Battlefield 6's Javelin Anti-Cheat prompted players to delete Valorant to play the game
Some PC gamers who tried to play Battlefield 6’s Open Beta between August 9 and 10 encountered an unexpected issue with the game’s anti-cheat, Javelin. The anti-cheat is clashing with Valorant’s Vanguard anti-cheat software, preventing players from opening the game, and prompting users to uninstall Valorant to play Battlefield 6 without any issues.
Several reports of this issue have surfaced on the r/Battlefield subreddit and social media, where players shared screenshots of a “Security Violation” pop-up stating that Battlefield 6 failed to launch due to “general software incompatibility” with Valorant, prompting users to “uninstall the conflicting software, or adjust its settings.”
This issue has prevented many Valorant players from accessing the Open Beta, as both games use kernel-level anti-cheat, which causes conflicts over Secure Boot, which is also a prerequisite for both titles.
For the open beta, playing the game on PC requires players to enable Secure Boot via the system’s BIOS. EA did provide basic instructions on how to enable Secure Boot. Despite this, many mainstream users felt overwhelmed by navigating to a section of their PC that they normally do not access.
While some players report the game isn’t booting for them, EA has reported that its Javelin anti-cheat has prevented over 330,000 cheaters from playing the game during the beta, while players submitted 44,000 reports of cheating instances. Still, this hasn’t prevented determined cheaters from infiltrating Battlefield 6’s open beta.
Numerous websites have detailed cheats allowing players to obtain all sorts of abilities, including aimbots, wall hacks, faster movement, enemy health and weapon information, control over bullet recoil, and spread. Furthermore, these aimbots implement options to trick players or the game into believing that a human is playing, i.e., making the aimbot lock on to enemies in a more ‘natural’ way.
EA clarified that Secure Boot isn’t the “silver bullet” to eradicate cheaters. Rather, it’s just “another barrier that helps us make it harder for cheat developers to create cheat programs, and makes it easier for us to detect them when they do.”
Riot Games’ head of anti-cheat, Phillip Koskinas, shared that Vanguard is compatible with Javelin, and a clean uninstall isn’t necessary. Battlefield 6 blocks simultaneous instances of Valorant and Vanguard running in the background, as Javelin and Vanguard anti-cheats compete to protect the same memory regions when in operation.
This could potentially lead to some PC players opting to purchase console versions of Battlefield 6 post-beta to avoid these PC-specific hurdles, even as many others find the practice of using kernel-level anti-cheats intrusive in general. With the second phase of Battlefield 6’s open beta planned between August 14 and 17, EA is investigating the issue and will possibly have a fix that prevents the same issue from recurring.
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