Drew McCoy, project lead for Respawn Entertainment, recently published a blog post detailing the status of the companies ongoing battle with Apex Legends cheaters on PC and how the team will handle the problem in coming months.
The update was promised in the previous week’s blog post and addresses concerns about a wide range of cheating activities, from aim-bots and speed modifiers, to account sellers and account farming.
McCoy said:
We’ve been working 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 we’ve already rolled out several updates (and will be continually doing so for the foreseeable future), others will take time to fully implement.
We can’t share details on what we’re doing so as to not give a head’s up to the cheat makers, but what we can say is that we’re attacking this from every angle[.]
These angles include beefing up cheater detection methods and, most importantly, the introduction of a new cheater report tool.
McCoy said the new tool has already helped Respawn discover new cheats, including those that were previously undetectable; Easy-Anti Cheat is now able to detect those automatically.
All total, 300,000 account creations have been blocked, and more than 700,000 players have been banned. That’s only a small fraction of Apex Legends‘ concurrent players from a few months ago, but still, it’s a significant step forward.
In the last 20 days alone, 4,000 spam accounts were banned, and the number of matches tarnished by cheating has been reduced by more than half within a month.
Some fans might have mourned Respawn’s choice of EAC when the decision became public, but it seems Respawn is making good on its promise to root out cheaters and keep the game as fair as possible.
