Forum Discussion

3 years ago

Linux players getting banned

Edit: Looks like they fixed the issue causing the bans. Edit 2: EA is reversing bans and sending out emails letting you know. Yay! Hello, I believe myself and a few others got banned for just playi...

UngerGames

2 years ago

Part of me's been worried that Respawn would have issues with some of the linux gaming tools being used, like Proton-GE, gamemode, mangohud, latencyflex, custom kernels, etc, since those aren't directly from Valve, and in theory might have some way (?) of tripping up an anti-cheat. I just hope they realize a lot of those tools are as common for linux users as something like MSI Afterburner/RTSS is for Windows users (I know from a technical perspective those are very different, but I couldn't think of a better analogy - plus I'm talking purely about usage rates here). Some of those even come pre-installed on some linux distros (a lot of Steam Deck users even use Proton-GE), and especially pre-DXVK 2.0, could provide a much greater performance boost than something like Afterburner ever has (thinking mostly about Proton-GE's DXVK_ASYNC, although thankfully that hasn't been needed/used for months now).

Considering that analogy: If Respawn needed to ban MSI Afterburner users because it somehow interfered with their anti-cheat, could they? I don't think they would, but I guess they could. We're playing on their servers, so their rules. But to do so in a reasonable manner, I'd hope they'd give a heads-up that it's no longer supported, could get you banned in the future, and unban anyone that was banned for using it before they gave that heads-up. In a situation like that, I just hope they'd also give us linux users the same treatment.

Let's just hope this linux banwave is unrelated to all of that (and probably is, since a lot of banned users were on mainstream distros, official Proton, and very simple/no launch options), and that this was simply a Windows-focused anti-cheat change that caught innocent linux users in the crossfire.

If so, according to this r/linux_gaming post, there are proton/wine-exclusive Windows API functions (like wine_get_version) that Overwatch uses to detect linux players (they've had 1-2 instances of accidentally banning/unbanning linux users too). Maybe Apex can also utilize those to avoid this situation in the future, if they aren't already.

rasmusthekawaii

2 years ago

I believe that those are not hopefully going to be an issue considering the fact that people use rivatuner and msi afterburner and such on windows too. It could be due to some simple miscalculation on protons end where it accidentally calculates some value to be higher by 1 or something similar (as in movement speed or like in teamfortress 2 servers linux servers give less ammo or something like that).
I do not believe that msi afterburner or mangohud could be used as a banworthy software. Considering both are popular software and I am sure they are aware of them. Also Msi afterburner is used to overclock gpus and such it would probably be really unfair to ban said software. As in would it be fair to ban a certain gpu that is factory overclocked?

As I used a completely stock version of debian 12 without any launch options, Default proton experimental option for proton and was banned. I added a screenfetch of my PC specs.
My personal might be theory could be that something super common like running or moving could trigger the ban due to rounding difference compared to windows.
Like in this case from TeamFortress 2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzZoo1yAQag

A short video on what I believe could be happening. But then again proton is translating windows calls and I am not very sure if this would be part of the issue here.