Community Manager
Welcome, and thank you for taking care of the PVZ community @EA_Shepard,
It could be a long read, but I would appreciate it if you could read it through.
I am a content creator for the PVZ shooter series and I have just reached 50k followers on Bilibili (I also have douyin (28k) and YouTube (1.8k) channels). I have been playing Garden Warfares since 2015 and started uploading gameplays the next year. I play the games on PC and I have spent over 2000 hours on the PVZ shooters combined.
The games were joyful until recent years when cheaters and hackers made the games mostly unplayable on PC. Garden Warfare 2 regained popularity after its release on Steam, and many of my videos gained over 100k views because of that. However, without effective anti-cheats, Garden Warfare 2 is the game where cheating is most rampant, especially in 2023. Most cheaters cheat by bringing frostbite mods online, and many of them are devastating to online gameplay on PC. Cheaters can crash the online game lobby so that all the players are kicked out and lose the progress. You may know of the complete server outage of GW2 multiplayer (MP) modes that lasted for months in the first half of the year, and it was caused by excessive lobby crashing by the cheaters. Even if the servers were not broken, one or two cheaters could be enough to ruin the games for all MP mode players because they can change around the servers and game modes and crash all lobbies in the middle of the games and no one gains any progress. And this has happened multiple times, not a theory. Other disgusting cheatings include round-ender that ends the game in the middle of the game and loads the next map, control lock that disables any keyboard or mouse input to the game for anyone in that lobby and players have to force stop the game, freeze-all that makes your character frozen and unable to do anything. There are many more forms of cheating in Garden Warfare 2 on PC such as instakill, immunity to damage, and using Boss characters. It is extremely hard not to meet a cheater if you play the game continuously for an hour.
The cheating problems are discouraging people from playing, buying, and content-creating the Garden Warfares. Two years ago, I was able to stream the game and many of my followers would join and play together just like any other game. Cheaters started to target me last year and now it will not even take 5 minutes for cheaters to crash the lobby I am in if I start to stream Garden Warfare 2. They would also use the ban exploit to ban me every day if they knew my ID. These cheaters not only ruin other players' experience in the game, but they are also constantly threatening and assaulting non-cheating players on social media. Since I am the biggest active GW content creator in China, some of the cheaters are defaming me and spreading altered images of me. I may need to sue them soon to stop them.
As a fan of the PVZ Garden Warfare series and a player with over 2000 hr of gameplay, I sincerely hope that the game experience of PC Garden Warfares improves. I know it might be hard and time-consuming to build an anti-cheat system for the game, but I would like to know if that is possible. There may be easier ways to lower the effects of cheaters, such as lifting the player limit of the private play from 4 to 24. The private play mode in GW2 and BFN only allows 4 players to play in the customized lobby with AI-filling options, however, 4 human players, which make 2V2, are not enough for any kind of VS game mode. I would suggest kindly lifting the player limit for the PC private play to prevent encountering cheaters. I am not sure how much work needs to be done, but I would assume it is relatively easier to achieve. And if EA is developing a new sequential of the GW series, I would suggest improving the private plays as a plus, by increasing player limits, adding more configurations and spectator functions etc.
Speaking of sequential, Many PVZ shooter fans including myself have been looking forward to a new authentic GW sequential after the final update of BFN. Personal speaking, many good designs from GW and GW2 are missing in BFN, and some bad designs were kept in BFN. I may need to write another essay-long post to talk about it if it is happening. I went to EA Vancouver last November just because it was the birthplace of PVZ shooters during my stay in Vancouver waiting for my flight back to China. I could not enter the building of course, because I was not invited.
I sincerely hope that the current issues regarding PC GWs can be solved and I appreciate your time for reading through this long post.
