Last week, Apex Legends’ growing community of cheats was hit with a significant ban wave as Respawn issued hardware ID bans preventing players from creating new accounts following a ban. Happiness was short-lived, however, as players found that a new type of cheat had surfaced in the wake of Respawn’s actions.
A post on the Apex Legends subreddit last night warned players about the rise of “soft-cheating.” According to the author of that post, who claims to play the game competitively, this is where cheaters “are reducing their aimbots to level indiscernible to an anti-cheat algorithm.”
While a spectator might be able to see an aimbot locking on, the new cheats have a built-in “buffer,” meaning they deliberately miss enough shots to fool accuracy counters contained within an anti-cheat service. These cheats are potentially even more damaging than maxed-out aimbots as “new players a disillusioned because they think they are being outplayed on pure skill, and veteran players being killed instantly makes one suspicious of cheats which actually punishes good players.”
Last we heard, Respawn had banned more than 350,000 Apex Legends cheaters, and that number is likely to have risen over the past few weeks. The high number of cheaters apparently linked to China means that the developer is facing calls to region-lock the country – requests similar to those made to PUBG Corp in response to its cheating problems.
Stick around: Apex Legends is getting a leaver penalty
Innovative Apex Legends players aren’t bad news for everyone, however, as industrious players have been hard at work trying to improve Gibraltar. The battle royale’s biggest boi is normally an easy target, but he quickly becomes far more difficult to hit when you strap one of Octane’s jump pads to his shield – although he’s also pretty difficult to control in that situation, too.