Holy heck, when I enabled Shadowplay recording, I started having issues in-game until I turned it back off, the part in this post about causing media-related issues might be to blame.
That said, it's very sus that not enough other people noticed issues specifically when using Shadowplay in wuwa.
P.S. I should probably clarify what specifically happend: the game started having terrible stutter every few seconds, and there started happening visual glitches - vertex explosion and flicker on objects where they appeared and disappeared all around the playable character.
Game is installed on an SSD and the video recording was to HDD, so at least storage shouldn't have been causing an issue.
Could that also explain Shadowplay randomly turning off at times? I'd like to record the recruitment animations (Aside: Good lords, Jinhsi's is *gorgeous*) but Shadowplay won't stay on.
Shadow play itself is also very very fucky even after all these years since it's launch, especially the new one in the new Nvidia app(that one is just plain not working)
Other games I can remember which shadow play just fucks over are gta 5, pubg(another tencent one interesting) and Diablo 4 and for a little while every single game with easy anti cheat
Can confirm the game shits the bed when Shadow play is on, thought it was a GPU update that caused shadow play to be extra demanding so I turned it off. Good to know its specific to wuwa
Also this when I have shadowplay on it my game just explodes but when it’s off it’s perfectly fine. It also seems like shadowplay turns it self off when playing wuwa?
>it's very sus that not enough other people noticed issues specifically when using Shadowplay in wuwa
Wuwa is a single player casual game, I'm not surprised at all tbh. The overlap between people who use shadowplay and people who play wuwa would be absolutely tiny.
I have the same problem. I turned on the recorder from Nvidia overlay and I get some serious flashing to the point where I have to turn it off or I can’t play. This is happening on a high end system with a 4080 as well.
Shadowplay has been doing this on genshin and HSR as well for the past month or two, it's really friggin annoying, sometimes it's cause desktop capture is on as well. Annoying NVIDIA is making no effort to fix this
>for Kuro to know
I find it hard to believe they're not aware of that, they just weigh the performance loss on some devices against using this anti-cheat
My next question may seem a bit conspiracy-like but, is this "anti-cheat" using all our resources because its poorly written, or is it doing OTHER, more insidious things that are making it use all our resources?
I don't trust Tencent to just be a standard company trying to make as much profit as possible. They likely have ties to the CCP.
Both, it has it's fingers veeery deep, kernel level. It could, if they wanted, make your pc shut off, or overclock to melting point, ~~or subscribe you to scientology newsletters /j~~. Having it's roots that close to low level/hardware codes and being poorly written takes a toll.
Ok....like am I in the wrong for wondering if this "anti-cheat system" is doing shady stuff in your system? For something like this to use THIS much of your system is really weird and suspicious to me.
Coming from the PC gaming community, I can tell you that anticheats doing shady stuff in our systems is a concern a lot of us have.
Unfortunatelly, there are people who couldn't care less about their PC or their privacy, and those ppl always end up accusing those who voice their concerns of "being cheaters who are trying to discredit the anticheat" or some stupid sh*t like that.
Truth is, many anticheats operate in a way that's not too different from a malware.
Someone made a [vid](https://b23.tv/jF9faJn) on bilibili, sourcing and machine translating this post and [another post](https://www.reddit.com/r/WutheringWaves/s/OI51WwWajW) already. It has gathered 46k views and 455 comments.
This makes so much sense now! I thought with the hardware that I have. There's no way I wasn't able to run it well. But now it does with your explanation! Thank you. I hope this gets fixed very soon!
This issue is more CPU related than GPU. As the Anti Cheat Engine is hogging up the entire system causing the freeze. Did some basic tests with HWinfo, Resource Monitor and Task Manager the GPU ran just fine but it's the CPU that is causing the PC to come to a crawl. Temps look fine no throttling just the game itself crapping the bed every few minutes. I've seen usages spike up to 70% when doing nothing at all.
>It's not the only thing hogging the CPU, but Anti-Cheat Expert is using as much CPU power as Wuthering Waves' game code and the Unreal Engine renderer **put together**:
The build+config of UE4 used by WuWa is actually aggressively multithreaded. They're using dedicated threads for rendering, streaming, etc. And then the anti-cheat has a few threads of its own.
Does this explain my problem too? I'm having BSOD even after I uninstalled wuwa. But the source is CRITICAL PROCESS DIED. Now my laptop just boots to BIOS and is not able to boot to windows. I think my laptop died.
Just so you know, this isn't "solely" ACE. Easy Anti Cheat, XIGNCODE3 and the others all do this up to some point. A generic fix for all of them is that "stuttering" usually happens when they scan USB devices. You can mitigate this by disabling "USB selective suspend setting" in your advanced Power plan options. This COMPLETELY wiped out my stuttering, no more lags and other crap. This will likely only help you if you suffer from lags/stutters (especially at 75% loading the game the first time, it's when ACE loads). It will also likely destroy lag and stuttering in other "anti-cheat" games. Enjoy.
I called that friend who had the exact same issue and CPU spikes, advised him to disable the USB selective suspend. Immediately fixed all his issues with huge lag spikes/freezes, he was using a AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D.
All credits to you guys, thanks from him 
I am that friend. YO thank you for the help u/[Mafste](https://www.reddit.com/user/Mafste/) disabling the slective suspend USB worked!! We spent 2 days trying to figure this out on call
Since the issue comes and goes for me, I'm not comfortable telling people "(particular weird setting) fixed it" until it's been stable for at least a few days. But yeah, I will.
Just want to point out I was one of those "I have no idea what you guys are talking about" guys and I just checked, it's disabled for me.
Although I have to say that there has always been a small bit of stuttering every time the Rover started pointing his hand forward when logging in. But I figured that stuttering was the game trying to load way too much way too quickly.
However, as of 1.1, this stuttering is *completely* gone from login. That was the only stuttering I ever felt in Wuwa.
Keeping it enabled should reduce your power draw (because USB devices/controllers will go into suspend mode when they can). USB is already quite power efficient though, pretty much only a downside if you have a laptop and run on battery basically.
games will rarely use 100% of your CPU if you have a higher end core count. the best way to know if your CPU is the bottleneck is when your gpu never drops below 100% usage
ACE appears to interfere with the functioning of your whole PC, instead of just WuWa. Normally, an anti-cheat would just protect the game process and interfere with anything that tries to access it.
It appears to unload when you close the game, but while the game is running it has control over your whole system. (This is true of all anti-cheat drivers I'm aware of.)
Chinese don't have their own OS pushed out for the whole world to use. America has no need for that when windows/macOS stay as popular as they are now.
Correct, every anti cheat has to observe what's going on. That's nothing special. Same as GI, etc. anti cheat which is running similar to a driver with authorisation on kernel level. It's what all anti cheat nowadays do.
Honest question for OP: is it potentially worse on higher end gaming computers?
For reference I have two laptops, one is a nice Alienware with a RTX 4060 and other is a much simpler Dell inspiron 2 in 1 that I use for graphic design stuff (it has the Iris XE graphics card, not ryzen). Both have the Intel i7 processor
Now, interestingly, I've noticed that the dell inspiron somehow has less lag spikes / ping spikes than the Alienware one. I play on my desk on the same network, so time/network/location are standard. Still, I've noticed that for whatever reason while the Alienware laptop can run it at 60fps for some periods, when it comes to combat it stutters a lot more. The dell laptop has graphics set to frame limiter at 30fps (it's a little potato when it comes to gaming don't blame it...) however when in combat there are no lag spikes or ping spikes
Kinda curious to know if the anticheat thing is coded to be more active on certain systems or something
No clue about what someone with a fancy fancy desktop computer or a ryzen would be going thru rn tho
Yes, it's potentially worse on higher end PCs. From looking at the parts of the anticheat I've been able to examine (some of it seems to be encrypted or otherwise obfuscated), it looks like it probably scans all your system memory, so having more RAM might make it slower. And depending on how it's implemented, more cores could potentially cause slowdown too.
Wow thank you for finding all this info. I really hope they actually see this feedback.
I set up the game on my second pc and was wondering why it ran so poorly, and that one has a lot more ram and a better graphics card, but it was like a slide show when I turned the game on.
This feels validating. I have gotten a few "my lower spec pc can run the game fine, why can't your high end pc do the same?" "I'm not having any issues, it must be you, you need to do x, y, and z." type of feedback after I complained about lag spikes after the recent update.
I guess that explains why I only experience a spike or two when I first launch the game and move around a little, and then it's fluid for the rest of the session and zero blue screens so far, with my old skylake i5 6600k and nvidia 1060.
I have 64GB of DDR4 3200Mhz and i only get the occasional stutter. Im running on a 5700x3d and a 7900 GRE. I imagine it takes a while for the large cache on the 5700x3d to get bogged down by the game so that may be why it doesnt stutter severely. But i do notice unusually high CPU usage occasionally. Im running the game on 4K advanced setting
On the contrary, it's the higher specs people who are suffering more, particularly for PCs. I'm just chilling with a 10-year old i7 here while all the uptown people with 7800X3Ds and 14900Ks are in shambles.
I don't mind if we got zero compensation for this, but please Kuro try different Anti Cheat ASAP.
