US publishing giant Electronic Arts has claimed that 98% of Battlefield 6 matches were free of cheaters.
In a blog post on social media, the company claimed that its Javelin anti-cheat was doing the job as only around 2% of games had bad actors. EA says that its open beta tests for Battlefield 6 were “invaluable” for finetuning how it detects cheating and acts upon it.
During this period, Javelin helped block more than 1.2 million cheating attempts; the company has also booted “tens of thousands” of bad actors, including some who were brazen enough to live-stream their cheating attempts. At the start of the open beta, 93.1% of matches were cheater-free; by the end, this had risen to 98%.
Over the game’s first weekend, EA claims that Javelin prevented over 367,000 cheating attempts; since the shooter’s release, the tech has blocked over 2.39 million. Part of the success in blocking cheaters was due to the requirement for PC users to have Secure Boot enabled on their hardware; the company said that only 1.5% of the game’s audience are unable to activate Secure Boot on their PC.
“We are presently aware of, and have multiple detections for, 190 cheat-related programs, hardware, vendors, and resellers and their communities,” the company wrote.
“Since launch 183 of them (96.3%) have announced feature failures, detection notices, downtime, and/or taken their cheats offline entirely. While there are still clips circulating of cheaters claiming to be undetected, it’s far more likely than not that when you see gameplay of someone claiming to cheat undetected, they are already banned or have a hammer incoming. This successful disruption of the cheater community is encouraging. But, we know that bad actors will keep testing our defenses, trying new ways to break through. We are constantly monitoring these new threats and are ready to respond, but these early results show that our layered defense strategy is delivering the fair experience players deserve.”
Looking forward, EA is going to be exploring additional operating system security features – beyond Secure Boot – as well as cracking down on “cheating hardware” which is no doubt a reference to tech like Cronus Zen and XIM. There are also set to be improvements made to how users can report bad actors and classified improvements to how EA is improving its Javelin tech.
“Cheat developers never stop evolving, and neither will we. Fortunately, fair play is something that we’re passionate about both as developers and gamers so we’ve been preparing for a long time already,” the company wrote.
“That said, you can help us by making sure you report players that you suspect are cheating through our in-game cheat reporting – those reports snap up additional telemetry and highlight accounts for us to zero in on when investigating possible cheats and cheaters, and also help us accurately measure how much cheating is impacting your player experience.”
EA announced its new Javelin anticheat in April, an iteration of the company’s previous anticheat tech.
Battlefield 6 debuted on October 10. Within three days of launch, the shooter had sold over seven million copies, while this year’s Call of Duty had a much softer launch.
