Apex Legends is a really good battle royale, but like so many popular online games, it has a problem with cheaters. Pop around to the Apex subreddit and you can find all kinds of complaints about players breaking the rules instead of competing fairly, over the past few months the game has also been struggling with DDoS problems. Thankfully, Respawn said on Twitter today that it is "pursuing several options to crack down on cheating."
Those options include:
- Hiring more people to bolster its ability to manually ban cheaters
- Developing new tools to automatically detect and stop DDoS attacks
- Look into new ways "to more quickly catch and remove cheaters from games"
"Playing against cheaters sucks," Respawn tweeted. "We'll keep you updated as we ship the above changes and pursue new ones."
- Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has now banned 136,000 accounts as part of the ongoing struggle to ensure fair play but still says that IP banning isn't an option
- Epic will give Fortnite cheaters 'a second chance' with a new, more forgiving ban policy, as long as they didn't do anything too awful or illegal
The Respawn team is pursuing several options to crack down on cheating in @playapex:⚒️ Hiring more people to focus on manual bans🔧 Developing more tools to automatically detect and stop DDOS attacks🛑 Investigating ways to more quickly catch and remove cheaters from gamesJune 28, 2021
As updates go, there's really not much to see, especially when compared to detailed anti-cheat updates and reports from games like Call of Duty: Warzone and Rainbow Six Siege. But that doesn't reflect a lack of aggressiveness on Respawn's part when it comes to dealing with cheaters: In March it dropped the hammer on more than 700 high-ranked Apex players, including over 180 at the Diamond and Predator ranks—the top two ranks in Apex Legends competitive play—and in May it warned that players exploiting a "ghost rock" bug is a bannable offense.
Apex's recent bump in popularity (thanks in part to Season 9 being really fun) makes it a larger target than ever for cheaters looking for an easy win and Respawn will have to crank up its efforts to keep up.
