Respawn Entertainment, in its continuing fight against cheaters and spammers in Apex Legends, will soon match them up against each other to prevent them from destroying the experience for legitimate players.
The developer, in a check-in post on Reddit, provided a glimpse into what it is working on behind the scenes to combat cheating in the battle royale shooter.
One of the features that Respawn is working on is matchmaking that will place detected cheaters and spammers in games against each other. By making them fight against each other, legitimate players will be saved from the frustration of going up against cheaters, though Redditors believe that there are other benefits to Respawn’s move.
Redditor Danksop said that by making cheaters fight against each other instead of outright banning them, they will remain off the game’s live servers as a ban will likely just make them create another account immediately.
Cheaters may soon figure out that they are going up against other cheaters exclusively, and may then create a new account to get back to the live servers. However, as Redditor G00dcoffee pointed out, as they keep playing after being flagged as cheaters, Respawn will be able to collect data from them to improve its own anti-cheat measures.
In the Reddit post, Respawn revealed other things it is working on in the fight against Apex Legends cheaters, such as using machine learning to make models that will detect and automatically ban cheaters, and improving detection to identify and ban new spam accounts even before they are used. The developer is also considering implementing two-factor authentication in certain regions on high-risk accounts, and is investigating how people party up for matches because willingly teaming up with cheaters, even if they do not use cheats themselves, is still considered cheating.
“As we’ve said before, the war against cheaters will be ongoing and remains a high priority for us. There will always be work to do, improvements to make, and new things to adapt to,” Respawn said, right before expressing gratitude to players who have helped the developer track down cheaters in Apex Legends.
