Electronic Arts says its new Battlefield 6 anti-cheat is working. According to the publisher, Javelin — a custom, kernel-level system developed just for PC that guards against cheating within live matches — has reportedly had a significant impact in reducing cheating on the platform, with DICE referencing that a Match Infection Rate was at 2%, meaning there is no detected cheating in 98% of tracked PC matches.
What EA Says Is Working in Battlefield 6 Anti-Cheat
“We use the simple yardstick Match Infection Rate (MIR): the fraction of games where we detect at least one cheating event in the set of multiplayer matches played,” wrote DICE. By forcing MIR to 2%, EA contends that the overwhelming majority of games maintain competitive integrity, which is no small feat for a high-population shooter where even low percentages add up to thousands skewing active lobbies.
While 2 percent is not zero, the figure is materially superior to the anecdotal chaos common in early months of a hit shooter’s life span. The studio says the improvement comes from combining Javelin’s low-level monitoring with server-side enforcement that will pull offenders out of a game soon after they begin cheating while escalating penalties for repeated offenses.
Methods: Kernel-Level Approach and Its Trade-offs
Javelin works at the kernel level, the same layer of an operating system that many cheat loaders focus on today. Having a driver run in “ring 0” allows anti-cheat tools to detect and block meddling even before it’s passed on to the game, but access like that fuels valid concerns from players about privacy, security, and attack surface.
EA is not alone in going this way. (Notably, both Riot Games’ Vanguard for Valorant and Activision’s Ricochet for Call of Duty are based on kernel components.) Their sojourn explains why publishers would go to this extreme: because when cheats get down and dirty with memory and system calls underneath user-mode defenses, only a driver is going to be an effective counter. Industry best practices also now include signed drivers, tight scope limits, telemetry visibility, and regular third-party reviews to reduce exposure for players.
But the calculus is simple: large-scale competitive games are much more heavily damaged by a single bad actor per lobby. The reason is simple: if there’s a kernel solution that will keep lobbies clean and won’t crash your game, introduce performance dips, or false-positive you, communities have the tendency to accept it — quickly revolting if one doesn’t.
Why Battlefield’s Strong Start on PC Anti-Cheat Matters
Battlefield 6 is centered around epic, large-ticket battles with crossplay and big player counts. One obvious aimbot or ESP across the 64v64 is able to hijack the experience of an entire match. The scale of that makes any protection gains massive: going from, say, 6% to 2% MIR equals far less contaminated lobbies across millions of matches a day.
Recent player reports on social channels and community hubs have seen fewer suspicious-looking killcams, but more visible notice of enforcement actions.
That’s in line with what we’ve seen deployed elsewhere: timely removals, feedback messages that confirm action taken, and intermittent ban waves to discourage cheat developers from iterating in real time.
Where Javelin Fits the Overall Anti-Cheat Landscape
The shooter space is becoming a defense-in-depth model. もちろん、パブリッシャーはクライアント側のドライバ（低レベルな操作を観察）、サーバーサイドアナリティクス（統計的な異常を検出）、チートセールスに法的措置と様々に混ぜています。 Bungie’s recent legal victories against some of the most popular cheat distributors, Valve’s ongoing (albeit largely ineffective) VACNet updates, and third-party tools like BattlEye and Easy Anti-Cheat all represent the same arms race: make cheating more costly, more fragile to removal in mass sweeps, and more punitive.
EA building and branding its own stack is more of a commitment than off-the-shelf, but also the company reflecting that it can do this. This gives us a more precise tuning knob to the Battlefield netcode and telemetry, as well as being able to have quicker responses for edge cases and having a public-facing number in MIR that players can follow over time.
Metrics That Will Matter Next for Ongoing Player Trust
Low MIR is a sensational headline, but sustained trust really rests on three things: stability, fairness, and transparency. Players will keep a wary eye for driver-related crashes or frame-rate hits, monitor the rate of false-positive reports and appeals turnaround, and anticipate regular data shares — even ones at a high level — to see if MIR stays low as cheat makers make changes.
EA’s early readout is the game has dodged the cheat spirals that kneecap many a live shooter. If Javelin successfully keeps MIR near 2% with whatever collateral damage is minimal, then the kernel-first approach will have proven itself. If not, players will find out quickly. In that genre, anti-cheat isn’t a sales-based launch feature — it’s a living system that wins or loses trust with each game played.
