LogInReportedly, the program stays on your computer even if you delete the game.
The long-awaited continuation of NovaLogic's first-person shooter series, Delta Force, was finally shipped by Tencent's TiMi Studio Group earlier this week, only to receive, much to the surprise of many, an avalanche of criticism and poor reviews rather than the widespread acclaim and tears of nostalgic joy the developers had likely anticipated.
Although the game got off to a solid start, reaching over 100K concurrent players on its first day, its Steam rating now stands at 'Mixed,' and not for the usual reasons like bad optimization, tedious gameplay, poorly written story and characters, or the game simply being boring, but for something arguably even worse than those four put together.
The main issue causing the poor reception is that Delta Force installs Tencent's Anti-Cheat Expert (ACE) – a kernel-level anti-cheat software that reviewers have described as "invasive" and compared to spyware – on your PC without explicitly informing you about it. According to reviews, ACE conflicts with another kernel-level program, Easy-Anti Cheat, which is present in games like Fortnite, PUBG, Apex Legends, Rust, The Finals, Valorant, and many others, preventing those games from even starting.
To make matters worse, closing or even uninstalling the game reportedly doesn't stop ACE, with the service continuing to run behind the scenes on your system, forcing players dissatisfied with the game to write their own guides on how to remove it. Here's one such guide shared by Steam user Alyzah:
"Open CMD in administrator mode and enter these commands:
sc delete ACE-GAME
sc delete ACE-BASE
sc delete "AntiCheatExpert Service"
sc delete "AntiCheatExpert Protection"
And of course, restart your PC to finalize the deletions."
Another reason players dislike ACE is its spyware-like nature, which has led many to worry that the program might be stealing user data and sending it to Tencent to use as they please.
Although the development team has vehemently denied this, stating that their anti-cheating tools are "not intended to access or misuse player information, nor are they associated with any political agendas" and claiming that the "anti-cheat tool only runs while the game is active," describing evidence of the contrary as "false alerts," it's unlikely that these reassurances will actually convince any gamer who already has their suspicions.
TiMi Studio Group
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