Despite the optimism around the changes to ranked coming into season 20 of Apex Legends, the competitive experience has been at the mercy of cheaters, especially in the upper echelons. Now, Respawn is taking the first step in remedying this, tightening up party restrictions after previously removing them.
In an Apex patch released today on April 8, a limit of a three rank tier difference has been implemented on parties queuing up for ranked. While such a large pool still gives players a lot of freedom to run games with friends in other ranks, it should prevent cheaters with fresh accounts from worming their way into Master and Apex Predator lobbies. In the same update, Respawn also fixed ranked badges to display the correct ranks and addressed a connection error some players encountered when reconnecting after a crash.
The game has been left reeling over the past month from a series of coinciding issues. Multiple Apex pro players were hacked during the ALGS regional finals in March, prompting fears over Apex‘s security. Only a few weeks later, a bug caused many players to suddenly lose account level progression, cosmetics and more after the weekly reset on April 2. Respawn was able to quickly provide a fix and prevent further accounts from suffering the same fate, but postponed the beginning of the season’s second ranked split as a result of the recent issues.
This update feels like the light at the end of the tunnel is finally coming into view. The re-introduction of party limitations should lessen the impact of cheaters in high-level lobbies, but it by no means will completely resolve the issue by itself. If Respawn wants to keep the party limits loose though, raising the account level requirements to enter ranked back up to 50 could go a long way to making it even harder for repeat offenders on new accounts.
