So EA's anticheat bans linux players

Hey @nenoro_95 if you have a ban or sanction on your account then you will need to speak to our Terms of Service team.

The process to contact our ToS team can be found here: https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/account/information-about-banned-or-suspended-accounts/

1. Click Contact usat the top of any page on EA Help.
2. Select the game that your account was banned or suspended from. If it’s on your whole EA Account, choose Origin.
3. Choose your platform.
4. Select Manage my account, then Banned or suspended account.
5. Fill out any other details below.
   • For example, if you picked Origin, it might ask you if you are accessing the game through an Origin Access membership.
6. Click Select contact option.
7. Sign in to your account that has the ban or suspension, if you aren’t already.

Darko

@EA_Darko > So i read a post on Lutris about someone who has been banned by FairFight just because the anticheat panicked when it read "dxvk"

read again, i wrote i read a post on the forum of Lutris (forgot to mention "forum") and someone (not me) was banned because he played BF5 on a distro Linux and the anticheat FairFight thought DXVK was a cheat.

But DXVK is not a cheat it's > A Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 9/10/11 which allows running 3D applications on Linux using Wine. (Definition find on DXVK github).

Example > What if i play Apex Legends (it's an example i don't like BR) and your anticheat find out i play Apex not on Windows 10 but on Gentoo what will happen ?

Answer > The anticheat will ban me because in its code there is no line who says "linux / dxvk / d9vk / vkd3d (direct X 12), lutris, wine".

So 1 - 2 years ago i said EA needed to join Linux and of course no one from EA reacted because i'm not a youtube/streamer who is in EA influence program.

So what next ? Are you going to join linux and let us play your games without being banned or keep closing your eyes ?

@nenoro_95It is quite clear that EA or Epic Game will never consider Linux after all this years Linux Community has been asking for Linux ports for their games. When you search linux in Answers HQ, you can see the request for linux can be date back to the time of BF3, which was 2012. 8 years has passed, and this request is ignored. Given an update in Apex Legend in February was also breaking WINE deliberately and also the recent ban and suspension of account in BF5, We can safely interpret that as a big "NO" to linux for their games already.

I only kept Windows for only one EA games: Titanfall2. And 99% of my time is using Linux. Windows are as bad as where my other posts and many others peoples who had already stated in Answers HQ (or other forums or in reddit). I am disappointed for EA whom they do not see the Linux potential for their possible business gain. Their refusal on porting games in Linux and calling Linux users as cheaters had enough to cause their old fans and Linux community angry.

There's an easy solution to this problem use the FAR superior Vulkan API instead of Directx.

If you talking cheats there probably are 99% more cheaters using windows, perhaps they should begin to ban Windows instead.

Hi!

I really hope they resolve this issue ASAP. This started gaining attention when players started getting banned from Battlefield V, however, I'm having a problem with another game. My setup is as follows: Manjaro Linux running Lutris, via which I run Origin using Proton 4.11 and I play Apex Legends this way. Getting this set up was already an agony of it's own, there is only one other company whose games are even harder if not impossible to run, the name of which I'm not going to post here, Linux users know what I'm talking about. Anyway, that's not the point here. I finally got Apex Legends running and after playing the training for like 1 minute I got kicked back to the menu and it said that my client didn't pass the anticheat authentication. For what, exactly? Sure, it's a free game, I'll just play something else. But what if it wasn't? What if I actually paid for an EA game, like Battlefield V? Do I also have to purchase Windows, like they're in a bundle?

"Well just install Windows, you shouldn't be using Linux for gaming anyway" most readers would say.

It is true that for a very long time Linux had been lacking behind Windows when it came to gaming, in fact it was always the argument against using Linux for gamers. But times have changed. I can play any game I want on Linux without even a single FPS being sacrificed, and although the Linux community is indeed much smaller than that of Windows, that little 2 percent is still very significant when the 100% means millions of users. I think it's time EA and other companies take Linux users into account when making their games. Now, this doesn't mean they should port all games to Linux as well - because let's face it, it really wouldn't be worth it for them, they do want to make money after all - but at least they could make their anticheat software in such a way that it doesn't start screaming in terror when it sees DXVK, or make a native version of at least their game launcher client, etc. 

I really, really hope you're not still keeping Windows around for Titanfall 2. 

Titanfall 2 has ran flawlessly on Linux for over a year at this point. I have 1000 hours in-game, almost all of it multiplayer (I played through the campaign once). 

Also, OP is total nonsense. What actually happened, is TWO people ***CLAIMED*** to have been banned JUST for running BF5 on Linux through Wine+DXVK. That's it. Two random people, claiming to have been banned for no other reason than that they were running the game on Linux, and yet dozens of articles and YT videos were made flat-out claiming that EA were UNEQUIVOCALLY BLANKET-BANNING Linux users. Meanwhile, thousands of other Linux users have run and continue to run BF5 multiplayer on Linux with zero issue whatsoever. It's disgusting how little any of those sites/YT channels care whatsoever about journalistic integrity or even just not spreading absolute F.U.D. 

Often in cases where it's just one or two people making claims like that, it later comes out that yeah, they actually were in fact cheating. Otherwise, it'd have been much more widespread. And the thing is, even if not, the forums here and the actual BF5 forums have tons of posts by WINDOWS users claiming THEY were falsely banned on BF5 for playing the game on WINDOWS. So, that means that Fairfight mistakenly bans a certain percentage of users. And guess what, they're probably equal (proportionally) on both Windows and Linux. 

But yeah, if you're using Windows for Titanfall 2, go ahead and ditch Windows. Both the Origin and Steam versions of Titanfall 2 run flawlessly. I'm like a G28 (overall), and 100% of my playtime has been on Linux, never a single second on Windows. 

This is a pointless post. You're not falsely being banned for trying to play Apex Legends on Linux. Apex Legends uses EASY ANTI CHEAT, which is a completely different anticheat software than what BF5 uses. 

BF5 users weren't getting banned just for playing on Linux (the original story was an absolute misleading bit of nonsense), but either way, Apex uses Easy Anti Cheat and Easy Anti Cheat DOES NOT WORK in Wine/Proton. It doesn't function, so the game kicks you for not having working anticheat. THAT'S the issue, it's not a false ban. 

BF5 uses a SERVER-SIDE anticheat, Fairfight, so when you play it on Linux the anticheat still functions. But with Apex, it uses a kernel-level client-side anticheat, and when you try to play on Linux, it fails to run, so it kicks you from the game because you don't have a working anticheat client. It's not even remotely the same thing.