Respawn Entertainment is reportedly ramping up the crackdown onApex Legendscheaters through permanent hardware bans against PC players.
The permanent bans against cheaters on the battle royale shooter’s PC versionfirst surfacedon a thread on the officialApex Legendssub-Reddit. The thread contained screenshots of posts from cheating forums showing complaints from players that they have been unable to rejoin the game after having their account banned.
The ban, apparently, is no longer just on the cheater’s account. Respawn is reportedly issuing permanent hardware bans, so the cheaters who create new accounts on their PCs are getting banned almost immediately.
The screenshot in the opening post of the aforementioned thread on theApex Legendssub-Reddit revealed a cheater who has tried nearly everything, including changing the MAC address, reformatting, and partitioning the hard drives of the PC, all to no avail.
There still appears to be a limited number of ways for players who received permanent hardware bans to get back into the game, including buying a whole new PC. That seems like a pretty bad deal just to play one game, but it goes to show that cheaters never prosper.Apex Legendsplayers who choose to play the game the correct way, meanwhile, arenot sympatheticto the plight of cheaters, even ones that claim that they will no longer use cheating software.
With the permanent hardware bans, Respawn israising the barfor other developers in addressing the issue of cheating in online multiplayer games. While Epic Games is notoriously unable to fight against cheating in rival Battle Royale shooterFortnite, Respawn is making sure that cheaters do not ruin theApex Legendsexperience.
Fighting against cheating has always been one of the major focuses of Respawn withApex Legends. In less than two weeks after the game was launched, the studio said that it had already banned more than16,000 cheaters. Earlier in March, Respawn said that the number of banned cheaters was up to 355,000 on the PC version of the game, while promising that anin-game report featurewill soon be added to make it even harder for cheaters to escape the banhammer.
