I did some digging, and eventually tried to run Battle for Neighborville, which also seems to run EA anti-cheat. It also didn't run, but unlike GW2, it produced a crash report, which told me that the reason for the exception was that "The thread tried to read from or write to a virtual address for which it does not have the appropriate access."
I also tried disabling Windows Defender temporarily, which didn't change anything. The game still wouldn't boot up. I checked which apps are allowed through the firewall, and everything EA-related was allowed.
I'm guessing that the anti-cheat cannot reach the kernel level. Maybe this is because of my OS? I'm on Windows 11, 24H2. I didn't find any documentation on the EA anti-cheat to check if this version of Windows 11 is supported or not. I could also be entirely wrong.
I'm making a little progress. Apparently, this is the same problem for all the games in the franchise, so I started looking at solutions in other branches.
https://forums.ea.com/discussions/plants-vs-zombies-franchise-en/i-cant-launch-plants-vs-zombies-battle-for-neighborville/10553629/replies/10553635
This solution didn't help me, but I started trying different options. As a result, I deleted all EA anti-cheat files from the game directory and the game started running, I was even able to watch the game screensaver, but at the moment of joining the EA server, the game began to crash with an error that I need to restore the files. Naturally, after recovery, the game downloads new anti-cheat files and nothing else starts.
We continue to dig, since EA support is unable to help
But what can be accurately understood is that the anti-cheat has a conflict with something on the computer. Possible with Windows :D
did another day of digging.. I think ur right, I did all the possible solutions but to no avail, and it seems like some players are having the same issue. If the issue persists, I'm gonna ask for a refund :/
