EA Keeps Banning Battlefield V Linux Players

You shouldn't buy games from Electronic Arts (EA) with the hopes of using Wine to run them on a GNU/Linux desktop. Their FairFight "anti-cheat" system will wrongly see you as a cheater and ban you. Appealing is futile, EA stands by their automated system's decisions.

written by 윤채경 (Yoon Chae-kyung)  2020-01-14 - last edited 2020-01-04. © CC BY

One GNU/Linux user who paid EA good money for Battlefield V reports that:

"Good friends, finally after some time without being able to play Battlefield V on Linux, this week I was using lutris-4.21, I was having fun when my anti-cheat, FairFight, blew me out of the game, so I was banned. As I was not using any cheating, I think the anti-cheat considered dxvk or the table layer that used at the time as cheating, I sent an email to EA, is the alert."

Marcio3AA on the Battlefield V forums

EAs response to GNU/Linux users who use Lutris to launch Battlefield V using Wine and the DXVK DirectX to Vulkan translation layer is always the same general boiler-plate:

"Hello,

Thank you for contacting us regarding the action that was taken on your account.

The action pertains to the following violation:

Promote, encourage or take part in any activity involving hacking, cracking, phishing, taking advantage of exploits or cheats and/or distribution of counterfeit software and/or virtual currency/items

After thoroughly investigating your account and concern, we found that your account was actioned correctly and will not remove this sanction from your account.

Thank you, EA Terms of Service"

EAs response to numerous GNU/Linux users who got banned for not using Windows to play the game they paid for

It is interesting to note that the boiler-plate responses from Electronic Arts Inc are signed with "EA Terms of Service" as if that's some person working there.

Electronic Arts, who was named "Worst Company in America" by the Consumerist in 2012 and 2013, has a history of being very hostile towards free software users. Their "Origin" games store is not available for GNU/Linux and none of EAs games have native GNU/Linux support. This differs from their competitor Valve who does offer a native version of their Steam game store and launcher as well as numerous GNU/Linux-native titles. Valves games are not free software, it is, after all, an inherently evil for-profit corporation. Valve does contribute to and fund numerous free software projects and they do have a very positive attitude towards free software in general. It is not hard to see which of these companies free software users who want to buy and play commercial games should support.

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Anonymous (04a0e0f6)

24 months ago

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Look, please stop spreading this nonsense. ONE person claims to have been banned for doing nothing wrong, and only using Wine/DXVK to play the game on Linux. This has happened before and people were found to actually be cheating. Either way, ONE person claims this. ONE. Battlefield V is one of the most popular games to play on Wine, there are hundreds/thousands of Linux gamers playing Battlefield V, and one person MAY have been mistakenly banned. Yet there have been a dozen articles like this, and youtube videos, and reddit threads saying that ALL Linux users are being banned UNEQUIVOCALLY, and that's just false. I've played Battlefield V multiplayer on 4 separate occasions since this one person claimed they were banned, on both Arch Linux and Manjaro, including just last night, and using DXVK the entire time, and even DXVK with async some of the time. There is no universal ban, and we don't know if anyone other than this one dude has been banned, and we also don't know if they were actually banned for using Wine/DXVK.

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