Blocking Linux / Steam Deck in Apex Legends led to a 'meaningful reduction' in cheaters
Back in October 2024, Respawn announced they were blocking Apex Legends on Linux platforms (including Steam Deck). Apparently this has worked quite well for them.
The chart they showed already had there cheating metric on the decline and what followed wasn't exactly deviating much from original slope.
Seems like a very bad analysis of the data to me.
Does this mean Linux users / players are cheaters or cheat more than players on other platforms? Well, no. The issue is mainly that cheat makers like to run their exploits on Linux whenever they can, so blocking Linux as a platform is the easiest and bluntest tool game developers have to combat the problem.
Either way, just really confirms that they're not exactly great developers and I'm fine without playing this game and playing anything from EA honestly.
Are they seriously suggesting that 33% of cheating is coming from the 2% of users that run Linux?
That is an absolute bullshit figure that I refuse to believe.
It might rather be that 33% of cheaters used (or tricked the game to think that they used) linux to bypass the anti cheat because it was an easy solution (i'm not entirely sure of that statement, I never tried to cheat), not that 33% of the cheaters were cheating because they used linux. There is a slight nuance in my opinion, but I don't really know how to explain it well, I did my best.
Unsupporting Linux just seem to have removed a fairly common way to cheat.
That being said, chances are that cheaters will eventually find other solutions, since anti-cheat is a threadmill work.
But still, that sucks, that was a pretty brutal decision.
It's funny how EA is attributing their statistic to something can be strongly disproven. When looking at the given statistic they provided, they don't specify the raw count of cheaters banned, but simply the rate. Even giving the generous assumption that EA's statistics aren't significantly flawed, they show an alleged large drop in cheaters bottoming out in the week of Nov. 4, 2024, before starting to rise up again. Does something else coincide with the rate of cheaters dropping in the week of Nov. 4? There is in fact something that does. Season 23 was released the fifth with a large spike of players being brought into the game. Without a more comprehensive statistic graph over several months, it looks like EA is trying to just capitalize on the fact that a large influx of players joining the game will drop the rates of cheaters momentarily, and then passing it off as evidence that Linux cheating was rampant. Quite disingenuous.
What are they getting out of it?
Without getting into more outright malicious possibilities as I don't use Windows and cannot inspect how the application behaves on the platform, you could have things as simple like:
Sounds like a scapegoat. Am I to believe that cheaters would install Linux, just use a cheat in a game?
If they can detect cheaters, couldn’t they also detect if the cheater is using Linux? Where’s the stats?
Am I to believe that cheaters would install Linux, just use a cheat in a game?
You seem to severely underestimate the extreme lengths cheaters will go to in order to cheat. Not only are modern cheats very expensive (like 20+ dollars per WEEK subscriptions), but the ones that are the hardest to detect require a second PC connected to the main PC using a direct memory access module so that the cheat can read the game's memory in a way that is impossible to notice for the Anti-Cheat running on the game PC. On top of that they spend time and money on stolen/farmed accounts, spoofing hardware and phone numbers, and buying entirely new PCs when they get detected and banned.
Installing Linux is a tiny obstacle compared to all the other shit these losers are willing to go through in order to cheat.
They tweeted this graph in early December:
[…] In this chart, we're displaying the infection rate, or the rate of matches that had a cheater present. […]
Note how the graph is missing labels and how neither it nor the tweet include information on how these metrics were gathered.
That chart doesn't even show correlation. Cheating was having a downward trend then. Continued the downward trend after banning Linux users. What?!?
I wonder how the graph looks compared to school semesters stopping and starting. I bet it’s similar
(Replying to myself) Even if these numbers are legit, we don’t know the process or exact metrics used.
This data may include falsely banned players on Linux (which was reported before they restricted Linux) and may exclude many cheaters on Windows (any of those who weren’t caught). We don’t know.
A couple of months ago, they blocked Linux. But the cheaters were already on the decline, so obviously these two facts are unrelated lmfao
since then, things also led to a meaningful reduction in players. I've been following a few larger/medium sized Apex streamers, and now all I can see them play is Marvel Legends.
I do miss playing it, though, despite being absolutely horrible at the game.
It was pretty fun when it first came out, i had a blast with a max tier sniper in like, my third round of it.
I'm willing to bet that the average Apex player is not a big enough nerd to even install Mint, the friendliest of distros, to cheat in the game. Linux accounts for what, ~2.5% of Steam users total? Come on.
