Update: The cheater I encountered appears to have been met with swift justice. Redditor detuscan shared this screengrab on Friday, the same day as this story:
Battlefield 1 is playable now for Origin Access subscribers, a week before its full release on October 21. Imagine my surprise, then, when I was greeted in my first match by a wallhacking aimbotter who went 65-0.
It happened to me on the Amiens map in Rush mode, the shorter, attack-and-defend format. Moments into the match, I got killed around a corner that seemed impossible. I was glad to shrug it off—it was my first time on the map, I had my back to the guy, hell, maybe it was a lag spike I hadn't noticed. By the third or fourth time I had my face blown off through an impenetrable wall, I'd decided that my new objective was to test how effective this person's cheats were.
It's hard to estimate the extent of hacking going on in this early-access slice of BF1. The BF1 subreddit, for its part, shows very little discussion about the topic happening right now—just one other anecdotal complaint with very little support.
Players were dealing with hackers during the early September open beta period, which ran for about a week. "Fair Fight and Punkbuster are not cutting the mustard clearly. I just got out of a game where a hacker was headshotting everything in sight, it was plain as day," one beta player wrote on September 1. "Threats of recording it, reporting it etc didn't change anything. 42-0, 60-0 and no reply from the hacker. Next round he was back." From what it sounds like, this guy experienced the same thing a month ago that I did last night.
Incredibly, one of those unscrupulous hacking services posted a video advertising the use of one of their shady utilities on August 30, a day before BF1's open beta began. EA says that 13.2 million players jumped in during that time, and although it's unknown how many of those were on PC, the fact that there was seemingly modest discussion of beta hackers suggests that the problem isn't endemic at this point.
It's frustrating that I couldn't find a way to report the cheater I encountered (perhaps a post on the world's biggest PC gaming website will do). But apart from this run-in, I'm enjoying the heck out of BF1. Hopefully EA and DICE will be able to drop a war blimp of justice on these ne'er-do-wells before launch next week.