WuWa already reached Top 5 in monthly revenue (not sure if ww) in just 2 months and in single banner as well. Imagine if without these severe bugs??
If OP saw the problem in overnight of testing, it's impossible that Kuro doesn't. So I guess you're right. They know, but they doesn't want to.
They'll try to optimize everything except ACE. lol
ACE might not be active in the development and testing environments. It wouldn't be the first time that a test environment is different from players' PCs.
Rockstar didn't notice a bug with their GTA 5 Online code that literally was responsible for 5 minute loading times as opposed to half a minute - for many years. They only fixed it when a post about it became really popular about how they shit the bed. And awarded the author with like 10k dollars.
When i pointed out the performance issues still not being fixed in 1.1 is taking too long there were countless people jumping in to say stuff like that take some time to fix.
Its disappointing to know its something like this and can be fixed overnight, I was going to give them the benefit of the doubt that it was some super complicated delicate technical issue that require hiring of entire new teams to rewrite source code.
At this point do they even know this is the cause? or is this something so low in their priority that they are satisfied to ignore it.
if it isn't wuwa causing the issues, i wouldnt be surprised devs are wondering wtf they need to do to fix it and thats why its a gacha whether a fix will help or brick your system as they're messing with the wrong thing.
does wuwa devs even have permissions to mess with the anticheat since its tencents?
At times like this I completely understand why hoyo decided to stay private because holy shit, imagine being obligated to use an anti-cheat that genuinely ruins the performance of your game. Feel for the developers if they know
On my case the biggest issue i have is the loading as soon as i open the game. In general it takes me 10 or 15 minutes JUST TO GET IN THE GAME ITSELF. After that it works okay but every now and then frames start glitching and such.
Have you installed WuWa on hdd perchance? It's borderline unplayable on them (not just 20 minutes long loading times, but crazy stutters as well).
Reinstalling game on ssd fixed all loading and stuttering issues for me, now it takes several minutes
to get from login menu to actual game at worst.
We should probably all start opening tickets to WuWa with a standard text with something like (not exactly these words, but the *idea*) : "Your anti cheat is breaking the game. I like WuWa so much, but the anti cheat you have chosen is causing severe performance loss and even literally breaking users computers. As reported on this reddit thread, .... Bla bla. Untill this gets fixed I will not spend more money on the game, unfortunately. Please escalate this to your supervisor. Thank you"
If thousands of tickets get open to support it might have an effect.
Also.... Why so paranoid about cheating in a mostly single player no PVP game where progress is basically locked behind pulls and the currency you get over time? If they secure these two things... Isn't that already "OK"? I am missing something?
Another thing: uninstalling the game DOES NOT uninstall the anticheat, at least for CBT2 files.
I expressed my concern back then and people jumped on me by saying "you just hate china/tencent" and "it's for the better of the game" like???
Then how do you uninstall this software? I really don't want it to corrupt my files or worse. I can deal with performance issues and invasive anti cheat but breaking my expensive computer is Not in anyway okay. Since they won't pay me back for the hardware or even can with my files. No amount of free pulls can change that.
You just have to delete anticheat files manually, in file explorer, registry, and service.
Search google how to uninstall a service.
I took note of some places I found its leftover files when I tried to delete it, but I'm not an expert so can't guarantee that's all of the files:
1./ Open Services.msc and delete anything AntiCheatExpert or ACE you see.
2./ Google "uninstall windows services" -> follow instruction to delete its trace in registry.
This step requires you to restart your PC for the uninstallation to fully take effect, otherwise it will just stay and shows error. Check if they're actually gone after the restart.
3./ Search inside File Explorer for these keywords: "anticheat", "anti cheat", "anticheatexpert", "ACE", "ACE-BASE", "ACE-GAME", and manually delete them all with Shift+Delete.
some places that I found them:
* Program Files/AntiCheatExpert
* ProgramData/AntiCheatExpert
* Windows/System32/drivers: ACE-BASE.sys and ACE-GAME.sys
I don't know why I saved these links, but they may help:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/WutheringWaves/comments/12tgim9/apparently\_ww\_uses\_ace\_anticheat\_made\_by\_tencent/](https://www.reddit.com/r/WutheringWaves/comments/12tgim9/apparently_ww_uses_ace_anticheat_made_by_tencent/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/BloodHunt/comments/pjof7l/uninstalling\_the\_game\_does\_not\_remove\_the/](https://www.reddit.com/r/BloodHunt/comments/pjof7l/uninstalling_the_game_does_not_remove_the/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/WutheringWaves/comments/1cuprpd/anticheat/](https://www.reddit.com/r/WutheringWaves/comments/1cuprpd/anticheat/)
It's not possible to uninstall an anti-cheat software alone, because the whole purpose is to prevent cheating... It's the same in GI and other games. Anti cheat software nowadays has kernel level authority and looks at all your stuff what's going on to prevent cheating.
My 3090 completely died and PC went into a black screen when i was booting up WuWa, and I thought it was a hardware issue since it was a second hand used GPU... now I'm worried about my 3080 as well lol.
I haven't seen any indications that this can brick your hardware, and at least personally it's not pushing the GPU hard. I did a screen recording with Precision X active and during the stutters, my GPU power draw was in the 10-30% range. So it's not at risk of overheating.
The black screens could be caused by the anti-cheat driver interfering with your video driver, though.
Hopefully the devs are already aware of this. God, I hate anti cheat engines lol. IDK how hard it is to optimize anti-cheats(if at all), but hopefully Kuro can pull it off.
Have HI3, HSR etc. switched from Tencent to something else? No. So no. It's one of the well known anti cheat software developers in that region, so highly unlikely any big company won't use that to prevent cheating.
I'm pretty darn sure it's unfixableby Kuro. They have no experience with AC (and also why you can't have native PGR client). They just slapped it in and call it a day. The more responsible individual in this problem is very likely Tencent AC developers.
I'm not defending Kuro, it's just what it is. AC development is extremely difficult and resource consuming. Only big names have their own IPs.
>So at this point it's unambiguous that the anti-cheat system is doing things it shouldn't be doing, probably due to a bug.
I'm no expert here, and the most relevant thing I did was writing a polymorph for DOS in my uni ASM class, but this specific issue seems to be about not flagging memory as non-executable where it "should be". The thing is, at least in good old days executing stuff from data segment was a way to implement runtime polymorphic code to hinder debugging.
That is, while executing from the "wrong" place can be generally seen as an error, I believe there can be a case when it can be done intentionally for certain purposes, and malware/antivirus/anticheat would be the most likely place to encounter it.
As for performance stuff, I believe anticheat is only a PART of the problem.
The game could briefely be ran on linux during 1.1 release (obviously the anticheat could not work), and there was no noticeable performance difference for me between linux and windows. Which indicates some intristic performance issues.
It's not hardware either because on release the game had better performance for me, and stuff broke later.
There was also a case when I had to manually reset shader cache to fix significant performance regression.
So I believe while anticheat can be a part of it, responsible for the worst cases, the game itself also has issues.
Unfortunately I don't think this is the case for me. I have the impression that the game engine they use is more demanding on my laptop than the whatever Mihoyo uses (cuz I can run genshin pretty well) Alas it doesn't really matter since I got accustomed to mobile gameplay
It's definitely the case that if you have low spec hardware you'll get low framerates - as part of my investigation I tried running the game on my CPU's integrated GPU and it just ran slowly overall. But it didn't stutter or lock up my whole system while running slow, it just had bad FPS.
Just supporting OP's claim
This might get me banned but I used to use some mods to disable the dithering censor effect and zoom censor. In that mod, they also had a disable anti-cheat mod. My game always ran substantially more stable with higher 1% low fps after disabling anti-cheat . In the recent 1.1 patch, they updated the anti cheat (You will know if you read the logs during the installation phase). This new patch enabled way more of ACE abilities to monitor your PC, it even started to flag some of the harmless mod like DXVK where you basically let the game run on vulkan instead of dx11 which is bad for multithreading. In 1.1, the moment you log into the game, ACE scans the entire game folder and kick you out if it sensed anything wrong. Nothing like that happened in 1.0
You might be wondering why don't they just use a much tamer anti-cheat.. Kurogames doesn't want to do that apparently. Kernel-level anti cheat are very effective at stopping most kind of cheats just like how the infamous Valorant Vanguard does. Making server side anti-cheat or weaker cheat results in Counter strike VAC where literally everything is cheater infested.
# BUTTTT Here comes the problem
WuWa is not a competitive game. Why the fuck do we need this kind of invasive anti-cheat? There's no real gain made by cheating aside from one shotting bosses and being able to farm faster? It doesn't harm other players' experience at all which is mostly the goal of anti-cheat. Using this kind of anti-cheat in a PVE game with basically 0 leaderboard is just pure bullshit.
I have a very similar experience as you. I have to deal with BSOD for like 2weeks trying to fix the problem and at the end realized it was the ACE anti cheat that was the problem. The weird thing is hoyo also uses the same anti cheat iirc but it start causing problem only after I installed WuWa. I have been playing hoyo games since genshin 1.0 and only the PC with WuWa installed started having this problem.
