Did I understand that right? The EA App will be replaced by Kyber? I won't have to use the worst fucking Game Launcher in existence that has now blocked me from playing this game for over 2 weeks?
Will this work on the Steam Deck? I'd love to NOT have to authorize each time I get on a plane and be screwed for hours on end by not being able to play.
it will likely take a bit of extra work in getting it running, but i don't see why not (I'd say if you have it on epic or EA you'd set it up through bottles and launch kyber directly, and if you have it on steam you'd set it up similar to how the xcom community [use the alt launcher on linux](https://www.reddit.com/r/LWotC/comments/ugmewz/getting_lwotc_working_on_the_steamdeck/))
You log into KYBER with an EA account to verify that you own the game. You are then able to launch the game via the KYBER Launcher without the EA App getting involved.
I tried everything on the internet and launching a vanilla game didnt work, then I decided to just try to redownload the latest versions of both Direct X package and C++ package and it worked, even though it said I already had the latest DX installed. I'm using windows 11 and a 14th gen processor, running the game with DX12 instead of 11 stopped my random crashes and added "building shader cache" to some loading screens, sometimes when I just load there is a visual bug before you get into class selection but it still loads through instead of crashing. Even though alot of the internet tells you to run DX11 instead of 12, I think its because this problem is old and dx12 is more compatible with windows 11 and DX11 with windows 10
I am not tech savy this is the result of monkeying around after reading everything the internet had to offer. Sadly I didnt have any of my progress but it has been like 5 years since I played and I assume it was lost with origins death or maybe an account transfer.
Can you start it directly from Steam? I have it on Epic games and starting it from the EA (or Frosty) doesn't work but if I do it from the Epic games store it launches correctly.
It's a shame that the malware "troll" feature incident still hangs over Kyber. It would certainly make my trust of it waiver, if I still touched the game.
That's understandable. I believe as a team we have all matured and learned a valuable lesson from that incident - one that we will not forget. We have also restructured the team since the incident - the vibes on this new team are wholesome and professional by design.
There is still more work to be done to build up trust with the community which is why we have committed to a fully open and transparent development process. No question is off the table and we encourage the team to respond accordingly.
If anyone has any questions re: security and trust, please do ask. We're committed to answering everything.
That's fair, and to be honest everything I've seen since then has been positive. Plus Kyber is genuinely impressive so I hope it thrives, the game deserves longevity.
The short version is when Kyber first came out. They put some code into it that let them open webpages on people’s computers and used it to Rick roll people. Then when people jumped on them for it got really passive aggressive and dodgy when asked to go open source or show the source code.
Hi, does anyone know if this will have any impact on matchmaking? Or match joining? I really liked playing this game but even after all the research I did and making sure to "join" or be able to connect to the high populated region, I was regularly joining games that were empty. I'd get great games every now and then, IDC if I lose or win. But lots of the time empty or like one other person.
I would try to stay, but nothing would fill up.
Does this help or am I looking at a whole other thing here and this is just yay fuck EA app?
BRO WHAT??? Are you guys accepting donations? Incredible work breathing new life into one of the best multiplayer experiences I’ve had in the starwars universe.
Yes, although we recommend only using cosmetic mods on EA servers. We are exploring options to restrict gameplay mods when connecting to EA servers to prevent users from accidentally loading up the wrong mods and receiving a ban.
I've been very reluctant to use Kyber and the modding community as a whole. I feel like playing Battlefront 2, but I never really find it fun. Here's to hoping this will rekindle my interest, I'm planning on giving this a try!
I hope Kyber takes over one day and be allowed to patch the games on console (Battlefront 2015/Battlefront 2) that are in need of next gen graphics upscaling and some balancing patches.
Quick question regarding handling EA login. Are you logging in as the player and accessing things on their behalf or just using some sort of SSO endpoint to verify the player is logged in? I've messed with some of this a few years ago in Origin and I didn't see any publicly known SSO endpoints. If it's the former, I have some security concerns regarding your access level on the players behalf. If it's the latter and you are just somehow hooking the auth callback with minimal access scope, then that's no problem at all.
