Apex Legends cheaters hit by huge ban wave with more to come
An Apex Legends developer has manually banned over 600 cheaters in the past week as an ongoing effort to keep Season 8 clean.
Much like Activision’s Warzone, EA’s Apex Legends also has its fair share of cheaters in their games. It may be a bit less lucrative to cheat in Apex Legends, with crossplay being input-based – putting them mainly against other PC players. In Warzone, you can come across players from any system, at any time.
Regardless, it doesn’t matter which game you play on PC. If there’s a scent of competition, someone, somewhere will cheat. It’s up to developers to create their own anti-cheats in-house or pay for support from a third-party anti-cheat software, like Easy Anti-Cheat.
Apex Legends uses Easy Anti-Cheat, which is a regularly updated cheat detection tool with a dedicated team (composed of both Apex developers and Easy Anti-Cheat developers) set to constantly fight the wave of crafty cheat developers.
In addition to the automatic detection tool, developers can also manually spectate and ban players the anti-cheat does not identify, which is a task developer Conor Ford on the Apex Security team has taken up.
Manual ban wave wipes out 600 players
For those pesky cheaters that make it past the anti-cheat, developers like Ford are dedicated to banning them. This can take several hours of spectating players in-game to properly conclude if they’re hacking.
In just a single day of manual bans, Ford was able to ban a stunning 652 cheaters from the live servers.
This follows another ban wave he put out himself on February 10, banning 507 PS4 players abusing an RP glitch in ranked mode – supposedly banning them for the entirety of Season 8. In response, he requested the banned players “do something actually productive instead of cheating.”
Japan servers also getting a ban wave
If any region is filled with cheaters, it’s most certainly the densely populated Asian server. For games like PlayerUnknowns Battlegrounds, this was a huge issue when the game originally launched.
Fortunately for players on that server, it appears Respawn is also dedicated to banning cheaters in the coming weeks, per a tweet from Hideouts.
Starting things off, Ford stated that he is “dedicating a lot of (his) time this week to specifically focus on cleaning out (the Japanese) servers”. In a follow-up tweet, he also stated that there are “plans in place, that will be announced relatively soon, to better help this problem.”
Hopefully, we won’t have to wait long to see those plans, if they are specifically dedicated to anti-cheat measures, they will surely help the entire player base.
Image Credit: Respawn/EA