Cheaters in Apex have run rampant for years, ruining the general experience for the community. Glitching guns, infinite resource spawning, and more exploits have all affected every level of play, including pro players in the highest-ranked lobbies, despite Respawn’s attention and hotfixes to answer the problems.
The issues have gotten so bad, that individual fans have started taking matters into their own hands, creating their own methods for finding cheaters.
Apex Legends Status, a website dedicated to Apex’s server updates, legend picks, and more tools, this week announced a brand new private tool that can detect lobbies with boosting teams, highlight the offending account’s platform, and even predict how much RP was gained in each match.
Why Apex players are celebrating cheat-spotting software
Boosters are players who break competitive integrity by teaming with one or more rival squads, creating an alliance that can roll over the rest of the lobby with their numbers advantage. Not only does this guarantee high placement for each team, but it allows them to start eliminating and respawning each other, using the mobile respawn beacons scattered around the map.
These inflated kills for each player leads to large RP gains, allowing anyone with a boosting account to reach the highest ranks without much effort.
This process is harder for security systems to detect than traditional cheats since the perpetrators do not use any other scripts, cheats, or glitches that can be traced back to an account.
Apex’s console lobbies suffer the most from boosters, who make it easier to find their friends by turning off crossplay, reducing the player pool, and increasing their odds of entering the same lobby.
Apex fans want ALS guru to join Respawn
ALS’ announcement of the tool has been met with a widely positive reception, but fans have also been bashing the lack of response from EA or even Respawn themselves. Multiple calls were made for Hugo Derave, the creator behind ALS, to join Respawn and the anti-cheat team to help deal with the cheater crisis.
However, the creator soon clarified his intentions. Although useful for compiling data and finding patterns in boosting accounts’ RP gain and progress, the creator only wanted to use the tool for personal fun and never meant any slander towards Respawn’s security team.
Derave acknowledged the wide support case built up for joining Respawn but turned down the idea. ALS is publicly funded through Patreon donations, with all proceeds going towards Derave, the sole owner of the website. Instead, joining Respawn would take all time away from maintaining ALS, and would result in the eventual shutdown of the site.
At the end of his thread, Derave pointed out Respawn Hideouts, the head of security, for reporting boosting accounts and news on ban waves.
He praised the security team’s more sophisticated tools for detecting and dealing with rule-breaking accounts, which have already banned over 1,000 accounts in past seasons for breaking competitive integrity.
Despite the new detection tool only being used for personal benefit, ALS has brought the boosting problem to light, and the community can hope for bigger responses in the future from Respawn and Hideouts to the boosting problem.