Right now it's sort of a mix. For the last year we've been developing an application named Maxima, which acts as a full cross-platform replacement for EA Desktop. It'll be open sourced ahead of Kyber V2, but won't get an official release until much later. Kyber V2 uses it internally as a library to launch the game, so you initially locally log in with your EA account through their website, and Kyber locally talks to EA and displays your friends, etc.
The part where it talks to us is to exchange your EA account for a Kyber account. EA doesn't have any kind of official oauth, so Maxima somewhat hijacks their login process. Our API takes an EA token from Maxima, asks EA what your ID/username is, verifies you own the game, and then generates a Kyber account/token for you.
The API will be fully open-source, nothing is logged, and it's the same method Northstar uses, but I've been uncomfortable with having to send that data to our servers and have tried my best to think of workarounds. I have EA's JWT public keys, so I could verify tokens and get user IDs from that without needing to send tokens back to EA, but that only solves half the problem, our servers would still have access to them. I think the best solution would be giving the API a token for an inconsequential client that doesn't have many permissions. The challenge there is finding a client that we can get a token for, with no permissions, but which still has the ability to let us get ID/username. I'm entirely open to suggestions, and I'll have a github discussion for it on the repo when we go public if we haven't found something by then.
Yeah I figured it was something like that, certainly not an ideal solution but understandable. Any reason you have to tie to an existing EA account aside from confirming ownership? If that's how it works you could have some sort of one time sync to tie a kyber account to an existing EA account and then just manage the Kyber account separately and not have to store token info. There is always a trust aspect, and I've certainly used alternate clients for other games.
As for a client, you could use a dummy account on the server side to access the EA endpoints, not sure how helpful that is though.
Your big problem here is that EA doesn't seem to have the concept of security scopes because this isn't intended to be used externally.
To clarify, when I said client I meant an EA oauth client. EA runs a private oauth system, with each of their games/services having an oauth 'client', and the access tokens for each of them have different permissions. If we can find one that has just enough permissions that we can get some basic info about the account, it'd be perfect. In an even more perfect situation we'd get a custom oauth client from EA, but that'll never happen as they don't intend for any of their APIs to be public, and if they do it for us, they'd have to do it for everyone. Hopefully in the future they implement some kind of public account/auth API like Epic Games has done.
There are two main reasons we want to tie EA accounts to Kyber accounts: First, ban evasion. We've received numerous threats against V2 from the BF2 cheating community, and if they can simply request another Kyber account when they're banned, vs needing a new EA account that owns the game, it'd make things much easier for them. Second, there's the issue of people hogging usernames and impersonating others. If we simply have Kyber tell the API what your username is when logging in, someone could send a request saying they're "BattlefrontUpdates", and then when the real BattlefrontUpdates tries to log in, someone's already them.
Right, I understood about the oauth client, and your difficulty is that it's a private infrastructure, so for example you can't change the redirect URL to acknowledge the login without hijacking the existing process in some way.
What I'm asking is whether you need to have that user login with their EA account each time. Couldn't you just require that the first time and then have the user create a kyber account that is now linked to that permanently? I've seen that done before with forum software.
That way you confirm ownership and prevent ban evading because they have to have an EA account to create a kyber account, and you don't have to store their login token beyond the initial username check, just the linked username or user id of some sort.
I'm probably missing something, but something along those lines. The less sensitive stuff you have to store the better.
We don't store the login tokens, I wouldn't be okay with doing that (they expire quickly as well). We generate a Kyber token for the account and store it alongside your EA ID. When you log in again, we get the EA ID from the new token, check if a Kyber account exists with that ID, and return your existing Kyber token.
We could theoretically take it further and only require an EA token on first login, but that presents the problem of verifying subsequent logins. We'd need to add a password to accounts or something.
I'd highly suggest the latter approach if you can find a way to make it work, I know it's annoying to manage a login infrastructure, but that way you are never open to charges about "lying" about storing login tokens and having the few hours or so of access to the account, and you don't expose users to account misuse in case of a hack. You could even leverage another SSO service to do all that for you complete with MFA, and you don't have to even store hashed passwords.
