The Battlefield 6 open beta is over, and encouraging whispers of its oo-rahhable player count – peaking at over 500,000 on PC alone, so sayeth SteamDB – have been tempered with widespread reports of invading cheaters. That’s despite BF6’s new and unusual requirement to enable Secure Boot, a BIOS-level security feature in Windows, ostensibly to prevent such do-badding.
In response, a forum post attributed to EA’s anti-cheat team has played up successes in tracking and catching the beta’s cheaters, whose crimes allegedly range from classic wallhacks, speed hacks, and aimbots to cheats that reduce recoil or display enemy health and weapon info. However, it also concedes that Secure Boot “is not, and was not intended to be a silver bullet” – and in doing so, highlights the immense, perhaps impossible task that developers have of keeping cheater users out of their games.
I don’t mean to suggest that cheat makers are a breed of impressive technogeniuses. They trade in malevolence for profit, making them almost as big a bunch of loser babies as their customers. But they are persistent, and prideful, so attempts by publishers and developers to big up their latest anti-cheat as being particularly difficult to crack is often seen as a challenge as much as a deterrent. Vanguard, the AC system Riot Games use for their tactical FPS Valorant, holds a kind of grudgingly respected reputation among players for its relative efficacy, yet cheaters still show up now and then to spoil its shootouts.
It’s true that EA, or BF6 developers DICE, never claimed that requiring Secure Boot would keep hackers out for good. The feature is also just one component of the game’s wider AC protection, named Javelin, which that forum post boasts of having stopped 330,000 cheating and tampering attempts like they were .22 rounds pinging off a tank’s backside. That’s about three successful interventions for every five players, which suggests two things: one, Battlefield 6 faces an absolutely enormous number of malicious actors, and two, if you played the open beta at the weekend, there’s a very good chance that at least one of your games was saved from a cheating attempt.
Some of those numbers were undoubtedly passed around BF6 headquarters as evidence of Javelin’s great success. Except it was also beaten, in a matter of hours, and by a fairly wide variety of different cheats. And anti-cheat systems are a lot like Premier League goalkeepers: you can keep out attempt after attempt, but let just one through and people will think you’re rubbish.
I’d argue, then, that the biggest challenge facing multiplayer developers isn’t the pursuit of creating a truly hacker-free game. That, based on current evidence, looks close to impossible. Instead, it’s expectation management: what’s a publicly acceptable proportion of hackers to breach the system, and maybe more importantly, how much can you ask of rule-abiding players before they start getting genuinely pissed off by your AC requirements? What’s a palatable Blackstone’s ratio of inconvenienced innocents versus catchable perps?
So far, there haven’t been any recorded instances of EA – or Riot, whose Vanguard system also goes rooting around in the deepest depths of your PC – using kernel-access anti-cheat for anything untoward. But having to manually enable Secure Boot, especially if you’re not a frequent BIOS spelunker, is enough of a faff that for someone, somewhere, it’s going to chip away at goodwill. There have been recorded instances of user-end problems after the fact, too. The most ironic of which being that Battlefield 6’s anti-cheat can actually clash with Valorant’s, like two hench bouncers trying to fit through the same doorframe. Last year, a more extreme case of ‘acceptable loss’ calculations saw Steam Deck players booted permanently out of Apex Legends, on the grounds that the handheld’s Linux-based OS was making it too hard to keep cheaters away.
For now, developers seem to be weighing security more heavily than convenience. Respawn would later, with barely concealed pride, wheel out an “infection rate” graph as evidence that dropping Linux support was a worthy sacrifice. And as for Battlefield 6… well, their beta just got half a million concurrents. For all the grumbling about Secure Boot, it sure does look like players are happy to go along with it.
Provided, anyway, that it’s in service of an anti-cheat system that broadly works – or at least one that enough people perceive to work. Secure Boot might not be a particularly strong turn-off, but the one thing that gets players quitting faster than being lasered by some prick with X-ray vision is the belief, justified or otherwise, that he or his ilk will show up in the next game too. Battlefield 6 can’t stop every single cheater. But it’ll need to keep quiet the ones that do.
