Thank you for speaking the truth.
I am the owner of ALL Battlefield 1 servers in the Oceanic AUS / NZ region. I have been running and maintaining these servers for 5 years now. I have over 8,000 hours in the game on just one of my accounts, and hardly any of it is playing - most of it is administration, spectating, and banning hackers so that our region is hacker-free. This is the equivilent running time of 30 hours per week; close to a full time job - and I do it free, by passion.
I enjoyed many benefits of the community-made admin tools to keep hackers out, to make fun server game-modes, and even to host operations sometimes, which otherwise is a programming failure by EA since they do not allow players to host this on player-owned servers. Think - DICE made this amazing game mode, and then nobody can play it, so the fundamental game mode of battlefield 1 is wasted and unplayable - all the programming for nothing. We, the players and admins, solved all of these issues, used bots every day to get the servers running, kept a fair atmosphere for experienced and new players alike, and invested years of our own personal time to allow people to have fun after their hard day's work.
EA undid all of that with the anti-cheat release. Their needless screwing with a ~9 year old game (2016), for zero benefit, is merely caused on a whim of management. Already, hackers are rampant, and I am back to spectating and banning them, with my admin team. What was the anticheat for? Why does it exist? It only makes starting our servers harder and harder, because of the stupid overhead requirements on additional ram and kernel checking.
Today, EA even released a new update secretly to the anti-cheat which prohibited battlefield from running on ALL virtual machines (VM's). They keep throwing in new updates to the anticheat on a whim, which only ruin everything for the admins and players, but never stop the hackers. I am constantly remaking, repairing, and fixing the VM's so that they can run the bots - which start the servers - so the players can play. And EA keeps breaking it. I'm sick of it. Lucky EA already reverted this stupid update, or all hope would be lost.
We are sick of it - just keep out, stop breaking what we fix, let us enjoy the game. We don't need your anticheat software, we have been banning cheaters for 5 years and by experience, are able to know immediately and reliably when someone is hacking. Sincerely, a player of Battlefield since BF2, which has, like all the others of my era and before, essentially given up on this franchise purely because of EA's decisions. I don't plan to buy BF6 or any product from EA ever again - indefinitely. And I was once the advocate for hope in 2042 when others were already leaving.
