Battlefield Studios updates players on the success of Battlefield 6's anticheat EA Javelin every so often, with its last report revealing that over 580,000 attempts at cheating were stopped. But some players have queried how the devs would know what percentage of cheaters have been foiled when the most successful perpetrators can't be found.
It's a valid question, and one I've asked myself before. But it turns out that Battlefield 6's anticheat does know when someone's cheating, even if it's just an inkling. "We saw ongoing discussion on how match infection rate (MIR) could be effectively calculated when cheaters and cheat developers aim to avoid detection," an official blog post says. "MIR includes both confirmed cheaters—all of which are banned—and those we suspect based on the full set of detections and signals that are constantly growing and updating."
The gist of it is that MIR includes even suspected cheaters, "we then calculate all the confirmed and suspected infections versus the total number of matches to determine the MIR". This also explains why the MIR went up over the course of January, from 2.28% to 3.09%. As the system gets better at detecting cheaters, especially 'stealth' cheats which purposefully avoid being "high impact" the MIR goes up. There was also "a new ban acceleration method" which was tested on the 18th and then deployed on 26th which would impact MIR.
The MIR system is also meant to be less of a current indicator and more of a tool which devs can use to look back on and reference for the future: "It needs time to mature and stabilise. This is why we are looking at the previous month in these updates."
With that said, Javelin did manage to prevent a further 384,918 attempts to cheat of "tamper with the game before they could impact matches". The anticheat is also tracking 224 cheat-related programs, hardware solutions, vendors, resellers, and associated communities. "Of those, now 212 of them (94.64%) are reporting related feature failures, detection notices, downtime, or fully taking their cheats offline."
It's an impressive success rate. But that's the least it could do considering Javelin is a kernel-level anticheat, which is so aggressive it engaged in a turf war with Valorant's equally hostile anticheat.
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