Got greeted with this message today. I’ve been playing Apex on linux for more than a year. Not sure if this could be related? Is this just me?
I’ve contested the ban and I’m currently waiting for a response from ea support.
UPDATE : Got an email response from EA today. It’s basically a generic message saying that my account was associated with “cheating practices” and so they will not remove the ban.
This is absolutely fucking ridiculous! I’ve been playing this game since 2020 and have 3K+ hours on record, now this shit happens and there’s no recourse ? Fuck this company.
They don’t. I’ve been playing Apex on Linux for years now. Apex is doing ban waves for cheaters. OP likely did something that looked like or was cheating.
What he did was play on linux. You can have kernel level support for anti cheat on Linux so they look at that and see it as “suspicious” then ban.
Apex does not use kernel level anti cheat. It just uses normal easy anti cheat.
Are you aware that EAC is indeed a kernel level anticheat? Apex 100% does not use a user space anticheat, it is kernel level.
My response is getting downvoted. Even downvotes won’t give EAC kernel access on my computer 😂
I can’t tell you why, you are entirely correct. The EAC runtime used in Linux doesn’t have any kernel access, I misunderstood the context of the conversation when I made my first comment.
From two years ago, for time context, regarding EAC in Linux:
No. It has zero kernel access, and that’s not even possible.
EAC has (and has had for years) a native Linux client. That native Linux client is userspace only and has zero kernel access. Before, it was only for native Linux games that had EAC, like War Thunder, 7 Days to Die, Rust (before they abandoned Linux), etc. Epic refused to allow the Linux native EAC to work with Windows EAC games through Wine/Proton. That changed last fall, when Epic made the announcement.
Now, EAC games that work in Wine/Proton use the LINUX NATIVE EAC client, which communicates with a Linux EAC binary that each game that enables support ships, alongside their Windows EAC binary. The Steam Proton EasyAntiCheat Runtime is also required. This runtime allows the NATIVE Linux EAC client (which again, is 100% userspace only and has no kernel level access) to communicate with the Windows userspace EAC binary, to allow for a less-secure but still better than nothing EAC functionality for Windows games running in Wine/Proton.
The exact same situation is true for BattlEye. BattlEye has had a native Linux client for years, but it was userspace only, and didn’t work with Wine/Proton games. Now it does, in the same way EAC does.
This is also why so many games are refusing to enable it. Because it’s inherently less secure against cheaters than the kernel-level EAC/BattlEye Windows implementation. Just read 343’s Destiny 2 comments from the past week and you’ll see that exact reasoning. And I (and others) said from the beginning when it was announced last fall that many games would in fact refuse to enable EAC/BE support because of the less secure nature and increased risk of cheaters. And I was right.
Like I said in my previous comment. I also play on Linux and have been for years since season 12. I have not been banned. I also know people who have been banned on Windows who supposedly didn’t cheat. Maybe they did something toxic in game. We can’t really know what actually happened.