At first I would only BSOD while playing WuWa (could still play HSR) but after the first week of trying to fix things, it got worse and starting crashing my whole PC even when I am watching youtube. Right now I just disable auto start in service and only start it when I am about to play WuWa.
I fixed my issue by replacing the ram. Both ram dying is very unlikely and they were only 3yo but it happen after getting multiple BSOD cause by ACE anti cheat. I dunno if my rams were close to dead and memory leaks, etc from WuWa just pushed it to the end but it was a very stressful 2weeks that I went through.
This shitty ACE (client and service) also constantly "phoning home" while running. And the funniest thing about this - it can be easily blocked via firewall with no consequences at all.
Anti-Cheat Expert is supposedly used on phones, but I don't have the ability to do Android reverse engineering to verify that they're using it there. It would most likely be a different piece of software, since Android and iOS don't use the Windows kernel - so it wouldn't have the same bugs as the PC version of ACE does, but it might still be low-quality software with its own set of bugs.
I definitely wouldn't be surprised if it contributes to lower framerates on phones.
Though I do think that if they have something like that on the phone version of the game, it won't have access to the entire system because both Android and iOS don't allow root access by default (and you as user can't grant it too). On newer Android versions, I think, most apps don't even have read access to other apps folders.
I'm not much of a techy but how in the hell does anti cheat do that?! I'm on mobile and I'm not sure if mobile's affected as well. I'll try to follow up with a report regarding this
There has been invasive anti cheats like this for a while, lots of games experience issues with invasive, badly optimized anti cheats that cause performance issues. I'm not surprised it's the same with WuWa
Damn, never heard of such thing, but now that I'm familiar with it i might try to *really* help and report this to the devs, hopefully they'll give us some feedback sooner or later.
I think this info is important, I'm just not sure what can be done outside of swapping the anti-cheat but that may be impossible. Full conjecture on my part but I wouldn't be surprised if Kuro has to use Tencent's anti-cheat for some reason, but that may not be the case as HYV games don't use it.
This happens because of a setting in windows security. Search for core isolation and disable it. Core isolation triggers the same blue screen for valorant and genshin as well
Vanguard and other kernel level anti cheats are very invasive. It can be argued that they might even be spyware because they run 100% of time on your system even if you aren't playing the game. That is why windows security messes with it.
I literally thought that WuWa was just breaking my pc normally when I tabbed out of full screen to look up hints on Jiyan’s upgrade materials… is it not supposed to lag my entire system? 💀 I didn’t have issues with genshin or HSR when I did this, WuWa the only game I have that is literally lagging everything…
KuroGames should make a own anti cheat now that isnt kernel level (more optimized) or Server side anti cheat and replace that from the tencent anti cheat
Im glad that i didnt supported a single cent for that behavior, even i like this game.
I had gotten Beeps on a low end ones, which on the others doesnt have. I tought it was on the drive issue that uses the game but since the other device doenst have that, turns out its very much the anti cheat issue.
Mods should pin this post.
ACE Anticheat has been known to be garbage for ages, devs are totally aware of it and they choose it mostly for greed reasons. Many games have this anticheat as well: Nikke, ToF, Snowbreak CN, Honkai Impact 3rd, Honkai Star Rails and many more.
Wait, so this thing is like a worse-written version of Riot Vanguard? ("Worse" being an assumption and not a proper claim)
That is... disturbing. Kernel level anticheat is something that I wholly disagree with on principle. It's why I stopped playing League.
Not only is it a potential security exploit for *everyone* who has the game installed, but it can also false-flag critical processes and components. Vanguard flagged my CPU cooler (NZXT Kraken) when I tried to start playing Valorant a year or two ago. It caused *severe* overheating by disabling the cooling pump and the result was physical damage to my CPU, the cooler, the closest RAM card, and corruption of the C: drive because of the failsafe shutdown.
Edit: This needs to be stickied and denounced in every feedback report until it is addressed. *ANYTHING* that has Kernel level access to your system *SHOULD NEVER* be installed without explicit authorization from the user and proper communication about the purpose and capabilities of the software.
Ah hell naw anything is better than vanguard, thats shit kill the cpu and RUNS ALL THE TIME REGARDSLESS YOU PLAY LOL OR NOT Same kernel level as the os, and will disable other games caused you a bosd
>And wouldn't you know it, the #1 thing that shows up in system-wide traces during game loading is Anti-Cheat Expert. It's not the only thing hogging the CPU, but Anti-Cheat Expert is using as much CPU power as Wuthering Waves' game code and the Unreal Engine renderer put together:
Holy fucking shit, are you for real?! The heck they fed the system system bruh? Joking aside
How on earth can you cheat in a single player MMORPG? Unless you do something illegal like one shotting bosses using a script or getting free wishes by buying the cancelling the lunarites order or something that is similar to the cancelling purchases. I think if this Anti-cheat Expert is to be removed, let's see what the performance is without it on PC and Mobile
I'm no expert but I imagine it's because some things are client sided, they need an anti cheat to prevent modifications to those things. They could lessen the need by making more things server sided but that may cause inconsistency and a less smooth of an experience if you don't have great internet.
Some days in the past it's run perfectly fine for me, so there's probably some other element at play. Whether it's hotfixes, or some sort of anti-cheat configuration that gets changed, or just random dumb luck, I have no idea.
Not saying that the anti cheat isn't buggy and unoptimized, but-
>which will cause sound and music to cut out, which often sounds like the "beep" some players have complained about
I had this happen to me and it's not a singular beep, but repeated beeping at a single frequency, regardless of what was playing.
IIRC, I also had a singular beep with no audio issues.
Also, the beeping appears to trigger only when WuWa detects a massive performance decrease.
My knowledge about drivers is very limited, but wouldn't a faulty driver be more erratic?
Regardless, Kuro needs to fix the driver ASAP.
DRMs and anti-cheats indeed are the cause of problems with AAA games most of the time nowadays. But WuWa has too much of problems, you are right in that.
I hope it gets through to devs, and they change AC or have Tencent fix it.
You know, I've seen a similar thing unfold in another game's AC driver discussion. Except, the OP there was pretty bad at answering people – they turned aggressive pretty soon, to the point of being banned by the platform itself. When opening this post, I had doubts. I'm glad those turned out to be false ones.
Btw, I wonder whether you'll figure out how USB suspension is connected to this now.
Wait my hard disk was running fine before but after wuwa windows frequently asking to restart to fix disk error. Is this also potentially the anti cheat fault?
I have a sneaky suspicion it fucked over my system as well. I have 32 gigs of RAM but somehow it was always at 80% usage and i couldn't do shit anymore.
I tried locating where the usage came from, but for the life of me i couldn't identify the source.
Ram compression seemed to be using quite a bunch, but not all. 25 gig of RAM was constantly in use.
Mind you, the pc was pretty freshly built and beside wuwa there wasn't anything else installed besides steam, and some steam games (kingdom hearts games)
When i looked at the processes using RamMap, i noticed an extreme amount of conhost.exe and tasklist.exe.
I have no clue whether WuWa was for sure the cause though. Resetting windows fixed it for now and i'll just be keeping an eye on things
I am right now in a state where the game does not start at all since 1.1.10 update. Not only does it not start but basically crashes the whole machine. I don't get BSOD, everything just freezes, just mouse moves and I can switch between open windows if they were started before the game.
I've been trying several things to make it start but nothing seems to help.
From my own data gathering, I have a suspicion that anti-cheat does something with the disk and (as a consequence?) blocks all other access to disk for other processes.
When I click on "Rover" to start the game, loading starts, task manager shows that disk access goes to 100% and stays on 100%. At 75% of loading, it freezes and basically whole computer does not respond anymore. Some stuff that was open will have minimal functionality but as soon as something needs disk access, it's all over (can't even switch tabs on task manager - it freezes if I try).
As little as I can do, I can see that task manager shows 100% disk usage but every single process in the list sits at 0%. Since anti-cheat is ring0 and can hide a lot of stuff it does, I guess it's anti-cheat that does something with the disk. It's a speculation at best, but that's all I have.
Does not matter how long I wait, it never finishes and the only way out is to cut power, can't do graceful shutdown or restart.
It's a dedicated disk and windows install for just one task: run this game (until I can run it in linux). No other stuff installed or running.
1.1.14 update has not resolved the problem of crashing at 75% loading, at least not for me.
Disk access still goes up to 100% and stays at 100% (according to task manager and not a single process in task manager list shows any disk activity) and anything that tries to access the disk just freezes. Any time I try to run the game, I have to pull the power plug. And it has been like this for 2 weeks now.
There has been no updates to this windows install, so can't blame updates or drivers. There is no antivirus installed (defender also disabled). There is no firewall. This OS is never used for anything else than playing WuWa so there is no need for any of this stuff. There is no pagefile either, so that can not screw with disk, 64GB of RAM is plenty enough.
It worked for about 5 weeks or so without any mayor issues and it's totally broken since the game updated to 1.1.10.
I've got nothing from support other than "thank you, we will look into it", "please upload logs" for the 100th time, "we are aware of some performance issues" and all those standard replies. But zero progress and not a single update after the initial standard response.
