Virual

The desktop app is called "EA App" not "EA Play" which is where the confusion is coming from. "EA Play" is the game subscription service that's like gamepass.

I had the exact same issue as you in Apex Legends, and I was able to find a workaround. Basically, nvidia reflex didn't work with dx11 (DXVK) at all, but forcing the game into dx12 (VKD3D) mode worked without issue.

To enable, you just need to set this in your launch options.

%command% -anticheat_settings=SettingsDX12.json

Also, you may need to set the nvapi environmental variable, but I'm pretty sure nvapi is already enabled in proton for Apex Legends.

I recommend using proton experimental as it uses an up-to-date version of dxvk-nvapi

As of proton 9.0 the environmental variable is now PROTON_FORCE_NVAPI=1

https://github.com/jp7677/dxvk-nvapi?tab=readme-ov-file#steam-play--proton

From the article:

“Industry traffic has declined in major markets like the U.S., Australia, Canada, and Germany. In several markets, we also continue to be negatively impacted by the war in the Middle East,” McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said on the company’s earnings call.

So it does seem to be working to some extent.

The IP address that a request is coming from can absolutely cause captchas to be triggered. If the host is seeing a lot of bot activity from your IP, it'll do that. That and blacklisting is why Mullvad rotates IPs.

PIA and Mullvad should have equal speeds because they both have 10gbps servers and wireguard. Both PIA and Mullvad use ram-only servers exclusively. As for search engine captchas, I never get them with Mullvad. The main issue with PIA is that they were bought by a questionable company that previously developed adware. You can read about that here. Personally, I would never use a privacy tool that is owned by an ad company, even if they claim to have changed. I used them up until the acquisition, then switched and have been extremely happy with Mullvad.

Banding is that annoying color gradient you see sometimes in dark scenes.

On the left is 8 bit and on the right is 10 bit.

HEVC 10 bit in order to reduce banding for animation, especially during dark scenes. I know H264 Hi10 exists, but it has poor hardware support, so using HEVC 10 bit is the best option (I don't own a single streaming device that supports HW accelerated Hi10, besides my PC). Also, an added benefit is reduced file size. I find that doing my own encodes is very rarely worth it, but when I do, I use FFmpeg in the CLI and not tdarr.

Why both Overseerr and Ombi?