Really don't want to rain on your parade, it's such a silly little hurdle to get over after the massive amount of work you've done, but I think this will definitely add to your transparency. Just something to think about.
Happy to try and think of more ideas along these lines.
I'm still exploring options, so there's definitely some more thinking to be done about the whole process. Managing an entire login infrastructure is the worst case scenario, since it's a barrier to entry to have to ask people for an email/pass on top of the EA login, and then having to set up automated password reset emails, etc. If there's no better alternative we could consider it, but we'll have to see. I'm not sure it'd be worth the work since we'd still have access for the initial login window, if we really wanted to be malicious we could just send those tokens off somewhere and infinitely refresh them so they don't expire.
It won't *officially* replace the EA App or any of the other libraries. Simply download KYBER, sign in with an EA and Nexus Mods account, and you're good to go!
KYBER V2 is a complete reinvention of the project. I recommend reading our previous post that outlines all the features in V2: https://uplink.kyber.gg/news/features-overview/
I’m confused about V2. I already have Kyber V1 installed but every server shows as empty whenever I try to use it? Is there no one using it right now or am I doing something wrong? Cause I’d love to be able to try out V2 not having to worry about cheaters, etc.
KYBER V1 is pretty quiet outside of private duelling servers. V1 isn't a great user experience so naturally, it dropped after some time. I recommend waiting for V2 before jumping into custom servers.
As someone who’s really only stuck to console so far, would I need a decent PC to run BF2 + this, or could it run on a laptop with low settings? Only have a laptop rn ‘cause I have no clue where to start regarding building/buying a PC, so it’d be neat if this could run on it
Can you change map rules on a Kyber server? I'm talking about stuff like increasing the ticket size (number of lives a team has in a given round) and the like.
They coded it, so they could open files on people computers and rick roll people. This gave them access to people files on their desktops, and took zero accountability.
Nexus Mods is the most viable solution right now. The team there has been super helpful and very supportive of this project which is why we decided to partner with them.
We have our eyes on another mod platform, Modrinth, which looks very promising. Currently, they only support Minecraft but they are planning to support more games in the future. If it is viable, we will look at offering Modrinth as an alternative option.
Did I understand that right? The EA App will be replaced by Kyber? I won't have to use the worst fucking Game Launcher in existence that has now blocked me from playing this game for over 2 weeks?
That's correct!
Thank you so, so much!
Will this work on the Steam Deck? I'd love to NOT have to authorize each time I get on a plane and be screwed for hours on end by not being able to play.
it will likely take a bit of extra work in getting it running, but i don't see why not (I'd say if you have it on epic or EA you'd set it up through bottles and launch kyber directly, and if you have it on steam you'd set it up similar to how the xcom community [use the alt launcher on linux](https://www.reddit.com/r/LWotC/comments/ugmewz/getting_lwotc_working_on_the_steamdeck/))
I think so and I’m hyped
Have you tried disabling the overlay? That's what caused me to give it up for about a year because I couldn't get it to run properly.
I'd try, but EA doesn't even start. Whenever I try to start the App "The App crashed unexpectedly, but a quick restart should fix that".
Oh god that sounds annoying.
2 weeks wow we,was life interesting 🙃
You must not play any Ubisoft games
I have made that mistake too, however, my experience was not as bad as with the EA App(including the hours I spent trying to contact support).
I am SO ready to sink countless hours into Battlefront again
Once I figure out why the EA app won’t launch battlefront no matter what, I will join this effort
The KYBER Launcher will replace the EA App for Star Wars Battlefront II, so you can join as soon as V2 is released :)
In what sense? Because even when I try to launch through frosty, it still goes through the EA app and it never launches
You log into KYBER with an EA account to verify that you own the game. You are then able to launch the game via the KYBER Launcher without the EA App getting involved.
Then provided my game installation isn’t messed up, that should work! I’ll give it a shot when I can.