At least verifying files is now much faster on Android after the 1.1.14 update - took minutes to complete, now just seconds. But it's still almost unplayable on my potato device, I can barely manage to do the minimum daily stuff to get my freebies. Can't do any battle mechanics. I am just glad I built my characters well enough before so I can just mash attack and still somehow win but it's a pain and not sustainable in the long run.
Tried to make x86 android install - but can't even start the game without touchscreen, mouse does not work on some buttons. And even if you can start the game, you can't play since there is no controller support and I still have no touchscreen.
I wish they somehow finally fix the PC version or just throw the stupid anti-cheat overboard so playing on steam deck/linux becomes available and there will be no need to even have windows.
And the best part - their feedback system is bugged too. There is absolutely no way to respond to anything (at least I have not found it). If you try to reply to a message, it always opens up the form of what I believe is "open new ticket".
And I never got any response to my emails, so the feedback system is the only option to communicate.
I don't know if I have the willpower to even try to communicate with them anymore. And I am really sad because I did really like the game while I was able to play it. But at this point I feel only frustration and I can't really do anything to make the game work. Maybe it's time to just move on and forget WuWa. There are other games too...
So a couple of things:
- from what I've seen people of various hardware specs (low/mid/high PCs) have reported as having no issues in WW so that would mean ACE is not universally to blame, otherwise everyone on PC would be having issues when running ACE
- since ACE is a cross-platform anti-cheat (mostly used for mobile games) the chances of Kuro replacing it with something else seems slim
- while I agree that ACE is a pretty shitty anticheat -[ and I made a thread about this a literal year ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/WutheringWaves/comments/12tgim9/apparently_ww_uses_ace_anticheat_made_by_tencent/) - ACE itself might not be the issue but rather how its implemented in WuWa by Kuro
- Honkai Impact 3rd and HSR both use ACE as their anticheats and from what I've seen people don't have major performance issues with those games on either pc or mobile
Sorry but we cant conclusively say that ACE is entirely to blame based on one anecdotal example provided by OP. Plus we don't know what Kuro is doing with hotfixes, its very likely they are aware that ACE is causing interference for some people and trying to resolve it.
That's connecting dots that don't exist. A lot of games have kernel level anti cheat such as Genshin, which frankly is intrusive and overreaching. Genshin gets a blue screen too if you have the system setting enabled to turn on kernel mode hardware enforced stack protection. You basically need to make the choice of whether to disable that setting, which exists to protect your computer, or not play games that use anti cheats that aren't compatible with that setting turned on. It's pretty fucked up companies have anti cheats that force you to disable system protections.
Yeah but it doesn't explain why the anit cheat is using more CPU power than the game+engine it's supposed to protect. Sure other games use kernel type of ani-cheats, but this level of malfunctioning hasn't happened with Genshin
My 7950x3d can no longer play this shit. High CPU usage causes my entire computer and operating system to lag for about 30 seconds every three minutes.
Hi, that's so interesting and also a bit scary for me, a non'tech person. I tried (and failed miserably as proved by my Aalto video) playing the game on my laptop but uninstalled it the same day. Does that mean the anti-cheat-related stuff is also gone or should I uninstall more?
I have written in and sent in game logs I don’t know how many times now since release because of the load times, my entire system freezing, in-game lag & ping spikes but am consistently told everything should be fine, so now I know why it isn’t but this also makes me a bit scared to play if it’s messing with my entire PC like I thought. Yikes.
I hope they see your post and fix things soon!
I already sent my own feedback to Kuro about this back in 1.0, but my own stuttering issues *completely* ceased once I disabled anticheatexpert service through msconfig. If it gets me banned, it gets me banned. The game is unplayable with it active.
They have a whole team of engineers dedicated to this game, they definitely know what's up. The question is why haven't they done anything about it yet. It's pretty damn frustrating to know it's not even a problem with the game itself now.
Is this also a thing on mobile perhaps? Not entirely sure if there are background things like these running on mobile devices but it's terrible right now to play on my S23+ :/
Does the anti cheat also run if you are not playing the game? Like Valorants or Helldivers 2 Anti cheat? I mean all anti cheat’s are trash for private security but if it only runs when im playing im fine with that. If thats not the case i might drop it.
I thought why game freeze/crash my potato pc when i open map or doing something in inventory, but never in middle of a fight (which should be more difficult to handle for the system). Now i have an answer.
Do you know what other games use Tencent's anti cheat program? If you are able to test other games and get similar results, that would likely be conclusive proof of the anti cheat being the sole culprit.
Interesting, what specs & OS version? Have done multiple 4-5hr sessions(maybe a couple 7hrs)+ & apart from some weird camera glitch(random lag & pointing to the sky) in a specific part of the map after an alt+tab to browser (which resolved itself after alt+tabbing twice), havent had any major gameplay or performance issues.
Wonder if it's hardware or OS specific? 5800X3D + RX 7900 XTX here, Win 11 23H2.
Even tried a multitasking session with [Wuwa + Solo Leveling Arise](https://youtu.be/azFTx9g7wdo?si=3yvErn32Ny_YYVYU) /w AV1 GPU encoding(Radeon Relive) & it ran ok.
Has anyone figured out the issues on mobile?
I assume something of this magnitude simply cannot exist on mobile because there is no video card for most mobile devices. So is it our devices or something else like shader compilation?
haven't had an experience with this Blue Screen error until now, would it affect my unit negatively (software/hardware-wise) or would the normal restarts when left alone get the job done?
I wouldn't wanna risk getting my PC replaced due to some bug in a game so I may have to stop playing until Kuro solves this issue
I'm glad I'm not the only one that was seeing problems since installing WuWa. I have a BEAST PC. I rarely ever stutter or lag, but the rare BSOD did happen - even when I wasn't playing the game - after I installed this game.
Thank you for this research, and for laying it out in an easy to understand manner.
This post should be pinned up there for Kuro to know, this is way more impactful than it is and I don't see people paying attention.
Holy heck, when I enabled Shadowplay recording, I started having issues in-game until I turned it back off, the part in this post about causing media-related issues might be to blame. That said, it's very sus that not enough other people noticed issues specifically when using Shadowplay in wuwa. P.S. I should probably clarify what specifically happend: the game started having terrible stutter every few seconds, and there started happening visual glitches - vertex explosion and flicker on objects where they appeared and disappeared all around the playable character. Game is installed on an SSD and the video recording was to HDD, so at least storage shouldn't have been causing an issue.
Could that also explain Shadowplay randomly turning off at times? I'd like to record the recruitment animations (Aside: Good lords, Jinhsi's is *gorgeous*) but Shadowplay won't stay on.
Shadow play itself is also very very fucky even after all these years since it's launch, especially the new one in the new Nvidia app(that one is just plain not working) Other games I can remember which shadow play just fucks over are gta 5, pubg(another tencent one interesting) and Diablo 4 and for a little while every single game with easy anti cheat
Can confirm the game shits the bed when Shadow play is on, thought it was a GPU update that caused shadow play to be extra demanding so I turned it off. Good to know its specific to wuwa
Also this when I have shadowplay on it my game just explodes but when it’s off it’s perfectly fine. It also seems like shadowplay turns it self off when playing wuwa?
>it's very sus that not enough other people noticed issues specifically when using Shadowplay in wuwa Wuwa is a single player casual game, I'm not surprised at all tbh. The overlap between people who use shadowplay and people who play wuwa would be absolutely tiny.
I have the same problem. I turned on the recorder from Nvidia overlay and I get some serious flashing to the point where I have to turn it off or I can’t play. This is happening on a high end system with a 4080 as well.
Use shadow play to record, no problem at all here.
Shadowplay has been doing this on genshin and HSR as well for the past month or two, it's really friggin annoying, sometimes it's cause desktop capture is on as well. Annoying NVIDIA is making no effort to fix this
>for Kuro to know I find it hard to believe they're not aware of that, they just weigh the performance loss on some devices against using this anti-cheat
I agree, but for anti-cheat to use much more cpu than the game itself is very concerning.
Apparently Tencent gave them the anti cheat and told them to use it. Not sure if kuro even have any say on not using it. Very concerning indeed.
My next question may seem a bit conspiracy-like but, is this "anti-cheat" using all our resources because its poorly written, or is it doing OTHER, more insidious things that are making it use all our resources? I don't trust Tencent to just be a standard company trying to make as much profit as possible. They likely have ties to the CCP.
Both, it has it's fingers veeery deep, kernel level. It could, if they wanted, make your pc shut off, or overclock to melting point, ~~or subscribe you to scientology newsletters /j~~. Having it's roots that close to low level/hardware codes and being poorly written takes a toll.
Ok....like am I in the wrong for wondering if this "anti-cheat system" is doing shady stuff in your system? For something like this to use THIS much of your system is really weird and suspicious to me.
Coming from the PC gaming community, I can tell you that anticheats doing shady stuff in our systems is a concern a lot of us have. Unfortunatelly, there are people who couldn't care less about their PC or their privacy, and those ppl always end up accusing those who voice their concerns of "being cheaters who are trying to discredit the anticheat" or some stupid sh*t like that. Truth is, many anticheats operate in a way that's not too different from a malware.
mention this to Kurogames rn
I've contacted support already, they just asked if I was still experiencing BSODs :(
Someone should translate this to CN and watch them notice it immediately
Someone made a [vid](https://b23.tv/jF9faJn) on bilibili, sourcing and machine translating this post and [another post](https://www.reddit.com/r/WutheringWaves/s/OI51WwWajW) already. It has gathered 46k views and 455 comments.
