Abandon all hope, ye who banned here.
Posting this partly to put it on record and partly to find out whether anyone else has been through the same thing, because the more I dig into it the worse it looks.
The short version is that my account was permanently banned from Battlefield 6 on 16 May 2026, with a customer-facing reason of "Gameplay Enhancement" and an internal reason code on the disclosure of COMPETITIVE_ADVANTAGE. My recorded K/D in BF6 was 0.79 (I enjoy attacking on Breakthrough, ok?). Whatever the statistical profile of an account running unauthorised software is supposed to look like, that is not it.
The appeals process went nowhere. I submitted two appeals, and the first came back quickly with nothing of substance, while the second sat in a queue, produced a "we will update you as soon as possible" holding message, and was then denied on 3 June with no evidence, no explanation, and no sign that a human had actually reviewed it. At no point across either appeal did EA tell me what I was supposed to have done, when I had done it, or in which match it was meant to have happened.
That is what eventually pushed me into filing a Subject Access Request, and this is the part that matters most. In order to find out the basis on which I had been branded a cheater, I had to invoke UK GDPR and formally compel EA to disclose the data they hold on me.
What came back does not hold together. The anti-cheat section of the disclosure runs to 234 rows, and every single one contains the same five fields: session start, session end, date, IP address, and a title ID, with nothing else attached. There are no detection events, no flags, no anomaly scores, and nothing whatsoever identifying which session is meant to contain a violation. The narrative that accompanies it lists three reasons for the sanction. Unauthorised software, boosting, and excessive teamkilling and points to "the sessions identified in the attached file," except that there are no identified sessions in the attached file and nothing in it capable of supporting any of the three reasons. They handed me a log of the times I logged in and presented it as the evidence against me. I don't even play Hardcore modes where teamkilling is enabled so somewhat confused by this statement.
My own match reports were included in the same disclosure, around nineteen matches with full per-match stats, seemingly as proof of my alleged conduct, and they do me no harm at all (apart from being embarrassed I am so bad at this despite playing for 20 years). Kill counts run from single figures into the low teens, accuracy sits at something like thirty-odd hits from two hundred or more shots fired, and a couple of headshots in a match counts on a good day.
Steam is a dead end as well. I asked them to refund the purchase or intervene, and they confirmed in writing that they will not act on a publisher ban, which leaves me having paid £59.99 for a game I cannot launch, sanctioned for reasons the publisher cannot substantiate, with the storefront declining to get involved.
I am not asking EA to take my word for anything. I am not asking you to take my word for anything. I am asking them to produce the basis for a permanent sanction they have already imposed, and after exhausting their appeals process and forcing a statutory disclosure out of them, they still have not done it. The data they were legally obliged to provide contains no evidence of cheating at all.
So a couple of questions for the forum:
- Has anyone else been banned for "Gameplay Enhancement" and never received a shred of evidence for it?
- Has anyone actually had a false-positive ban overturned, and if so, what was the route that genuinely worked?
I have every case reference, the full SAR disclosure, and the correspondence on file, and I am happy to compare notes. If there is a pattern here, it would be worth establishing it properly.
I took another careful look at your case. Based on the data and evidence, the original decision and appeal outcome of the team were correct—the account did violate our Positive Play Charter that results in a permanent ban from BF6 for Competitive Advantage / Gameplay Enhancement.
That said, there are very rare situations that allow me to reduce a penalty as a one-time act of leniency for an account. During this additional review, I found that your case meets just enough of those criteria to be eligible. Because of that—and since you’ve already served a fair amount of time on the ban—I’ve removed the BF6 ban effective immediately.
I’m not able to share specific details about the violation or how detections work, or the criteria for leniency as that information could assist bad actors circumvent such detections or manipulate our appeal processes. What I can share is a strong recommendation that you review the hardware and software on your system and remove anything that could be violating the rules before jumping back into the game.
See you on the Battlefield.
