With thanksgiving, Apex Legends players are hoping that cheaters take a break. Cheaters have always been popular among First Person shooter titles. This includes the Best Multiplayer Game of the Year 2019, Apex Legends. Other popular games such as Warzone, CS:GO are not spared either.
Since its launch, the popular Battle Royale game has been plagued with rampant hackers. Cheaters have greatly affected the gaming experience ranging from speed hacks, aimbots to even hijacking chats in lobbies. Notwithstanding these annoying cheats, players were also met with frequent server crashes as server bugs are being exploited in the past seasons. Respawn which initially planned to place cheaters in the same lobbies did not materialise. Their efforts to stop cheaters via its anti-cheat system were somewhat not effective as players have been witnessing new cheaters in the lobbies.
Credits: Reddit, Cobbo
In a Reddit post, a user named Cobbo recently found a cheater in the middle of a ranked match and was apparently eliminated by him. He realised about the cheating incident after spectating his movement and decided to report him via the in-game reporting system. The cheater continued to shred the opponents in the Silver lobby and it was obvious that he was aimbotting. The players could only rejoice when the reported player was apparently banned on the spot near the end of the match.
Many content creators and pro players have been complaining that Respawn is not doing enough to keep the game and ensure that lobbies are clear off cheaters. One of the issues in Apex Legends is that cheaters can simply create a new account for free. Hence, simply removing or banning cheaters will not resolve the situation. Popular game titles are very attractive to cheaters because they could leverage on hacks to boost other players or sell accounts for cash. Without a proper control system, it makes making quick money even easier. Unlike Valorant, Riot takes cheating very seriously and have been taking the situation under tight scrutiny including smurfing. Players who cheats in the game will simply be slapped with an immediate ban. Although it may not totally stop all hackers, Riot takes action very quickly on suspicious activities.
Credit: Reddit, cksrajpoot
Prominent Apex Legends player, ImperialHal was recently frustrated the cheating situation. He blamed the game’s lack of proper control and its sub-par anti-cheat system for allowing cheaters to reach high ranked lobbies. He posted in Twitter after he was eliminated many times in top tier ranked games. Although the situation was not as bad as Warzone, fans agreed that this is not an excuse for Respawn to let hackers have their way. Last year, ImperialHal was even harassed by infamous hacker, Tufi, throughout his stream. Another contestable issue was on controllers using third party hardware such as Strike Packs which can effectively reduce recoil and increase fire rates.
Apex legends anti cheat is prob the worst out of any game ive played. Constant hacked accounts getting to pred and even people CHEATING IN TOURNEYS . What a game we play 👍
— TSMFTX ImperialHal (@ImperialHal) November 9, 2021
Whilst Respawn’s security head, Hideout, has a team watching out for cheaters, it was still not a happy ending because he could only pay more attention to pro players and there appears more to be done. Back in June, Respawn previously highlighted their strategy to crack down on cheaters. But it seemed that they should do more to contain the situation despite launching Season 11 successfully. Check out what’s new in Season 11 here.
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 games— Respawn (@Respawn) June 28, 2021