Battlefield 1's anti-cheat system is reportedly banning legit players

A couple of supposedly legit players have spoken out against Battlefield 1's anti-cheating system for banning them.

Following a massive Reddit post from Battlefield 1 player kl-Spazmo, in which he explained how the game's FairFight anti-cheat system banned him for being too good, others have come out to share similar experiences.

Battlefield 1 is not the first game to use FairFight, and if you've been playing the series on PC you'll know how good the tech has been at eliminating cheaters, at least compared to earlier games that relied on Punkbuster. Unfortunately, it seems false positives are beginning to crop up.

In the case of kl-Spazmo, a veteran of the series, who, in his own words, put over 2800 collective hours into FairFight-enabled Battlefield games, he first received a week's suspension from the game in December. "For me this temporary ban was reason enough to record everything that would happen after the suspension was lifted. And that's what I did," he said.

After the previous ban was lifted, kl-Spazmo was banned again in January, this time permanently. After contacting EA support and getting nowhere, he decided to reach out to DICE developers directly on Twitter. Producer Ali Hassoon promised to look into it.

At this point, it's worth nothing that although kl-Spazmo may be a cheater, the issue here is that FairFight has reportedly banned him based on his stats, not effectively detecting a third-party cheating software as is often the case. This is part of FairFight's model, but as he points out, other players such as Minidoracat have also fallen victim to the anti-cheat detector.

Kl-Spazmo says he has gameplay and webcam footage of the time he got banned. After some back and forth with DICE, he was unbanned following further review of his case. Though the initial video has been made private, he did promise to upload more with better quality to his YouTube channel.

Since then, other players have also shared their experience of getting caught doing nothing, but receiving a ban anyway. Minidoracat, the player mentioned above, has also began uploading similar videos.

In a lot of these cases, the players in question have a history of playing the Battlefield games competitively, and, such as in the case of Minidoracat, he was among the top players on Battlefield 1's leaderboard. Hopefully the recent scrutiny will result in less false positives in the future.