Steam Deck Players Watch Out! Linux Apex Legends Players Suddenly Receiving Ban Emails Up To 48 Hours After.

Update: So far there only seems to be one confirmed case of a Steam Deck user getting banned. The notable thing about the comment is stating the default Proton version and no launch commands were used. Custom launch commands or unofficial version of Proton could be a cause but the formerly mention case seems to go against that. Again, for right now I recommend avoiding playing this game on Deck until we know more.

Update 2: In that same Apex Legends support forum, at 5:12am EST Community Manager EA_David says the following:

Thank you for the posts. I have passed this on, but I don't have any more detail for now.

We will of course share what we have when we do get an update, and we may reach out to some individuals for specific info/logs and such.

Update 3: Cited first two users on both the Apex Legends forums and GitHub issue tracker. Those have been added to the original article.

Update 4: Users continue to get frustrated by EA's lack of communication other than emails standing by their ban decisions. Reddit user u/OGNathan wrote an extensive post about their personal ban experience to help bring more visibility to the issue.

Update 5: It looks like some players in the original Apex Legends forum thread are reporting they are now unbanned. EA/Respawn have not issued a statement at the time of writing.

Today it seems like a number of users are reporting in the Proton GitHib that they have been banned for some unknown reason. This doesn't seem isolated to just Proton-GE but the official Proton releases as well. Players are still trying to nail down a root cause for the ban as EA and Valve have not issued a fix nor a statement as of yet. This problem was initially reported on the Apex Legends forums on last Sunday by piewhat and on the following Monday on the Proton GitHub Apex Legends issue tracker by RMED24.

This is unfortunate for the players affected but also becuase Apex Legends was one of the first major multiplayer games to open up their anti-cheat to Linux users when the Steam Deck launched.

Some users are reporting receiving ban emails up to 48 hours after playing the game so you might want to hold off playing for a bit. I suspect the bans will be reversed once the error is fixed, but it highlights the one of downsides of Proton being a translation layer. Every so often games that were running great can receive an update that suddenly makes the game no longer work under Proton.

Realistically this sort of thing isn't very common, but third party launchers and Anti-Cheat are typically the root cause of compatibility issues. We're luckily seeing more multiplayer games open up their anti-cheat to Linux users. I think in the near future we'll see fewer issues with anti-cheat inhibiting Linux users from enjoying their games.

Third party launchers, however, will continue to be the bane of PC gamers regardless of your OS of choice being Linux or Windows.

If you did suffer a ban in Apex Legends you can wait it out playing some of the games currently on sale.

So did you get banned from Apex Legends? What multiplayer game are you waiting to get Linux compatibility? How many of you said, "Destiny 2"? Let us know in the comments below!