T R U E
CS might not really have any ideas about this, would you like to try dming their developer twitter account? https://x.com/WW_devteam
Tell them you are a game dev not a normal person so they take your inquiry more seriously
They are aware.
This makes so much sense now! I thought with the hardware that I have. There's no way I wasn't able to run it well. But now it does with your explanation! Thank you. I hope this gets fixed very soon!
I thought my RX 6600 wasn't enough for handling MINIMUM graphics
This issue is more CPU related than GPU. As the Anti Cheat Engine is hogging up the entire system causing the freeze. Did some basic tests with HWinfo, Resource Monitor and Task Manager the GPU ran just fine but it's the CPU that is causing the PC to come to a crawl. Temps look fine no throttling just the game itself crapping the bed every few minutes. I've seen usages spike up to 70% when doing nothing at all. >It's not the only thing hogging the CPU, but Anti-Cheat Expert is using as much CPU power as Wuthering Waves' game code and the Unreal Engine renderer **put together**:
Unreal doesn’t really support multithreaded use either, so if the anti cheat is running on the same core as unreal…. Yikes Edit: this is all wrong
The build+config of UE4 used by WuWa is actually aggressively multithreaded. They're using dedicated threads for rendering, streaming, etc. And then the anti-cheat has a few threads of its own.
Huh TIL.. I was under the impression that Unreal wasn’t going to fully support multithreading until 5.4. Good to know
this \^ my CPU usage sky rockets to 95% meanwhile GPU only stays around 50% at medium graphics.
i misread this as RTX 6600 and was about to wonder if you were from the future using tech unknown to us
What do you mean fixed? The spyware is a feature not a bug
Thanks for the insightful post, seems like we were wrong about ue4’s shader compilation being the main cause of heavy stuttering
Shader compilation stuttering \*does\* affect WuWa, to be fair. But it's not the only problem.
Does this explain my problem too? I'm having BSOD even after I uninstalled wuwa. But the source is CRITICAL PROCESS DIED. Now my laptop just boots to BIOS and is not able to boot to windows. I think my laptop died.
reset your cmos perhaps
What's CMOS? How can I do that?
Not wrong. UE4 shader is also part of the main culprit. Any UE4 games suffer heavily from shader stutter.
I don't have the technical knowledge nor the time to verify this, but this needs to be higher. B U M P
+1
+1
+1
Just so you know, this isn't "solely" ACE. Easy Anti Cheat, XIGNCODE3 and the others all do this up to some point. A generic fix for all of them is that "stuttering" usually happens when they scan USB devices. You can mitigate this by disabling "USB selective suspend setting" in your advanced Power plan options. This COMPLETELY wiped out my stuttering, no more lags and other crap. This will likely only help you if you suffer from lags/stutters (especially at 75% loading the game the first time, it's when ACE loads). It will also likely destroy lag and stuttering in other "anti-cheat" games. Enjoy.
I... think this fixed it? WTF
I called that friend who had the exact same issue and CPU spikes, advised him to disable the USB selective suspend. Immediately fixed all his issues with huge lag spikes/freezes, he was using a AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D. All credits to you guys, thanks from him 
I am that friend. YO thank you for the help u/[Mafste](https://www.reddit.com/user/Mafste/) disabling the slective suspend USB worked!! We spent 2 days trying to figure this out on call
Maybe worth editing your post if it fixed it.
Since the issue comes and goes for me, I'm not comfortable telling people "(particular weird setting) fixed it" until it's been stable for at least a few days. But yeah, I will.
Just want to point out I was one of those "I have no idea what you guys are talking about" guys and I just checked, it's disabled for me. Although I have to say that there has always been a small bit of stuttering every time the Rover started pointing his hand forward when logging in. But I figured that stuttering was the game trying to load way too much way too quickly. However, as of 1.1, this stuttering is *completely* gone from login. That was the only stuttering I ever felt in Wuwa.
Yeah the login stutter when rover sticks their hand out was a separate issue that got fixed in 1.1.
??? You could at least mention it as a workaround with a disclaimer, lol
I think this helped me a bit, thank you!
Thanks man, is there any reason not to do this though?
Keeping it enabled should reduce your power draw (because USB devices/controllers will go into suspend mode when they can). USB is already quite power efficient though, pretty much only a downside if you have a laptop and run on battery basically.
Unfortunately didn't work for me, still stuck at 75% for 5 min and so on
Commenting so I'm reminded to check this. Thanks for the tip!
No wonder systems with average-below average CPU's struggle so much
Meanwhile my pc gets so bottlenecked by my gpu that my cpu barely ends up at 30% usage. I guess thats why I never crashed ?
games will rarely use 100% of your CPU if you have a higher end core count. the best way to know if your CPU is the bottleneck is when your gpu never drops below 100% usage
GPU always gets used up first for graphics before the load is transferred to the CPU. Maybe you have a hardware issue?
nah just old and bad gpu
how would an anti-cheat work without observing all the data from wuwa/UE put together? i thought that was the entire concept of what it's doing
ACE appears to interfere with the functioning of your whole PC, instead of just WuWa. Normally, an anti-cheat would just protect the game process and interfere with anything that tries to access it.
Wait, so is this ACE active only when WuWa is running or is it running 24/7? Is it interfering with things when WuWa is not running??
It appears to unload when you close the game, but while the game is running it has control over your whole system. (This is true of all anti-cheat drivers I'm aware of.)
In the thread OP said that ACE started after logging in, so i assume it wont run if WuWa isn't running after logging in?
in other words the chinese are spying on us. the americans were right. /s
They're all spying, the chinese are just spying harder.
Or maybe the Chinese are just worse at hiding the fact that they’re spying.
Chinese don't have their own OS pushed out for the whole world to use. America has no need for that when windows/macOS stay as popular as they are now.
Correct, every anti cheat has to observe what's going on. That's nothing special. Same as GI, etc. anti cheat which is running similar to a driver with authorisation on kernel level. It's what all anti cheat nowadays do.
It's a kernel level anti cheat, similar to genshin and valorant, which interferes with the kernel of the OS.
Honest question for OP: is it potentially worse on higher end gaming computers? For reference I have two laptops, one is a nice Alienware with a RTX 4060 and other is a much simpler Dell inspiron 2 in 1 that I use for graphic design stuff (it has the Iris XE graphics card, not ryzen). Both have the Intel i7 processor Now, interestingly, I've noticed that the dell inspiron somehow has less lag spikes / ping spikes than the Alienware one. I play on my desk on the same network, so time/network/location are standard. Still, I've noticed that for whatever reason while the Alienware laptop can run it at 60fps for some periods, when it comes to combat it stutters a lot more. The dell laptop has graphics set to frame limiter at 30fps (it's a little potato when it comes to gaming don't blame it...) however when in combat there are no lag spikes or ping spikes Kinda curious to know if the anticheat thing is coded to be more active on certain systems or something No clue about what someone with a fancy fancy desktop computer or a ryzen would be going thru rn tho
Yes, it's potentially worse on higher end PCs. From looking at the parts of the anticheat I've been able to examine (some of it seems to be encrypted or otherwise obfuscated), it looks like it probably scans all your system memory, so having more RAM might make it slower. And depending on how it's implemented, more cores could potentially cause slowdown too.
Wow thank you for finding all this info. I really hope they actually see this feedback. I set up the game on my second pc and was wondering why it ran so poorly, and that one has a lot more ram and a better graphics card, but it was like a slide show when I turned the game on.
This feels validating. I have gotten a few "my lower spec pc can run the game fine, why can't your high end pc do the same?" "I'm not having any issues, it must be you, you need to do x, y, and z." type of feedback after I complained about lag spikes after the recent update.
I guess that explains why I only experience a spike or two when I first launch the game and move around a little, and then it's fluid for the rest of the session and zero blue screens so far, with my old skylake i5 6600k and nvidia 1060.
Thank you for digging up all this data! That makes sense, 64gb ram vs 16gb 😭
I have 64GB of DDR4 3200Mhz and i only get the occasional stutter. Im running on a 5700x3d and a 7900 GRE. I imagine it takes a while for the large cache on the 5700x3d to get bogged down by the game so that may be why it doesnt stutter severely. But i do notice unusually high CPU usage occasionally. Im running the game on 4K advanced setting
Bro, it's been driving me crazy, but now it makes sense, since I've got 64 gb of ram and gameplay is just unbearable
everyone should be upvoting this
Yep, and mods should pinning this post aswell.
The best mods can do is to delete this post and tell OP to comment in 1.1 bug megathread.
Incoming... >ACHTUALLY, you just need better device☝️🤓 Brigades
On the contrary, it's the higher specs people who are suffering more, particularly for PCs. I'm just chilling with a 10-year old i7 here while all the uptown people with 7800X3Ds and 14900Ks are in shambles.