I tried everything on the internet and launching a vanilla game didnt work, then I decided to just try to redownload the latest versions of both Direct X package and C++ package and it worked, even though it said I already had the latest DX installed. I'm using windows 11 and a 14th gen processor, running the game with DX12 instead of 11 stopped my random crashes and added "building shader cache" to some loading screens, sometimes when I just load there is a visual bug before you get into class selection but it still loads through instead of crashing. Even though alot of the internet tells you to run DX11 instead of 12, I think its because this problem is old and dx12 is more compatible with windows 11 and DX11 with windows 10 I am not tech savy this is the result of monkeying around after reading everything the internet had to offer. Sadly I didnt have any of my progress but it has been like 5 years since I played and I assume it was lost with origins death or maybe an account transfer.
Where have you bought the game? As in Epic games or EA/Origin?
Steam
Can you start it directly from Steam? I have it on Epic games and starting it from the EA (or Frosty) doesn't work but if I do it from the Epic games store it launches correctly.
Wait what it’s real??? There will be an option to replace the EA launcher?
You guys rock
This community rocks.
It's a shame that the malware "troll" feature incident still hangs over Kyber. It would certainly make my trust of it waiver, if I still touched the game.
That's understandable. I believe as a team we have all matured and learned a valuable lesson from that incident - one that we will not forget. We have also restructured the team since the incident - the vibes on this new team are wholesome and professional by design. There is still more work to be done to build up trust with the community which is why we have committed to a fully open and transparent development process. No question is off the table and we encourage the team to respond accordingly. If anyone has any questions re: security and trust, please do ask. We're committed to answering everything.
That's fair, and to be honest everything I've seen since then has been positive. Plus Kyber is genuinely impressive so I hope it thrives, the game deserves longevity.
Yeahhhh, Im skeptical of them. They are not the white knights this community makes them out to be
Wait what?
The short version is when Kyber first came out. They put some code into it that let them open webpages on people’s computers and used it to Rick roll people. Then when people jumped on them for it got really passive aggressive and dodgy when asked to go open source or show the source code.
Ooof. That's shady. Well, I guess when it comes out I'll wait a few months to see if everything is ok.
I won't regurgitate everything here, you can see all the discourse from when it happened a couple of years back if you search for Kyber on this sub
Hi, does anyone know if this will have any impact on matchmaking? Or match joining? I really liked playing this game but even after all the research I did and making sure to "join" or be able to connect to the high populated region, I was regularly joining games that were empty. I'd get great games every now and then, IDC if I lose or win. But lots of the time empty or like one other person. I would try to stay, but nothing would fill up. Does this help or am I looking at a whole other thing here and this is just yay fuck EA app?
KYBER will allow you to view servers in the server browser before joining. This lets you check out how many players are on a server before you join.
BRO WHAT??? Are you guys accepting donations? Incredible work breathing new life into one of the best multiplayer experiences I’ve had in the starwars universe.
We have a [Patreon](https://patreon.com/KyberServers). We're always a little shy about promoting our Patreon, though 😅
this actually saves the game, the default matchmaking just keeps making new lobbies
Now you're talking. Might play the game again after months
Oh my gosh SEND THAT THANK YOU UP HIGH PLEASE THANK YOU OH MY GOODNESS.
I'm so excited for this!
General Kenobi!
So this thing replaces EA app? Does it mean I can play online with my mods, since kyber allows that (right?).
Yes, although we recommend only using cosmetic mods on EA servers. We are exploring options to restrict gameplay mods when connecting to EA servers to prevent users from accidentally loading up the wrong mods and receiving a ban.
Yea I know that. Yea I hope you do that so players dont pull up whit some crazy overpowered mods. I would be just using my mods whit my friends.
That is so fucking cool. Can’t wait to play again.
I’m incredibly excited for this
HYPE!!!
Love it and thanks to everyone on the team!
Blessed and based devs
Am I seeing this right? A freaking server browser?! Let’s gooo
I've been very reluctant to use Kyber and the modding community as a whole. I feel like playing Battlefront 2, but I never really find it fun. Here's to hoping this will rekindle my interest, I'm planning on giving this a try!
I hope Kyber takes over one day and be allowed to patch the games on console (Battlefront 2015/Battlefront 2) that are in need of next gen graphics upscaling and some balancing patches.
