As we come close to wrapping up two months of Battlefield 6 since its release, EA and Battlefield Studios have published a report on the effectiveness of its Javelin Anticheat system through a lengthy post. In the post, the developers discuss measuring cheating through Match Infection Rate (MIR), and have confirmed that 98 percent of all matches in the game were free of cheater impact in the first week of launch.
“You can interpret [MIR] as the chance that you as a player would encounter a cheater in your matches,” explain the developers. “We prefer using this to know whether we are being successful or not as opposed to just volumes of enforcement such bans because even though we’ve been busy blocking, kicking, suspending and banning cheaters, it doesn’t mean much if we haven’t protected your play experience.”
The first weekend of Battlefield 6’s launch also resulted in Javelin Anticheat being able to prevent more than 367,000 attempts at cheating. The developers have noted that this was a considerably lower number of cheating attempts than the game’s open beta, which saw more than 1.2 million of these attempts. The number of blocked attempts since the game’s release has gone even higher, with the developers reporting 2.39 million cheats attempted and blocked so far.
Looking to the future, Battlefield Studios has noted that it plans to keep working on improving its cheat detection and prevention tools. To do so, the developers have been looking into even more operating system security features that can be used in the same vein as Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0, Hypervisor-protected Code Intergrity (HVCI) and Virtualisation-Based Security (VBS). There are also plans of targeting specific hardware typically used for cheating. While this hardware is often also used for the sake of accessibility, Battlefield Studios recommends that players should use official first-party accessibility controllers like Xbox Adaptive Controller of PlayStation’s Access controller.
Along with this, there are also plans for improving reporting flows, which would make it easier to report players that they suspect of cheating for Battlefield Studios to take action, as well as bringing improvements to internal tools that allow for better effectiveness against cheaters and hackers alike. Multiple teams are also noted as working on new anti-cheat features that can be used across the client, the server, “and beyond”.
“Cheat developers never stop evolving, and neither will we,” wrote Battlefield Studios. “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. 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.”
Battlefield 6 is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Battlefield Studios has previously been quite candid about discussing its anti-cheat features and requirements. Check out our review of the shooter while you’re at it.
