Battlefield 2042 Bans Have People Furious

To say the absolute least, the launch of "Battlefield 2042" has been an absolute disaster. Despite positive reviews pre-launch, EA's latest entry into the legendary "Battlefield" series is riddled with bots and bugs. Mostly maligned by longtime fans, "Battlefield 2042" currently has a rather embarrassing 2.3 user score on Metacritic for its PC release. Common criticisms have been aimed at the games poor maps, glitches, an overabundance of vehicles, and the transition from class loadouts to specialists. The game is so broken, even cheaters have started to abandon it in droves. 

Since its release, "Battlefield 2042" has seen its player base on Steam shrink from over 100,000 to just over 5,000 concurrent players as of late January (via SteamCharts). To make matters even worse, it seems that EA's customer service hasn't been doing much to restore the faith. Of the few players that have decided to stick with "Battlefield 2042," many of them have faced bans for mysterious or otherwise illogical reasons. And the fact that their complaints are not being heard is making them even more furious.

Similar to how "Call of Duty: Vanguard" has been dealing with cheaters, "Battlefield 2042" has incorporated anti-cheat software to detect players who are either using third-party software to bolster their performance or are otherwise violating the game's terms of service. And if player feedback is anything to go by, many of the bans players have received have been of the false-positive variety. 

In a lengthy Twitter thread, video game journalist Tom Henderson reported that many players in EA's Answers HQ forum have complained of being wrongfully banned from the game's services. According to Henderson, 90% of the users who had received a ban claimed that the game's anti-cheat software was falsely flagging RGB software such as Logitech G Hub or iCUE as cheating programs. Others complained about EA banning players who were partaking in XP bot farms. While this practice technically violates the terms of service, many have argued that this is simply a "feature" of the game at this point.

EA's response to these complaints has also made players furious. "EA's support appears to be useless, with the appeal replies consisting of copy and paste emails," Henderson said in his report. "In some cases, players were being banned [whilst] streaming/recording and showing no signs of ToS violations[.]" Instead of taking user-specific actions on these issues, it seems that EA's support team has decided to simply close its false-positive thread due to being "unable to assist with support questions specific to banned accounts." Now, not only are these players angry — they also feel abandoned.