Games worth discovering

Cheaters Took Over the Official Battlefield 1 Server and Mass Banned Normal Players

2K View2023-02-09

In the early morning of January 25, the fourth day of the Lunar New Year holiday, many Chinese Battlefield 1 players found themselves suddenly kicked off the game and banned from the server, and more surprisingly, the bans came from the official anti-cheat system FairFight.

#RSuhf1 is the code for a temporary ban

Players who did not cheat were angry and puzzled but quickly learned that the bans did not come from EA or the FairFight system but from a cheating group called CRBQ.

CRBQ announced that it was responsible for the attack on the server shortly after it began, claiming it was a long-standing retaliation against Battlefield 1's player-run anti-cheat community. Even more shockingly, CRBQ claims that the glitch they used to take over the server was obtained from said anti-cheat community.

Battlefield 1 stopped updating and supporting services in 2018, two years after the game was published. As an FPS game that’s easy to cheat in, the lack of continued development by DICE made cheating even more rampant.

A cheater with 2119 kills in one round. His ID means, “your mom dies if you don’t cheat”

In order to continue to play Battlefield 1 normally, some players began setting up private servers with control measures and jointly established the Battlefield Easy Anti-Cheat organization (BFEAC).

The app BFEAC developed that can mark cheaters and ban them from all servers that joined BFEAC

With BFEAC's efforts, Battlefield 1 turned into a stalemate. On one side were the official servers, which were ravaged by cheaters, and on the other side were the strictly controlled private servers. Neither the cheaters nor the anti-cheat players could completely overpower the other until one of BFEAC's partners, code name "22", discovered a deadly glitch.

The glitch 22 found allowed significant access to all the official servers; in a video he uploaded, 22 showed himself switching from one team to another and renaming the server.

Theoretically, after gaining control of the official servers, the list of cheaters created by BFEAC could have been applied to the server to ban all the known cheaters. So, while the exploit itself could get the one using it banned, it could also be used to clean up the official servers.

After the exploit was used for the first time to ban a cheater, CRBQ started to fight back as well.

CRBQ started by doxing 22, leaking his personal information and sending him death threats. While at the same time, they began using new accounts to cheat on the BFEAC private servers and to launch cyber attacks.

This definitely helped BFEAC make up its mind. Leading members then began to use the exploit to gain full control of the official servers and ban cheaters. After 107 years, the cruel battle of Verdun was reenacted in this World War I game.

The final vote of whether to take control of the official servers. Over 90% of members agreed

The cheaters' backlash was equally frantic, and they even started indiscriminately attacking servers in regions other than Asia, claiming that private servers that voluntarily quit BFEAC and stopped protecting 22 could avoid being attacked.

Some cheaters even claimed they were using DDOS attacks on both official and private servers

Threats did not move the needle for most players, who kept resisting and fighting against the cheaters.

However, the battle took a sharp turn for the worse with the news that the cheaters had found the same exploit BFEAC used to control the official servers.

A few days later, on January 25, the cheaters started a counteroffensive using the same glitch, banning players not a part of their group.

Losing the war, BFEAC had to retreat to their private servers and focus on defending against the mass attacks by cheaters.

Later that night, EA officials finally discovered the vulnerability being exploited. Although they had stopped updating the game, the community manager still fixed the exploit and restored the attacked servers.

With both sides having lost their deadly weapon, the cheaters retreated back to the official servers and stopped attacking the private servers as well. The war, which lasted for almost a month, ended there.

EA brought a WWI-style ending to "Cyber War 1": a war that was supposed to end all wars - but in the end, nothing ended.

There is no winner in this war, and the game environment of Battlefield 1 has once again returned to the state before the war: the BFEAC is still in effect on many private servers, and the official servers are still in chaos.