Antivirus Software Causes EA Javelin Anticheat to Eventually Serve Game Bans.
This issue especially affects Battlefield 2042 in terms of visibility, but is a systemic issue affecting Any EA Game that uses EA Javelin Anticheat.
Unbeknownst to an end user, using certain antivirus software solutions that have mechanisms to intervene when a malicious webpage is loaded to stop it and block it before it can do harm will just so happen to conflict with EA Anticheat's launching and operating when a game is launched. It will not outright stop EA Anticheat from functioning, but it will cause the service to hang on launch, and intermittently slow down and drop packets during gameplay.
It just so happens that the hang on initial launch presents itself as the infinite startup movie bug, where the Battlefield 2042 splash screen and Connecting to Online Services elements do not load, and it is stuck on the startup movie background until the game is closed and launched a second time.
The end user will not register that software on its system is interfering. Owing to Battlefield 2042's prior reputation, the user is much more likely to write off the launching issue and repeated packet loss or game stutter that may be associated with it as entirely being the game's fault, or the system hardware's fault. After all, no other games besides Battlefield 2042 or other EA Javelin Anticheat-using titles show any symptoms, so it must be an issue solely with them, so devs need to fix it or are not going to, so bad games remain bad and unstable as seems typical. Right?
Well, only partly. Because the end user has not made the connection, it may still play the games, but is less likely to, or continually writes off the symptoms as typical game problems. All the while, EA Anticheat is continually making note of the inability to launch and keep its service running as expected. After about 2 years of playing, or whenever it sees fit, it will proceed to ban that very same player for the background interference and disruption that the player thought was just a game issue on a system with legitimate software and no issues in any other game.
Additionally, any attempt to perform Ban Disputes through official means on the basis of it being a false positive will fail in this case, as there was technically an actual piece of software interfering, which in technicality, meets the conditions of violating the EA Safe Play Agreement's clauses on Service Disruptions. Even if a player never knew what caused it to begin with, or that it was a legitimate piece of software.
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After being a player who was personally affected by this, and went through some stages of disbelief and grief over it and the prior years of playing and spending in Battlefield 2042 amounting to nothing, A whim of trying something on a whim to see if it did anything finally seemed to show results, solve the initial launch failure/infinite startup movie bug, and finally get Battlefield 2042 to reliably launch the first time, every time. As well as solve my own game ban.
The solution, or at least a mitigation end users can do for now? Specifically create an Exception for C:/Program Files/EA/AC/EaAnticheat.GameService.exe (EA Anticheat's Game Service Process) within the antivirus software, but not just any general exception for scanning. It has to specifically be an exception targeting the antivirus software's Online Threat Prevention, or similarly named webpage intervention suite, or else it may or will not work. For an affected user, you will know if it works if the game can now show its splash screen and Connecting to Online Services element consistently.
For EA Staff and developers, the EA Anticheat Game Service must either be whitelisted at a company inquiry level with BitDefender and other antivirus software companies (e.g. ESET, Avast, Malwarebytes, or otehrwise), or why it is triggering the Online Threat Prevention mechanism or a hang associated with it in the background must be looked into as a preventative.
Undoing any recent Service Disruption Game Bans issued as a result of this matter, including my own, could also be done as a nicety, to get more players back to playing the game and not have it lose them unnecessarily.
Regards for the time being.
File attachments are to show BitDefender Antivirus Free Edition's enabled Online Threat Prevention mechanisms, and how to create a working exception for it. I have yet to test which exact component of this is causing the issue, but will update the forum post if or when I manage to isolate which feature is interfering with launching the game.
