EA finally admits broken system unfairly banned Battlefield 1 players, urges banned players to do this


The problem with Fairfight in Battlefield 1 is that it hasn’t been very fair to people who aren’t cheating, and EA is finally owning up to that.

People were getting banned for false-positives, that were automatically triggering Fairfight to ban people on the spot. Once you’re wearing that banned-hat, good luck trying to get unbanned. Everyone says they’re innocent, but the players who were innocent and didn’t cheat at all were getting lumped in with the actual cheaters.

It turns out that this was happening due to a perfectly legal and legitimate 3rd party application that was tripping some kind of sensor in Fairfight, but EA says it has been fixed now.

It’s like a fishing net that also catches dolphins. So for all you dolphins who were unfairly banned, EA wants you to head over to http://help.ea.com to get your account back.

They posted a message on their forum about this, but if you were unfairly banned and don’t happen to see this forum post, you won’t be able to get your account back – by the sounds of it, it’s up to you to appeal your ban, even if it was clearly caused in error as EA admits. It doesn’t sound like they’re going to automatically lift all of the bans that were false-positives. So for anyone who got banned and just moved on and doesn’t look at the Battlefield 1 forums every day, tough luck.

“Hello Battlefield players,
We’ve recently addressed an issue where players have been wrongfully banned from Battlefield 1. The cause was a single legitimate third party application tampering with the Battlefield 1 process, triggering a game/internal check against the player which in turn was reported to FairFight for automatic banning. Disabling the specific policy in our anti-cheat software has corrected the issue and we have lifted the ban on the affected players.

We approach anti-cheat systems cautiously. We take every step needed to suspend those who violate our Terms of Service, but also mitigate instances where an innocent player may be banned.

If you feel that you have been wrongfully suspended by our anti-cheat systems, please reach out to us at http://help.ea.com .”

It’s worth noting that comments are closed on this post. So, if someone was banned months ago, they’ve got to just hope they happen to see this thread in order to get their privileges of playing a game they paid money for back again.