Complaint Review: Bohemia Interactive - Prague

On 04. september 2023, after having been playing DayZ for over 3000 hours online Bohemia Interactive's (BI) anti-cheat software Battleye (BE) (managed and developed by another company) sent me message saying I was globally banned from the game. The message stated clearly that I am banned by Battleye on behalf of the game developer. 

Some may think that I along with thousands of others should complain over Battleye but BE is essentially just a tool used by BI. BI is the body who decides the margins of bans and should have all the power to investigate false ban claims and lift bans as they wish. But they don't care and won't even look into the issues. BI sold me the game based on a promise that its playable online. Apparently its not anymore and not for my fault.

After getting banned I contacted BE and filed the appeal of false ban. Nothing happened. I got no answer whatsoever. Then I contacted BI and recieved an automated "copy/paste" response stating that if BE hasn't lifted the ban within 72 hours the ban was valid. I wrote an answer, explaining the situation in more depth but they never responded to it. I doubt someone ever even read it further than the title before sending the copy/paste response.

I have never in my life used any sort of cheating in any online game. Yes, I have used cheat codes many years ago in offline single player games like Skyrim, Doom, Wolfenstein etc because I got stuck somewhere or whatever. Let's make clear that using codes offline is not cheating but making game more easily playable. Its acceptable and sometimes even inevitable due to glitches and bugs. Cheating in online games, on the other hand, is just despicable because it ruins it for everyone else.

I myself am not a competitive player. I'm 47 years old and like to play quietly. I just suck in player-versus-player combat. This is why I always chose very low-pop servers. In combat situations I usually died. This pattern of mine would be easily provable by game logs and everyone would agree that this profile doesn't mach with a cheater. Everyone is free to watch my gameplay videos and decide if it looks like cheating or not: https://www.youtube.com/@rauljaanson2423/videos

Understandably, online cheating is a very serious and frustrating problem which has to be dealed harshly but the current situation seems to be that anti-cheats have lost the battle and are just swinging blindly, throwing bans every direction where they notice even the slightest anomaly. This has lead us to the point where people can get banned for ridiculous things. For instance: mouse macros, screen overlays (although BE states on it's website that this wont get anyone banned), Kaspersky antivirus, any macro you may have running on the background due to your work or whatever, edgy or jumpy internet connection, high ping and EVEN RGB LIGHTS CONTROLLER SOFTWARE!!!

This is just ridiculous! In such situation which the developer is very well aware of they should specifically pay more attention to false ban complains and consider that their anti-cheat software is notoriously flawed. But they don't. They don't care. 

I personally would've been very satisfied if they only had discussed my case, whatever the outcome would've been. I just wanted to feel that they care of their customers. But they completely ignored me. This is why, after several months of researching and mourning, I decided to file an official complaint against them.