Apex Legends Has Banned 355,000 PC Cheaters

Apex Legends developer Respawn Entertainment announced that it's banned more than 355,000 players on PC since the game's debut. That's a drop in the bucket compared to the 50 million people who are playing the game, but every single one of those players benefits from having cheaters kicked out of the battle royale.

Respawn said in a Reddit post on March 8 that Apex Legends currently relies on Easy Anti-Cheat and that even though "the service works," it's not going to rest on its laurels. The developer said it's taking the following actions to make some improvements to Apex Legends' anti-cheat tools:

• Reaching out and working directly with experts, both within and outside of EA
• Scaling up its anti-cheat team
• Adding a report feature on PC to report cheaters in game that goes directly to Easy-Anti-Cheat.

"We’re going to have to be pretty secretive about our plans," the developer said, because "cheaters are crafty and we don’t want them to see us coming."

Respawn also said that it's considering how to handle people who spam during character select, figuring out why servers can suffer from slow performance during the start of matches and having AMD visit its studio to resolve crashes for Apex Legends players using the company's graphics cards. It's already done the same with Nvidia.

The developer also dashed hopes for an option to reconnect to matches. It gave two reasons why: It fears players would abuse the feature, and because "we believe the resources needed to build, test and release it are better spent focused on fixing stability issues so that the feature isn’t necessary."

Getting rid of cheaters and improving a game's infrastructure are just as vital to a title's success as the introduction of new features. People generally don't like to play with cheaters, and technical issues can mar otherwise fun experiences. Respawn's commitment to handling both issues should help Apex Legends retain its players and avoid being another flash in the pan.