Battlefield 5 dev gets banned from Black Ops 4, makes video asking Treyarch to let him back in

Florian Le Bihan is a core gameplay designer at DICE, currently working on Battlefield 5. Despite that affiliation, he's also a big fan of Treyarch's new military shooter, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. Nice, right? It's always great to see competing developers genuinely enjoying each other's work. 

Then this happened. 

It's not clear exactly why he was banned, but the feeling is that he was just too good to not be cheating. "I guess I hit too many heads :(," he tweeted shortly after becoming aware of the ban. But he wasn't cheating at all: You see, Florian Le Bihan, gameplay designer, is also DRUNKKZ3, a former pro player and manager with the Fnatic esports organization.   

He took the ban in good humor, but wanted to keep playing, too. So he put together a video of clips showing off his skills, subtly entitled "TreyarchPLS," and shared it with the studio.

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 Then he waited patiently. Well, he waited.

"My best guess is more based on stats and patterns like HS Ratio, kills per minute, headshot sequences and drastic performance trend changes over time," he theorized in conversation while waiting for the Treyarch team to take mercy on him. "Combine multiple suspicious factors and a few alarms ring until the ban."

He also expressed confidence that the ban couldn't have been triggered by external software: "Saying that because my PC at home is probably the most clean thing ever, i can't stand to have a single program to run at the same time as i play to make sure i get best performance. Worst case i have firefox + TS or Discord running and that's it."

Fortunately, this sad story has a happy ending—and Le Bihan even offered some free advice for a future patch. Well played, sir.