Respawn Entertainment has not relented on its crackdown against Apex Legends cheaters, with the developer revealing that 770,000 players on the game’s PC version have been banned.
In a developer update posted on the game’s official sub-Reddit, Respawn added that it has also blocked more than 300,000 account creations, and has banned more than 4,000 cheat seller accounts in just the past 20 days.
Respawn said that it is working closely with EA Security and Fraud, the Origin teams, and fellow developers from DICE, FIFA, and Capital Games for its anti-cheat measures. It is also maintaining the Easy-Anti-Cheat (EAC) system, which is automatically finding new cheats.
The developer said that it will not reveal what else it is working on in order to not alert cheat makers, but that it is attacking the issue “from every angle.”
“We take cheating in [Apex Legends] incredibly serious and have a large amount of resources tackling it from a variety of angles. It is a constant war with the cheat makers that we will continue to fight,” Respawn said in the Reddit post.
The developer’s efforts are apparently making a huge difference in the Apex Legends community, with the total number of PC matches affected by cheaters and spammers reduced by more than half over the past month.
Respawn has been on the hunt for cheaters ever since Apex Legends launched in February, with 16,000 cheaters already banned from the game after just two weeks since its release.
By March, the number of banned cheaters on the shooter’s PC version had increased to more than 355,000. In the post that revealed that figure, Respawn said that it would be rolling out an in-game report feature to Apex Legends on PC. That feature is now live and helping to sniff out new cheats, supporting the EAC system.
Apex Legends cheaters have started receiving permanent hardware bans, which prevents them from creating new accounts on PCs that have been used to cheat on the Battle Royale shooter. With this move, Respawn is raising the bar for other developers in the fight against cheating in online multiplayer games, which is one of the major factors that will ruin the experience for gamers and make them play something else.
On paper, there’s not much that distinguishes Apex Legends from the countless other battle royale’s clogging up the oversaturated market, our review noted of the game in March. It has its own spin on PUBG’s steadily constricting death ring, Overwatch’s roster of likable characters, and Titanfall 2’s parkour-inspired fluidity. It separates itself from the dozens of other genre clones through polish, passion, and heart.
And best of all, it’s free.
