000 cheat attempts — less than during comparable Open Beta weekends but in line with the current number of cheat developers we are tracking. This has grown to 2.39 million cheat attempts blocked to date.

Across all of our PC players so far, we are down to 1.5% of people not being able to activate Secure Boot on PC —  thanks to your feedback, efforts by our Fan Care team, and involvement of some key community contributors and will continue to sort through remaining edge cases. Secure Boot isn’t a silver bullet to stop all cheating; but it is a barrier in of itself and enables other barriers. It helps enhance our detections to make each one just that extra bit harder for cheat developers. It can be circumvented, everything can, but sometimes even experts forget that those circumventions also light up lots of indicators; just getting around a barrier doesn’t mean we didn’t watch them the whole time as they dripped paint back to their nest for us to hammer drop their whole community.

We are presently aware of, and have multiple detections for, 190 cheat related programs, hardware, vendors, and resellers and their communities. Since launch 183 of them (96.3%) have announced feature failures, detection notices, downtime, and/or taken their cheats offline entirely. While there are still clips circulating of cheaters claiming to be undetected, it’s far more likely than not that when you see gameplay of someone claiming to cheat undetected, they are already banned or have a hammer incoming. This successful disruption of the cheater community is encouraging. But, we know that bad actors will keep testing our defenses, trying new ways to break through. We are constantly monitoring these new threats and are ready to respond, but these early results show that our layered defense strategy is delivering the fair experience players deserve.

What’s Next

In the war against cheating, we’re just getting started.  Here’s what’s coming next:

• Explore Additional OS Security Features.
  • You may have noticed security features beyond Secure Boot like TPM 2.0, HVCI and VBS are part of the Battlefield 6 system requirements. It’s important to note that these are operating system security features, and in general are good security posture to have enabled for your machine and will help avoid any disruptions in playing BF6 when enforcing that requirement becomes necessary.
• Enforce against Cheating Hardware.
  • Some of you might have seen various articles and screenshots of EA communications about users being banned because of use of cheating hardware. While most of these are humorous fan creations and not official, there is a shred of truth to them. Cheating, regardless of the how, is prohibited and using known cheating hardware is no exception.
  • We are also working to enhance this with not only our own methods of detection, but through collaboration with our platform partners to ensure these devices do not impact our playerbases anywhere, regardless of platform.
  • For players that have previously relied on such devices for accessibility, we recommend using first party official peripherals like the Xbox Adaptive Controller | Xbox and Access controller from PlayStation (US).
• Improving reporting flows.
  • We’ve heard feedback from players that depending on the mode, have trouble effectively reporting violations or suspected cheating in-game. We are working on new flows and updates to the reporting UI to make this more seamless and allow users to provide more context to the team so we can act on accurate reports faster and with better context.
• Improving internal operations tools.
  • Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of our internal tools enables our analysts to work faster and with greater accuracy in validating detections, investigating your cheat reports, and keeping tabs on what cheaters are doing. Our tooling is how we can react so quickly to the plethora of new cheat developers and ensure we have ways to detect them and keep them from impacting your matches. 
• Classified.
  • We have multiple teams working on various new anti-cheat features and detections across our multi-layered suite of tools across Javelin, the game client, server, and beyond coming online as fast as we can get them ready. As soon as any of these new ways of delivering ban hammers are fully tested and ready we’ll share more but for now we don’t want to tip our hand to any bad-actors looking to ruin your game experience.

The Road Ahead

Cheat developers never stop evolving, and neither will we. Fortunately, fair play is something that we’re passionate about both as developers and gamers so we’ve been preparing for a long time already. That said, you can help us by making sure you report players that you suspect are cheating through our in-game cheat reporting - those reports snap up additional telemetry and highlight accounts for us to zero in on when investigating possible cheats and cheaters, and also help us accurately measure how much cheating is impacting your player experience.

Keep it fair out there - we’ll see you on the Battlefield.