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:
- EA didn’t see Linux users as profitable enough to support long-term
- EA/Respawn wanted an attempt to garner good will from the community by dropping support for a minority platform
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.
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.
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.
