Cheating is an ongoing problem in Apex Legends and one that–from the outside looking in–feels like an issue that’s gone unaddressed for dozens of seasons now. It’s a tricky situation for the Apex Legends team. On one hand, if the team tells players how it’s actively getting rid of cheating players or bots, then the team shows its hand and subsequently makes all of Apex Legends’ safeguards that much easier to get around. But on the other, saying nothing makes it seem like the team is actively ignoring player concerns. For a while now, the Apex Legends team has opted for the second approach, seemingly believing it the better of two imperfect strategies. Going forward, however, the team is going to try to thread the needle between both strategies.
Ahead of the release of a blog post that goes into how the Apex Legends team has contended with cheaters in the past and breaks down the anti-cheat takeaways for this past June and July, Electronic Arts head of product and studio integrated communications Tracey Thompson spoke to me about the philosophy behind this change in strategy.
“EA Entertainment is sort of looking at the landscape of where we are,” Thompson told me. “And obviously as you know, there is the narrative around cheaters in Apex and being afraid to play the game means that this is a very acute problem that’s ongoing and isn’t necessarily the most easy to tackle.”
Most of all, Thompson continued, EA and Respawn hope that players see that the team behind Apex Legends already knows there’s been a lack of transparency when it comes to the implemented anti-cheat strategies in Apex Legends. That sentiment was “an important part” of putting together the blog. In the blog itself, the Apex Legends team notes that more than six million accounts have been banned since Apex Legends’ launch in February 2019, with a little over 100,000 accounts banned each month on average. In June and July 2024, these bans were overwhelmingly permanent and most were imposed for cheating as opposed to bots.
Far more permanent than temporary bans in Apex Legends the past few months.
“We know that we need to tell you more,” Thompson added. “We want to really kick things off with sharing what we have been doing and then knowing that it needs to be more… [We acknowledge] that this may not be as meaty as people would like, but I do think that in sharing this with you…[it sets] an expectation with [players] that we know that there’s way more that we have to do.”
While talking with Thompson, she reiterated that this blog post is merely the “first of many” to come and that fans shouldn’t be worried that this one post will be Apex Legends’ one-and-done response. “Over time, we’re going to actually start to open the aperture to give people more and more without actually giving away the secrets that people could then circumvent,” she said.
In a follow-up email to the PR team, I asked if Respawn had an idea concerning the cadence of players getting updates like this blog post. Would players hear more during seasonal updates? Once a year during the annual birthday celebration? Every other month?
In response, the Apex Legends team emailed the following statement: “We want each of these updates to be meaningful so that will guide us on the cadence. However, we won’t always wait for a blog. If we want to share something in the moment that we feel is a win or a smaller update, we’ll do that through social [media], community platforms, etc.”
Squashing cheaters is a never-ending battle.
As someone who plays Apex Legends fairly regularly and has been covering every season for GameSpot since Season 3, I’m curious to see the dev team’s follow-up to this initial blog. From day one, the Apex Legends team has firmly remained in the “We don’t really talk about it” camp when it came to its anti-cheating strategies. And this was to, again, avoid cheaters learning what to circumvent. It feels a little strange to see the team shift the pendulum in the other direction after all this time, even if it’s only to aim for a middle ground. What can the team share that was too difficult to share before? But like anything when it comes to a live-service game, we’ll just have to wait and see.
Apex Legends Season 22 is in full swing. The new season added a new cyberpunk-themed map and the ability to dual-wield two of the game’s four sidearms. It also features a brand-new battle pass, which changed ahead of the launch of Season 22 following public outcry.