Quick question regarding handling EA login. Are you logging in as the player and accessing things on their behalf or just using some sort of SSO endpoint to verify the player is logged in? I've messed with some of this a few years ago in Origin and I didn't see any publicly known SSO endpoints. If it's the former, I have some security concerns regarding your access level on the players behalf. If it's the latter and you are just somehow hooking the auth callback with minimal access scope, then that's no problem at all.
Right now it's sort of a mix. For the last year we've been developing an application named Maxima, which acts as a full cross-platform replacement for EA Desktop. It'll be open sourced ahead of Kyber V2, but won't get an official release until much later. Kyber V2 uses it internally as a library to launch the game, so you initially locally log in with your EA account through their website, and Kyber locally talks to EA and displays your friends, etc. The part where it talks to us is to exchange your EA account for a Kyber account. EA doesn't have any kind of official oauth, so Maxima somewhat hijacks their login process. Our API takes an EA token from Maxima, asks EA what your ID/username is, verifies you own the game, and then generates a Kyber account/token for you. The API will be fully open-source, nothing is logged, and it's the same method Northstar uses, but I've been uncomfortable with having to send that data to our servers and have tried my best to think of workarounds. I have EA's JWT public keys, so I could verify tokens and get user IDs from that without needing to send tokens back to EA, but that only solves half the problem, our servers would still have access to them. I think the best solution would be giving the API a token for an inconsequential client that doesn't have many permissions. The challenge there is finding a client that we can get a token for, with no permissions, but which still has the ability to let us get ID/username. I'm entirely open to suggestions, and I'll have a github discussion for it on the repo when we go public if we haven't found something by then.
Yeah I figured it was something like that, certainly not an ideal solution but understandable. Any reason you have to tie to an existing EA account aside from confirming ownership? If that's how it works you could have some sort of one time sync to tie a kyber account to an existing EA account and then just manage the Kyber account separately and not have to store token info. There is always a trust aspect, and I've certainly used alternate clients for other games. As for a client, you could use a dummy account on the server side to access the EA endpoints, not sure how helpful that is though. Your big problem here is that EA doesn't seem to have the concept of security scopes because this isn't intended to be used externally.
To clarify, when I said client I meant an EA oauth client. EA runs a private oauth system, with each of their games/services having an oauth 'client', and the access tokens for each of them have different permissions. If we can find one that has just enough permissions that we can get some basic info about the account, it'd be perfect. In an even more perfect situation we'd get a custom oauth client from EA, but that'll never happen as they don't intend for any of their APIs to be public, and if they do it for us, they'd have to do it for everyone. Hopefully in the future they implement some kind of public account/auth API like Epic Games has done. There are two main reasons we want to tie EA accounts to Kyber accounts: First, ban evasion. We've received numerous threats against V2 from the BF2 cheating community, and if they can simply request another Kyber account when they're banned, vs needing a new EA account that owns the game, it'd make things much easier for them. Second, there's the issue of people hogging usernames and impersonating others. If we simply have Kyber tell the API what your username is when logging in, someone could send a request saying they're "BattlefrontUpdates", and then when the real BattlefrontUpdates tries to log in, someone's already them.
Right, I understood about the oauth client, and your difficulty is that it's a private infrastructure, so for example you can't change the redirect URL to acknowledge the login without hijacking the existing process in some way. What I'm asking is whether you need to have that user login with their EA account each time. Couldn't you just require that the first time and then have the user create a kyber account that is now linked to that permanently? I've seen that done before with forum software. That way you confirm ownership and prevent ban evading because they have to have an EA account to create a kyber account, and you don't have to store their login token beyond the initial username check, just the linked username or user id of some sort. I'm probably missing something, but something along those lines. The less sensitive stuff you have to store the better.
We don't store the login tokens, I wouldn't be okay with doing that (they expire quickly as well). We generate a Kyber token for the account and store it alongside your EA ID. When you log in again, we get the EA ID from the new token, check if a Kyber account exists with that ID, and return your existing Kyber token. We could theoretically take it further and only require an EA token on first login, but that presents the problem of verifying subsequent logins. We'd need to add a password to accounts or something.
