Apex Legends developer Respawn Entertainment scored what appeared to be a decisive victory over cheaters in a recent update. Following last week’s patch going live, hackers and cheaters alike began reporting their bans en masse across social media, with some even having the gall to criticize Respawn for their actions. With previous ban waves, unsavoury players have often been able to make a new account and simply continue cheating away to their heart’s content, though this time, Respawn was one step ahead of the curve and took action against those accounts, too.
In the days following, players reported near enough a cheat-free environment not infested with aimbots and other malicious software, though, as we all know, nothing lasts forever. Respawn may have successfully wiped every cheater in existence out with last week’s nuke, but players today are reporting that a new type of ‘soft cheating’ is on the rise in its place. As per DarthAesder’s Reddit post, this newfangled method of cheating involves deliberately prohibiting aimbot software from having perfect accuracy in order to evade Respawn’s anti-cheating algorithm.
The banwave in the last week made games almost bearable to play on Asia/SG servers. The chance of encountering a cheater dropped to about 1 in 10 games. However since about 12 hours ago there has been an incredible surge of cheaters once again. Quite possibly a new cheat has been released on their forums.
Soft cheating is on the rise, where cheaters are now reducing their aimbots to levels indiscernible to an anti cheat algorithm, but obvious enough from the receiving end of it. When spectating them you can see the aimbot locking on, but their cheats give a buffer of missed shots to fool the accuracy counter. This “soft cheating” is even more problematic than the previous cases where aimbots were cranked to the max. New players are disillusioned because they think they are being outplayed on pure skill, and veteran players being killed instantly makes one suspicious of cheats which actually punishes good players.
Before you ask me to simply “git gud”, I have 3k damage badges and triple triple on 4 of my legends. I play competitively and am pretty experienced. I can tell you that things like receiving 100% successful tracking damage on a zipline are blatantly obvious to players, but the algorithm simply cannot catch on.
Please don’t downvote, there are cheaters with literally thousands of kills despite Respawn’s previous attempt to ban them. The new wave of soft cheating needs some attention.
While the above report could simply be interpreted as a case of one player being outplayed by skilled opponents, the account says that this isn’t the case and that the cheating is obvious when using Apex‘s in-built spectate feature. Furthermore, the thread has since attracted more than 400 responses from other players with similar accounts of encountering soft cheaters, seemingly corroborating the original claims.
One player details how, having visited forums dedicated to cheating, they found people discussing their ability to evade detection by playing dumb when others are spectating them. That way, players are less likely to report them and simply move on. The news will no doubt be troubling for Respawn, which has already exhausted massive efforts to combat cheaters in Apex Legends, and this new-wave version could prove particularly hard to stamp out.