As Apex Legends continues to grow with each new season, so does the number of hackers, boosters, and cheaters using exploits to gain an unfair edge over their opponents. Despite Respawn’s commitment to banning thousands of accounts, new methods of cheating continue to pop up with each new event and ranked split.
In Season 16, Apex players have been reporting a new cheat in the past days, which allows smurfs to retain their rank, no matter how well they perform in a ranked match.
The cheater in the Twitter clip was found in the Japanese servers, where a gold player would receive no RP or kill participation for eliminating enemy players. The cheater also did not earn any placement points, despite ending the game in second place, losing a total of 43 ranked points at the end of the lobby.
The cheat prevents the account from gaining any ranked points from any source, no matter how many kills or how high the team places in a match. Although the purpose seems counter-intuitive to the purpose of ranked, the cheaters prospered when working in groups.
The Rampart in the clip enabled the RP to cheat, but the Pathfinder did not, allowing him to continue earning points in lobbies with disproportionate ranks and skill levels. While Rampart lost 43 RP, Pathfinder gained 190 RP, giving account boosters a new way to take advantage of new players and lower-ranked lobbies.
Boosters have always been a large problem in Apex, with the biggest offenders seen on the console leaderboards. Top Predator players have consistently been teaming with each other, turning endgame lobbies into kill farms, where all boosters benefit from abusing the respawn beacons scattered around the map.
However, teaming relies on the smaller player pool found in Master and Predator ranked lobbies, with console players suffering the most as cheaters disable the crossplay function, significantly shrinking the number of lobbies found.
The new cheat allows a single team to take advantage of the lowest-ranked lobbies, letting any prospective player create a new account and immediately start exploiting the cheat, boosting their stats, obtaining normally hard-to-earn badges for damage and kills, and helping their friends’ competitive rank.
Despite the worries surrounding the new wave of cheats, Respawn has been monitoring the situation and has recently been rolling out new ban waves to address the cheaters. Hideouts, the head of Apex security, posted an update on April 26, announcing a new wave of bans aided by their new anti-cheat detection systems.
Although Respawn and Hideouts have been actively combating the large number of cheaters, the community continues calling for more communication from the dev team surrounding the issues. When pro players and content creators criticized the numerous audio bugs introduced in Season 16, Respawn immediately responded with a statement on Twitter, and a same-day patch.
The community subsequently called for an expanded security presence as independent creators continue to make their own tools for detecting cheaters.
The Apex community can continue to hope for increased communication from Respawn and more definite answers as the next content update in Season 17 releases on May 9, 2023.
