Cheating is an issue that many games continue to face, but in the case of Apex Legends, Respawn Entertainment claims that it is making headway into this matter.
Project Lead Drew McCoy shared that the development team continue to work “closely with key experts across EA, including EA Security and Fraud, the Origin teams, and our fellow developers at DICE, FIFA, and Capital Games, in addition to Easy-Anti-Cheat." While the team has already rolled out some updates, others will take more time before they are fully implemented.
McCoy added that Respawn is unable to share details on what they are doing in order not to give cheat makers an idea. However, he assured everyone that they are “attacking this from every angle.”
In fact, McCoy revealed that the recently added in-game reporting tool resulted in the discovery of new cheats. This included cheats that have been previously undetectable, but have been automatically detected through the EAC.
In relation to the anti-cheat measures, Respawn said that:
- Total bans are now at 770,000 players
- At least 300,000 account creations have been blocked
- Over the last 20 days, 4,000 cheat seller accounts (spammers) have been banned
- Total matches on PC impacted by cheaters or spammers have been lowered by more than 50% in the last month
McCoy said further that they are taking cheating in Apex Legends seriously and have allocated a large amount of resources in order to tackle the issue from different angles. He declared that the war with cheat makers is one that they “will continue to fight.” McCoy revealed that they will also provide an update on other issues that have been raised soon.
While it is admirable that Apex Legends is indeed working to minimize cheating, they need to look into what is known as soft cheating. Soft cheating is when players continue to use aimbots, but tweak it so that it remains undetected by any anti-cheat measures. For example, instead of getting 100% hit rate, it is lowered to 70%. With this, the anti-cheat system continues to think it is all human. Another difficulty with soft cheating is that it is hard to detect the account that is cheating. So far, the only method available is to report the account and hope Respawn takes the time to review.
