There’s getting hit with the banhammer, and then there’s what happened this past week with cheaters in the most popular battle royale title, Apex Legends. After more than 15,000 players were banned for cheating in the first week, that number of caught hackers and cheaters has risen exponentially. Since the game cracked the milestone of 10 million players in it’s first week, it’s since skyrocketed to more than 50 million players overall in the first month since launch.
That explosion in popularity also brought in tons of people looking to cheat, whether to gain the upper hand to compensate for lack of ability, or just to ruin people’s fun, there were hundreds of thousands of gamers who found their enjoyment from cheating in Apex Legends. So in short, Respawn dropped a ban nuke on the whole enterprise of cheats in their flagship title.
Respawn wasn’t too happy about that trend though, and neither were legitimate players. The resulting backlash came swiftly, with more than 350,000 accounts being banned in the last month for some form of cheating in-game. n a recent Reddit update, Respawn’s community manager, Jay Frechette revealed that number and other details about the future of anti-cheat methods in Apex.
Respawn will be working with EA and other anti-cheating specialists, like those at Epic, to develop detection and anti-cheat protections at the server level, and possibly client-side, although specifics weren’t disclosed as of yet. Although there is a player reporting system on the way. Players will be able to automatically submit relevant data to the developers and their anti-cheat partners when they file a report.
It will be interesting to see how EA and Respawn respond legally to the creators of these cheats. Cheat creators and modders in various games have been hit with legal threats and full lawsuits many times, so there’s a possibility that EA could go that route.