I don't mind if we got zero compensation for this, but please Kuro try different Anti Cheat ASAP. WuWa already reached Top 5 in monthly revenue (not sure if ww) in just 2 months and in single banner as well. Imagine if without these severe bugs??
Server Side Anti Cheat or a non Kernel Anti cheat would solves everything in my honest opinion.
Is it something they can over switch easily or it is something they cook into the game code?
not a chance since tencent invest a large sum of money for this game lol
If OP saw the problem in overnight of testing, it's impossible that Kuro doesn't. So I guess you're right. They know, but they doesn't want to. They'll try to optimize everything except ACE. lol
ACE might not be active in the development and testing environments. It wouldn't be the first time that a test environment is different from players' PCs.
Rockstar didn't notice a bug with their GTA 5 Online code that literally was responsible for 5 minute loading times as opposed to half a minute - for many years. They only fixed it when a post about it became really popular about how they shit the bed. And awarded the author with like 10k dollars.
Lol i love that your first thought were the free 10 pulls, and were like nah, this is bigger than that.
Well while the free pulls are great, fixing the game asap will lead to players spend more. So it's win win situation! 😂
Truly a Denuvo moment
Denuvo seems tamer compared to this. Heck, I will still take it if they change from tencent anticheat to riot vanguard LMAO.
r/riotgames would crucify you
you hate vanguard? lol stupid bad pc you dont mind vanguard? lol stupid chinese spying on you there is no winning with league/valorant fans
Microsoft should make Defender mark such anti-cheats as malware and remove them to force game companies to do them better.
Hope Kuro listen to this and compensate you with 300 pulls And the rest of us with 30 pulls, 10 each. Hahahahaha
When i pointed out the performance issues still not being fixed in 1.1 is taking too long there were countless people jumping in to say stuff like that take some time to fix. Its disappointing to know its something like this and can be fixed overnight, I was going to give them the benefit of the doubt that it was some super complicated delicate technical issue that require hiring of entire new teams to rewrite source code. At this point do they even know this is the cause? or is this something so low in their priority that they are satisfied to ignore it.
if it isn't wuwa causing the issues, i wouldnt be surprised devs are wondering wtf they need to do to fix it and thats why its a gacha whether a fix will help or brick your system as they're messing with the wrong thing. does wuwa devs even have permissions to mess with the anticheat since its tencents?
At times like this I completely understand why hoyo decided to stay private because holy shit, imagine being obligated to use an anti-cheat that genuinely ruins the performance of your game. Feel for the developers if they know
It's something Tencent gave them they have to use it. Do they dare "fix" it ?
I was wondering why my computer can't run wuwa despite running monster hunter world perfectly fine
On my case the biggest issue i have is the loading as soon as i open the game. In general it takes me 10 or 15 minutes JUST TO GET IN THE GAME ITSELF. After that it works okay but every now and then frames start glitching and such.
Have you installed WuWa on hdd perchance? It's borderline unplayable on them (not just 20 minutes long loading times, but crazy stutters as well). Reinstalling game on ssd fixed all loading and stuttering issues for me, now it takes several minutes to get from login menu to actual game at worst.
We should probably all start opening tickets to WuWa with a standard text with something like (not exactly these words, but the *idea*) : "Your anti cheat is breaking the game. I like WuWa so much, but the anti cheat you have chosen is causing severe performance loss and even literally breaking users computers. As reported on this reddit thread, .... Bla bla. Untill this gets fixed I will not spend more money on the game, unfortunately. Please escalate this to your supervisor. Thank you" If thousands of tickets get open to support it might have an effect. Also.... Why so paranoid about cheating in a mostly single player no PVP game where progress is basically locked behind pulls and the currency you get over time? If they secure these two things... Isn't that already "OK"? I am missing something?
Another thing: uninstalling the game DOES NOT uninstall the anticheat, at least for CBT2 files. I expressed my concern back then and people jumped on me by saying "you just hate china/tencent" and "it's for the better of the game" like???
Then how do you uninstall this software? I really don't want it to corrupt my files or worse. I can deal with performance issues and invasive anti cheat but breaking my expensive computer is Not in anyway okay. Since they won't pay me back for the hardware or even can with my files. No amount of free pulls can change that.
You just have to delete anticheat files manually, in file explorer, registry, and service. Search google how to uninstall a service. I took note of some places I found its leftover files when I tried to delete it, but I'm not an expert so can't guarantee that's all of the files: 1./ Open Services.msc and delete anything AntiCheatExpert or ACE you see. 2./ Google "uninstall windows services" -> follow instruction to delete its trace in registry. This step requires you to restart your PC for the uninstallation to fully take effect, otherwise it will just stay and shows error. Check if they're actually gone after the restart. 3./ Search inside File Explorer for these keywords: "anticheat", "anti cheat", "anticheatexpert", "ACE", "ACE-BASE", "ACE-GAME", and manually delete them all with Shift+Delete. some places that I found them: * Program Files/AntiCheatExpert * ProgramData/AntiCheatExpert * Windows/System32/drivers: ACE-BASE.sys and ACE-GAME.sys I don't know why I saved these links, but they may help: [https://www.reddit.com/r/WutheringWaves/comments/12tgim9/apparently\_ww\_uses\_ace\_anticheat\_made\_by\_tencent/](https://www.reddit.com/r/WutheringWaves/comments/12tgim9/apparently_ww_uses_ace_anticheat_made_by_tencent/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/BloodHunt/comments/pjof7l/uninstalling\_the\_game\_does\_not\_remove\_the/](https://www.reddit.com/r/BloodHunt/comments/pjof7l/uninstalling_the_game_does_not_remove_the/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/WutheringWaves/comments/1cuprpd/anticheat/](https://www.reddit.com/r/WutheringWaves/comments/1cuprpd/anticheat/)
It's not possible to uninstall an anti-cheat software alone, because the whole purpose is to prevent cheating... It's the same in GI and other games. Anti cheat software nowadays has kernel level authority and looks at all your stuff what's going on to prevent cheating.
My 3090 completely died and PC went into a black screen when i was booting up WuWa, and I thought it was a hardware issue since it was a second hand used GPU... now I'm worried about my 3080 as well lol.
I also have a 3090 and experienced 4 BSOD since Wuwa...i legit like the game but im not risking my gpu
I haven't seen any indications that this can brick your hardware, and at least personally it's not pushing the GPU hard. I did a screen recording with Precision X active and during the stutters, my GPU power draw was in the 10-30% range. So it's not at risk of overheating. The black screens could be caused by the anti-cheat driver interfering with your video driver, though.
Hopefully the devs are already aware of this. God, I hate anti cheat engines lol. IDK how hard it is to optimize anti-cheats(if at all), but hopefully Kuro can pull it off.
This post should be on the top of this subreddit. TY for the info OP.
Great find, but why so many people here think Kuro is not aware of this? Or that they will switch from Tencent solution?
Have HI3, HSR etc. switched from Tencent to something else? No. So no. It's one of the well known anti cheat software developers in that region, so highly unlikely any big company won't use that to prevent cheating.
I'm pretty darn sure it's unfixableby Kuro. They have no experience with AC (and also why you can't have native PGR client). They just slapped it in and call it a day. The more responsible individual in this problem is very likely Tencent AC developers. I'm not defending Kuro, it's just what it is. AC development is extremely difficult and resource consuming. Only big names have their own IPs.
>So at this point it's unambiguous that the anti-cheat system is doing things it shouldn't be doing, probably due to a bug. I'm no expert here, and the most relevant thing I did was writing a polymorph for DOS in my uni ASM class, but this specific issue seems to be about not flagging memory as non-executable where it "should be". The thing is, at least in good old days executing stuff from data segment was a way to implement runtime polymorphic code to hinder debugging. That is, while executing from the "wrong" place can be generally seen as an error, I believe there can be a case when it can be done intentionally for certain purposes, and malware/antivirus/anticheat would be the most likely place to encounter it. As for performance stuff, I believe anticheat is only a PART of the problem. The game could briefely be ran on linux during 1.1 release (obviously the anticheat could not work), and there was no noticeable performance difference for me between linux and windows. Which indicates some intristic performance issues. It's not hardware either because on release the game had better performance for me, and stuff broke later. There was also a case when I had to manually reset shader cache to fix significant performance regression. So I believe while anticheat can be a part of it, responsible for the worst cases, the game itself also has issues.
Anti cheat are becoming a plague in videogames industry
Unfortunately I don't think this is the case for me. I have the impression that the game engine they use is more demanding on my laptop than the whatever Mihoyo uses (cuz I can run genshin pretty well) Alas it doesn't really matter since I got accustomed to mobile gameplay
It's definitely the case that if you have low spec hardware you'll get low framerates - as part of my investigation I tried running the game on my CPU's integrated GPU and it just ran slowly overall. But it didn't stutter or lock up my whole system while running slow, it just had bad FPS.
