In case you’ve been living under a rock for a while, Apex Legends is the game of the moment and hogging all of the spotlight, but not always for the right reasons. It’s a tale as old as the video game industry itself, which makes it not too surprising that Respawn Entertainment is finding itself in the midst of a tough battle against cheaters and abusers looking for an easy way to win.
In fact, we already know that the developer banned over 300,000 players in the first month of release, and that number will no doubt continue to climb. With a base of more than 50 million people, 300,000 may look like just a drop in the ocean, but the problem of where these offenders are gaining access to hacks and aimbot software remains.
Still, Respawn is making an effort to fix the issue and now, they’ve finally added a reporting system in-game – as promised. It arrived alongside the Season 1 update yesterday and below, you can find the full patch notes that explain it.
- Added Report a Player feature for cheating and abuse on PC.
- Players can now report cheaters they encounter in-game and it’ll be sent directly to Easy Anti-Cheat. You can do this from either the spectate view after dying or when looking at your team’s Banner Cards in the Squad tab.
- We have lots of other work going on behind the scenes and this remains high priority for us. We won’t be able to share many specifics of what we’re doing but we’ll strive to provide updates on progress for the things we can talk about.
- Speed hacking: We do currently have anti-speed hacking in Apex Legends, but it’s not being as effective as intended due to a bug that we believe we’ve identified and will be addressing in our next server update. Will provide ETA for it when I have it. Working to get it out ASAP.
- Added Report a Player for abuse on Consoles
- You can report players from the spectate view after dying or when looking at your team’s Banner Cards in the Squad tab.
Once again, it’s clear that Respawn’s well aware of the issue and is making great strides to knock out the cheaters and abusers, and surely we’ll see them taking even more steps to prevent cheating in the months to come. But will it be enough to fully rid Apex Legends of those who shouldn’t be playing it?
Well, that’s hard to say. Fortnite also suffered from a pretty big cheating problem in its early days and Epic had to go to incredible lengths to clean it up. Granted, they’ve done an excellent job of fixing the problem so far, but even now, there’s still a fair amount of cheating going on.
In other words, Respawn has a long road ahead of them, and we can only hope that they continue to take action against those who seek to ruin the game for others.
