First of all, thanks for your post—it reminded everyone to protect their accounts. Since I started playing the game, I haven't really paid much attention to account bans, because I had never been banned before. It wasn't until the fourth season, when I got wrongly banned, that I found a ton of situations similar to mine on the community forums. The reasons vary—some are because of username violations, some don't even know what they did, and some Chinese players have to use a VPN to play because of regional restrictions. Then there are many cases like mine, where the ban was for gameplay enhancement. Like you said, if you want to play this generation of the Battlefield series, you have to enable BIOS's secure mode, which helps reduce simple, blatant cheating to some extent. Personally, I think enabling BIOS secure mode can eliminate any risk, but EA's banning system might recognize some third-party software as game aids, even though that software might have nothing to do with gameplay enhancement. I feel EA's anti-cheat methods are worse than just checking the data—cheaters obviously have really high K/Ds, and for someone like me whose K/D this season didn’t even reach 1.2, being considered a cheater is really absurd. Oh, and their appeal system is garbage, couldn’t be worse—it's been twenty-one days, and I haven’t received any reply or explanation, just been told to wait. The game I paid for is unplayable because of their mistake, which is really frustrating.
You kind of missed the entire point of the post, which is if you don't want to get banned, don't cheat.
Using a VPN is against the ToS. In my opinion it isn't enforced enough.
OP, good post. It's amazing how many people out there excuse or try to explain away something that is cheating, or at least a violation of the ToS. Of course there are always the bad actors who deserve the ban through and through, but some people just don't think or think they know better, when in reality we are playing by EA's rules.