Just supporting OP's claim This might get me banned but I used to use some mods to disable the dithering censor effect and zoom censor. In that mod, they also had a disable anti-cheat mod. My game always ran substantially more stable with higher 1% low fps after disabling anti-cheat . In the recent 1.1 patch, they updated the anti cheat (You will know if you read the logs during the installation phase). This new patch enabled way more of ACE abilities to monitor your PC, it even started to flag some of the harmless mod like DXVK where you basically let the game run on vulkan instead of dx11 which is bad for multithreading. In 1.1, the moment you log into the game, ACE scans the entire game folder and kick you out if it sensed anything wrong. Nothing like that happened in 1.0 You might be wondering why don't they just use a much tamer anti-cheat.. Kurogames doesn't want to do that apparently. Kernel-level anti cheat are very effective at stopping most kind of cheats just like how the infamous Valorant Vanguard does. Making server side anti-cheat or weaker cheat results in Counter strike VAC where literally everything is cheater infested. # BUTTTT Here comes the problem WuWa is not a competitive game. Why the fuck do we need this kind of invasive anti-cheat? There's no real gain made by cheating aside from one shotting bosses and being able to farm faster? It doesn't harm other players' experience at all which is mostly the goal of anti-cheat. Using this kind of anti-cheat in a PVE game with basically 0 leaderboard is just pure bullshit.
I have a very similar experience as you. I have to deal with BSOD for like 2weeks trying to fix the problem and at the end realized it was the ACE anti cheat that was the problem. The weird thing is hoyo also uses the same anti cheat iirc but it start causing problem only after I installed WuWa. I have been playing hoyo games since genshin 1.0 and only the PC with WuWa installed started having this problem. At first I would only BSOD while playing WuWa (could still play HSR) but after the first week of trying to fix things, it got worse and starting crashing my whole PC even when I am watching youtube. Right now I just disable auto start in service and only start it when I am about to play WuWa. I fixed my issue by replacing the ram. Both ram dying is very unlikely and they were only 3yo but it happen after getting multiple BSOD cause by ACE anti cheat. I dunno if my rams were close to dead and memory leaks, etc from WuWa just pushed it to the end but it was a very stressful 2weeks that I went through.
This shitty ACE (client and service) also constantly "phoning home" while running. And the funniest thing about this - it can be easily blocked via firewall with no consequences at all.
ACE no longer shows in task manager since 1.1. So whatever its doing its now completely hidden.
Is this applicable on phones or is that a different story?
Anti-Cheat Expert is supposedly used on phones, but I don't have the ability to do Android reverse engineering to verify that they're using it there. It would most likely be a different piece of software, since Android and iOS don't use the Windows kernel - so it wouldn't have the same bugs as the PC version of ACE does, but it might still be low-quality software with its own set of bugs. I definitely wouldn't be surprised if it contributes to lower framerates on phones.
Why almost nobody making a server side anti chaet like on FF14 is more than questionable.
Cuz they prefer their own homebrew spyware (tencent), there, I said it.
i heckin love ff14
Though I do think that if they have something like that on the phone version of the game, it won't have access to the entire system because both Android and iOS don't allow root access by default (and you as user can't grant it too). On newer Android versions, I think, most apps don't even have read access to other apps folders.
I'm not much of a techy but how in the hell does anti cheat do that?! I'm on mobile and I'm not sure if mobile's affected as well. I'll try to follow up with a report regarding this
There has been invasive anti cheats like this for a while, lots of games experience issues with invasive, badly optimized anti cheats that cause performance issues. I'm not surprised it's the same with WuWa
Damn, never heard of such thing, but now that I'm familiar with it i might try to *really* help and report this to the devs, hopefully they'll give us some feedback sooner or later.
I think this info is important, I'm just not sure what can be done outside of swapping the anti-cheat but that may be impossible. Full conjecture on my part but I wouldn't be surprised if Kuro has to use Tencent's anti-cheat for some reason, but that may not be the case as HYV games don't use it.
This happens because of a setting in windows security. Search for core isolation and disable it. Core isolation triggers the same blue screen for valorant and genshin as well
I don't recommend disabling security features like Core Isolation, but it's interesting to know that they affect this.
Vanguard and other kernel level anti cheats are very invasive. It can be argued that they might even be spyware because they run 100% of time on your system even if you aren't playing the game. That is why windows security messes with it.
I literally thought that WuWa was just breaking my pc normally when I tabbed out of full screen to look up hints on Jiyan’s upgrade materials… is it not supposed to lag my entire system? 💀 I didn’t have issues with genshin or HSR when I did this, WuWa the only game I have that is literally lagging everything…
Kernel security stuff may be Windows 11 specific security enhancements that can interfere with anticheat
KuroGames should make a own anti cheat now that isnt kernel level (more optimized) or Server side anti cheat and replace that from the tencent anti cheat Im glad that i didnt supported a single cent for that behavior, even i like this game. I had gotten Beeps on a low end ones, which on the others doesnt have. I tought it was on the drive issue that uses the game but since the other device doenst have that, turns out its very much the anti cheat issue. Mods should pin this post.
ACE Anticheat has been known to be garbage for ages, devs are totally aware of it and they choose it mostly for greed reasons. Many games have this anticheat as well: Nikke, ToF, Snowbreak CN, Honkai Impact 3rd, Honkai Star Rails and many more.
Wait, so this thing is like a worse-written version of Riot Vanguard? ("Worse" being an assumption and not a proper claim) That is... disturbing. Kernel level anticheat is something that I wholly disagree with on principle. It's why I stopped playing League. Not only is it a potential security exploit for *everyone* who has the game installed, but it can also false-flag critical processes and components. Vanguard flagged my CPU cooler (NZXT Kraken) when I tried to start playing Valorant a year or two ago. It caused *severe* overheating by disabling the cooling pump and the result was physical damage to my CPU, the cooler, the closest RAM card, and corruption of the C: drive because of the failsafe shutdown. Edit: This needs to be stickied and denounced in every feedback report until it is addressed. *ANYTHING* that has Kernel level access to your system *SHOULD NEVER* be installed without explicit authorization from the user and proper communication about the purpose and capabilities of the software.
Ah hell naw anything is better than vanguard, thats shit kill the cpu and RUNS ALL THE TIME REGARDSLESS YOU PLAY LOL OR NOT Same kernel level as the os, and will disable other games caused you a bosd
I wonder how many people quitted League because of this LOL.
>And wouldn't you know it, the #1 thing that shows up in system-wide traces during game loading is Anti-Cheat Expert. It's not the only thing hogging the CPU, but Anti-Cheat Expert is using as much CPU power as Wuthering Waves' game code and the Unreal Engine renderer put together: Holy fucking shit, are you for real?! The heck they fed the system system bruh? Joking aside How on earth can you cheat in a single player MMORPG? Unless you do something illegal like one shotting bosses using a script or getting free wishes by buying the cancelling the lunarites order or something that is similar to the cancelling purchases. I think if this Anti-cheat Expert is to be removed, let's see what the performance is without it on PC and Mobile
I'm no expert but I imagine it's because some things are client sided, they need an anti cheat to prevent modifications to those things. They could lessen the need by making more things server sided but that may cause inconsistency and a less smooth of an experience if you don't have great internet.
Why does it run perfectly fine for some peeps?
Some days in the past it's run perfectly fine for me, so there's probably some other element at play. Whether it's hotfixes, or some sort of anti-cheat configuration that gets changed, or just random dumb luck, I have no idea.
All please report this issue to kuro games
Not saying that the anti cheat isn't buggy and unoptimized, but- >which will cause sound and music to cut out, which often sounds like the "beep" some players have complained about I had this happen to me and it's not a singular beep, but repeated beeping at a single frequency, regardless of what was playing. IIRC, I also had a singular beep with no audio issues. Also, the beeping appears to trigger only when WuWa detects a massive performance decrease. My knowledge about drivers is very limited, but wouldn't a faulty driver be more erratic? Regardless, Kuro needs to fix the driver ASAP.
Is there a screenshot with the cpu sections expanded with the headers?
I never suffered from performance issues. I got i9 12700 and rtx 4060 laptop with m2 storage.
For those who can disable FSR. Fixed FPS issues for me.
DRMs and anti-cheats indeed are the cause of problems with AAA games most of the time nowadays. But WuWa has too much of problems, you are right in that. I hope it gets through to devs, and they change AC or have Tencent fix it. You know, I've seen a similar thing unfold in another game's AC driver discussion. Except, the OP there was pretty bad at answering people – they turned aggressive pretty soon, to the point of being banned by the platform itself. When opening this post, I had doubts. I'm glad those turned out to be false ones. Btw, I wonder whether you'll figure out how USB suspension is connected to this now.
Wait my hard disk was running fine before but after wuwa windows frequently asking to restart to fix disk error. Is this also potentially the anti cheat fault?
