The Easy Anti-Cheat Debacle

The story begins vaguely around October 2022 (hey, I don't keep track of time like that) when I started thinking of buying a new GPU. With the price crisis and everything else, the purchase was made in February 2023. Around the same timeframe, Gears 5 went on sale on Steam. Bought, installed, benchmarked Gears 5, gushed all over it.

Then set it aside till July 2023 because of waiting for Gears 4. I am a stickler for proper sequencing in sequels.

Gears 4 is not available on Steam and it finally went on sale on the Microsoft Store (Game Pass is uneconomical if you only want to play two games available there). Bought Gears 4, installed, played, gushed all over it.

A few things happened. The only one I was aware of is that the Steam Client got updated. Nothing to do with the games itself. The other thing I became aware of only after reinstalling Gears 5 was something called Easy Anti Cheat. This was not there in February 2023 (at least I remember no such splash screen).

That is when the debacle proper began. Gears 5 would not start because EAC was, uh, incompatible or something. Still don't know what the actual problem is.

The Hunt For A Solution On The Internet followed as is to be expected. A lot of posts with people facing the same issue. A lot of posts repeating the same three odd solutions. Nothing worked.

Off to official support website and The Great E-mail Exchange over four plus days with Xbox support. Try this, try that, blah, blah, nothing worked.

Finally got informed that this is not a game issue but an operating system issue. Redirect to Microsoft Support. Online chat. Remote control of PC by tech support. A few hours and zero solutions later downloaded an ISO of the latest Windows 11 install with instruction to update my copy of Windows.

All this because EAC refuses to start on Windows 11.

And now a word about EAC. A search results in this: "Easy™ Anti-Cheat is the industry-leading anti-cheat service, countering hacking and cheating in multiplayer PC games through the use of hybrid anti-cheat ..."

And now the gripe. I don't play multiplayer games and have never understood the appeal of multiplayer games.

Here is an idea. When you launch a game, ask the gamer if they want the offline single player campaign or multiplayer, then pass the gamer through that door. Disable multiplayer protocols for single player campaign. All this anti-cheat bull, let the multiplayer community deal with it. If there are gamers who cannot participate in multiplayer without cheating that should not mean single player offline campaign gamers should suffer the consequences.

It is a good thing that I am writing this almost seven weeks after it all happened because at the time I was so furious with the EAC implementation that anything I wrote would have broken down into incoherency amidst the barrage of a jillion F bombs.

Isolate offline single player campaigns from EAC (or whatever replaces it in the future). Prevent heartburn, hypertension, febrile illness, tremors, excessive sweating and other medical and psychiatric problems for a better single player future.

There was another reason that fueled the rage.

There are a bunch of years in my past that were spent as a programmer. Really in the past. Around dBase III and Clipper time. One thing every programmer learns to know as a personal friend to get programs to behave is the if-then-else-end in whatever form it may exist in any language used.

The EAC implementation is just lazy programming. Just ask one simple question and go from there. What is it with the global enforcement regardless of gamer situation?

Update 30 March 2024: So last week I formatted C:\ and reinstalled Windows 11. All fresh, not from the cleaners but from the manufacturer. A week later the happy thought occurred to try again. It worked! So I guess there was some other app that was interfering with EAC. Odd thing though, I installed the same apps again and nothing interfered this time. Hmm.