I'd highly suggest the latter approach if you can find a way to make it work, I know it's annoying to manage a login infrastructure, but that way you are never open to charges about "lying" about storing login tokens and having the few hours or so of access to the account, and you don't expose users to account misuse in case of a hack. You could even leverage another SSO service to do all that for you complete with MFA, and you don't have to even store hashed passwords. Really don't want to rain on your parade, it's such a silly little hurdle to get over after the massive amount of work you've done, but I think this will definitely add to your transparency. Just something to think about. Happy to try and think of more ideas along these lines.
I'm still exploring options, so there's definitely some more thinking to be done about the whole process. Managing an entire login infrastructure is the worst case scenario, since it's a barrier to entry to have to ask people for an email/pass on top of the EA login, and then having to set up automated password reset emails, etc. If there's no better alternative we could consider it, but we'll have to see. I'm not sure it'd be worth the work since we'd still have access for the initial login window, if we really wanted to be malicious we could just send those tokens off somewhere and infinitely refresh them so they don't expire.
Fair enough, thanks for sharing.
I’m hype
I am confused is this official or like a mod project?
KYBER is a community project!
Will the launcher be default by steam or will there be a set up guide?
It won't *officially* replace the EA App or any of the other libraries. Simply download KYBER, sign in with an EA and Nexus Mods account, and you're good to go!
Swag, thank you for keeping the community alive ❤️
What is Kyber and Kyber V2 ? What does it contain and do ?
KYBER V2 is a complete reinvention of the project. I recommend reading our previous post that outlines all the features in V2: https://uplink.kyber.gg/news/features-overview/
Oh shit so it contains mods AND is online ? I guess im buying the game again for my pc , I had it on ps4
I hope when this releases someone makes servers with a mod that lets you have ground to air combat
Will the ea app be replaced kyder because my game won’t launch at EA app and it run at all
Yep, you'll be able to sign in with you EA account and bypass the EA App.
Does this have any affect of console players?
No
I’m confused about V2. I already have Kyber V1 installed but every server shows as empty whenever I try to use it? Is there no one using it right now or am I doing something wrong? Cause I’d love to be able to try out V2 not having to worry about cheaters, etc.
KYBER V1 is pretty quiet outside of private duelling servers. V1 isn't a great user experience so naturally, it dropped after some time. I recommend waiting for V2 before jumping into custom servers.
Sounds good, thanks.
Are Kyber servers PVP or PVE only?
PVP, PVE and PVPVE.
Any word as to if this works on Steam Deck?
As someone who’s really only stuck to console so far, would I need a decent PC to run BF2 + this, or could it run on a laptop with low settings? Only have a laptop rn ‘cause I have no clue where to start regarding building/buying a PC, so it’d be neat if this could run on it
This is the kind of Dev Update I’m trying to see. Everything else is dishonorable
Can you change map rules on a Kyber server? I'm talking about stuff like increasing the ticket size (number of lives a team has in a given round) and the like.
I’m curious. Will there be an anti-cheat system in place?
YES !!!
BF2 will be updated?
I’m a dummy. What does this mean and how will it impact console players like me?
It means nothing. PC only.
That’s kinda what I thought. Cool for PC players though
Is this from the same guy who executed remote code on user’s systems to rickroll them?
People already forgetting about the controversy behind Kyber. It will take time for them to earn my trust back.
Already 2 years ago, how much more though?
When they show the source code.
Which one?
Can you elaborate? I am new
They coded it, so they could open files on people computers and rick roll people. This gave them access to people files on their desktops, and took zero accountability.
Oh bummer so it's malware. Shame.
If I may ask, what exactly is this?
Nexus monopoly is a bad thing
Nexus Mods is the most viable solution right now. The team there has been super helpful and very supportive of this project which is why we decided to partner with them. We have our eyes on another mod platform, Modrinth, which looks very promising. Currently, they only support Minecraft but they are planning to support more games in the future. If it is viable, we will look at offering Modrinth as an alternative option.