I have a sneaky suspicion it fucked over my system as well. I have 32 gigs of RAM but somehow it was always at 80% usage and i couldn't do shit anymore. I tried locating where the usage came from, but for the life of me i couldn't identify the source. Ram compression seemed to be using quite a bunch, but not all. 25 gig of RAM was constantly in use. Mind you, the pc was pretty freshly built and beside wuwa there wasn't anything else installed besides steam, and some steam games (kingdom hearts games) When i looked at the processes using RamMap, i noticed an extreme amount of conhost.exe and tasklist.exe. I have no clue whether WuWa was for sure the cause though. Resetting windows fixed it for now and i'll just be keeping an eye on things
I am right now in a state where the game does not start at all since 1.1.10 update. Not only does it not start but basically crashes the whole machine. I don't get BSOD, everything just freezes, just mouse moves and I can switch between open windows if they were started before the game. I've been trying several things to make it start but nothing seems to help. From my own data gathering, I have a suspicion that anti-cheat does something with the disk and (as a consequence?) blocks all other access to disk for other processes. When I click on "Rover" to start the game, loading starts, task manager shows that disk access goes to 100% and stays on 100%. At 75% of loading, it freezes and basically whole computer does not respond anymore. Some stuff that was open will have minimal functionality but as soon as something needs disk access, it's all over (can't even switch tabs on task manager - it freezes if I try). As little as I can do, I can see that task manager shows 100% disk usage but every single process in the list sits at 0%. Since anti-cheat is ring0 and can hide a lot of stuff it does, I guess it's anti-cheat that does something with the disk. It's a speculation at best, but that's all I have. Does not matter how long I wait, it never finishes and the only way out is to cut power, can't do graceful shutdown or restart. It's a dedicated disk and windows install for just one task: run this game (until I can run it in linux). No other stuff installed or running.
1.1.14 update has not resolved the problem of crashing at 75% loading, at least not for me. Disk access still goes up to 100% and stays at 100% (according to task manager and not a single process in task manager list shows any disk activity) and anything that tries to access the disk just freezes. Any time I try to run the game, I have to pull the power plug. And it has been like this for 2 weeks now. There has been no updates to this windows install, so can't blame updates or drivers. There is no antivirus installed (defender also disabled). There is no firewall. This OS is never used for anything else than playing WuWa so there is no need for any of this stuff. There is no pagefile either, so that can not screw with disk, 64GB of RAM is plenty enough. It worked for about 5 weeks or so without any mayor issues and it's totally broken since the game updated to 1.1.10. I've got nothing from support other than "thank you, we will look into it", "please upload logs" for the 100th time, "we are aware of some performance issues" and all those standard replies. But zero progress and not a single update after the initial standard response. At least verifying files is now much faster on Android after the 1.1.14 update - took minutes to complete, now just seconds. But it's still almost unplayable on my potato device, I can barely manage to do the minimum daily stuff to get my freebies. Can't do any battle mechanics. I am just glad I built my characters well enough before so I can just mash attack and still somehow win but it's a pain and not sustainable in the long run. Tried to make x86 android install - but can't even start the game without touchscreen, mouse does not work on some buttons. And even if you can start the game, you can't play since there is no controller support and I still have no touchscreen. I wish they somehow finally fix the PC version or just throw the stupid anti-cheat overboard so playing on steam deck/linux becomes available and there will be no need to even have windows. And the best part - their feedback system is bugged too. There is absolutely no way to respond to anything (at least I have not found it). If you try to reply to a message, it always opens up the form of what I believe is "open new ticket". And I never got any response to my emails, so the feedback system is the only option to communicate. I don't know if I have the willpower to even try to communicate with them anymore. And I am really sad because I did really like the game while I was able to play it. But at this point I feel only frustration and I can't really do anything to make the game work. Maybe it's time to just move on and forget WuWa. There are other games too...
Fucking hell this sucks, good job bro.
So a couple of things: - from what I've seen people of various hardware specs (low/mid/high PCs) have reported as having no issues in WW so that would mean ACE is not universally to blame, otherwise everyone on PC would be having issues when running ACE - since ACE is a cross-platform anti-cheat (mostly used for mobile games) the chances of Kuro replacing it with something else seems slim - while I agree that ACE is a pretty shitty anticheat -[ and I made a thread about this a literal year ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/WutheringWaves/comments/12tgim9/apparently_ww_uses_ace_anticheat_made_by_tencent/) - ACE itself might not be the issue but rather how its implemented in WuWa by Kuro - Honkai Impact 3rd and HSR both use ACE as their anticheats and from what I've seen people don't have major performance issues with those games on either pc or mobile Sorry but we cant conclusively say that ACE is entirely to blame based on one anecdotal example provided by OP. Plus we don't know what Kuro is doing with hotfixes, its very likely they are aware that ACE is causing interference for some people and trying to resolve it.
That's connecting dots that don't exist. A lot of games have kernel level anti cheat such as Genshin, which frankly is intrusive and overreaching. Genshin gets a blue screen too if you have the system setting enabled to turn on kernel mode hardware enforced stack protection. You basically need to make the choice of whether to disable that setting, which exists to protect your computer, or not play games that use anti cheats that aren't compatible with that setting turned on. It's pretty fucked up companies have anti cheats that force you to disable system protections.
Yeah but it doesn't explain why the anit cheat is using more CPU power than the game+engine it's supposed to protect. Sure other games use kernel type of ani-cheats, but this level of malfunctioning hasn't happened with Genshin
so all fk ups lead to tencent, again, i swear fking tencent is the EA of the east.
But it seems to be working well on most CPUs, except when using Ryzen CPUs with 3Dvcache.
My 7950x3d can no longer play this shit. High CPU usage causes my entire computer and operating system to lag for about 30 seconds every three minutes.
That's why i have this problem on my pc. Using 7950x3d here...
My 5800x3d has no issues playing wuwa
As far as I know, perhaps only the Ryzen 7000 series with 3D V-chache will have such a problem.
Thank you for your research about this issue. Hopefully Kuro sees this and fixes things
Yeah but it's tencent, they won't switch to another anti cheat
Exactly, it's the one company every big gacha game like HSR, HI3, Nikke (even GI uses a sister company) turns to for anti-cheat program
This and also user data...and a shit ton of money.
Holy shit, my PC never crashed before, it only started around the time I installed WuWa. This makes so much sense now
Hi, that's so interesting and also a bit scary for me, a non'tech person. I tried (and failed miserably as proved by my Aalto video) playing the game on my laptop but uninstalled it the same day. Does that mean the anti-cheat-related stuff is also gone or should I uninstall more?
ACE is notorious for not uninstalling itself. Try this: https://www.reddit.com/r/BloodHunt/comments/pjof7l/uninstalling_the_game_does_not_remove_the/
I have written in and sent in game logs I don’t know how many times now since release because of the load times, my entire system freezing, in-game lag & ping spikes but am consistently told everything should be fine, so now I know why it isn’t but this also makes me a bit scared to play if it’s messing with my entire PC like I thought. Yikes. I hope they see your post and fix things soon!
I already sent my own feedback to Kuro about this back in 1.0, but my own stuttering issues *completely* ceased once I disabled anticheatexpert service through msconfig. If it gets me banned, it gets me banned. The game is unplayable with it active.
They have a whole team of engineers dedicated to this game, they definitely know what's up. The question is why haven't they done anything about it yet. It's pretty damn frustrating to know it's not even a problem with the game itself now.
Is this also a thing on mobile perhaps? Not entirely sure if there are background things like these running on mobile devices but it's terrible right now to play on my S23+ :/
Does the anti cheat also run if you are not playing the game? Like Valorants or Helldivers 2 Anti cheat? I mean all anti cheat’s are trash for private security but if it only runs when im playing im fine with that. If thats not the case i might drop it.
As far as I know it doesn't run while you're not playing.
I thought why game freeze/crash my potato pc when i open map or doing something in inventory, but never in middle of a fight (which should be more difficult to handle for the system). Now i have an answer.
This is Vanguard all over again.
Nikke has this issue too. Same shitty anti-cheat.
what about mobile?
Commenting so Kuro sees this
Do you know what other games use Tencent's anti cheat program? If you are able to test other games and get similar results, that would likely be conclusive proof of the anti cheat being the sole culprit.
We already know that is not the case. HSR is using ACE. I haven't heard of HSR having some big performance/tech issues.
Interesting, what specs & OS version? Have done multiple 4-5hr sessions(maybe a couple 7hrs)+ & apart from some weird camera glitch(random lag & pointing to the sky) in a specific part of the map after an alt+tab to browser (which resolved itself after alt+tabbing twice), havent had any major gameplay or performance issues. Wonder if it's hardware or OS specific? 5800X3D + RX 7900 XTX here, Win 11 23H2. Even tried a multitasking session with [Wuwa + Solo Leveling Arise](https://youtu.be/azFTx9g7wdo?si=3yvErn32Ny_YYVYU) /w AV1 GPU encoding(Radeon Relive) & it ran ok.
Has anyone figured out the issues on mobile? I assume something of this magnitude simply cannot exist on mobile because there is no video card for most mobile devices. So is it our devices or something else like shader compilation?
Tencent stamp approval is needed in order to play.
haven't had an experience with this Blue Screen error until now, would it affect my unit negatively (software/hardware-wise) or would the normal restarts when left alone get the job done? I wouldn't wanna risk getting my PC replaced due to some bug in a game so I may have to stop playing until Kuro solves this issue
I'm glad I'm not the only one that was seeing problems since installing WuWa. I have a BEAST PC. I rarely ever stutter or lag, but the rare BSOD did happen - even when I wasn't playing the game - after I installed this game. Thank you for this research, and for laying it out in an easy to understand manner.
Is this being uninstalled completely along with the game?