EA Anticheat Does Not Work (A Callout To EA)

Question

I think anyone who's ever played an online EA game within the past several years will agree with this statement, but just in case, I'm going to explain it as best I can with what little I know

First, I'm not going to pretend, I'm not going to sugarcoat, but I am going to be polite. EA's in-house anticheat is garbage. Their anticheat sits at the kernel of the system it's installed on. Allow me to repeat that. The anticheat EA currently uses is installed in the deepest level of your system, and if not, really close to it. That means your system could theoretically be completely scanned by any game by EA. But this also means anyone who gains access to your EA account without your permission can do the same. Having any program installed on that level is a security risk, not for the games, but for the users themselves

Second, these anticheats don't actually prevent cheating. There have been numerous reports of hackers on EAs games since it was rolled out, most of which have been relegated to PC specifically, as it's easier to hack a PC than it is a console. Players have had their accounts banned because of these malicious hackers. On top of that, EA has done nothing to stop it. If anything, their silence tells way more than simply acknowledging the problem, let alone telling us they're going to address it. This means people who genuinely care about these games are losing time and money because of these bad actors, and EA is just letting it happen

Third, let's discuss EA themselves, and their lack of communication. They release these games, expect players to buy them, play on their servers, buy tons of microtransactions, but when people stop playing because hackers are having their own version of fun, EA says nothing. EA does nothing. And in the instance they do say something, the damage has already been done. I have a number of educated guesses as to why they don't, but at the end of the day, none of them matter. Regardless of the quality of games released, the quality of the anticheat makes even shovelware look good. And when shovelware looks good, that's when you know you failed

This is a callout to EA. You need to scrap your anticheat. Permanently. It is abysmal. You make plenty of money every year, you can use some of it on anticheat software from other developers. It's not that hard, and knowing you earned over $7 billion at the end of the fiscal year of 2025, whatever that software costs will be mere pennies in comparison

Please, do the right thing for your customers

ea_lunardustcat · Answer

Thank you for posting.&nbsp;
Like many other products in the anti-cheat space, EA Javelin Anticheat operates in the kernel by necessity. Because external cheats don't interact with the game process itself, they can easily evade many anti-cheat techniques, especially if they do things from the kernel. The kernel is the deepest part of the operating system, and if cheats operate from there while the anti-cheat does not, they can hide everything they are doing with no chance for us to detect or prevent any of it. While having a kernel driver is essential to protecting fair play in our games, we also understand the concerns that a kernel driver can raise. EA Javelin Anticheat only runs when one of our protected games is running, and it will uninstall itself if you have uninstalled all of your EA games that have EA Javelin Anticheat protection. We have partnered closely with internal teams and 3rd party assessors to validate that EA Javelin Anticheat will only inspect what it needs to for anti-cheat purposes… everything else is off-limits.&nbsp;
As for our AntiCheat efforts and communication, you can refer to the security news and updates we’ve published across our various titles.