Cheaters are a common breed of good-for-nothing, desperate players who can’t get good and resort to using cheats to get the upper hand against their opponents. As an Apex Legends player, it is common to see these hackers spamming and cheating their way to victory.

The developers, Respawn Entertainment, has done a bunch to improve their game up to the point of having cheaters banned mid-match to the satisfaction of the players. With Ranked Mode live, it’s only fair to see an improvement in their anti-cheating measures.  Now, they have unveiled their inner workings in the war against cheaters: fighting fire with fire.

Adapt, Engage, Eliminate

Respawn recently shared some insights on how they plan to clamp down on cheaters on Reddit, and it’s a doozy.

Here are some of the efforts the developers have announced:

• Using machine learning to create behaviour models that detect and auto-ban cheaters.
• Requiring two-factor authentication (TFA) in certain regions on high-risk accounts.
• Improving detection that identifies and bans new spam accounts before they are used.
• Ongoing work to adapt to new cheats.
• Matchmaking that matches detected cheaters and spammers together.
• Investigating how people party up for matches. Even if you are not specifically using a cheat, partying up with cheaters is still cheating.
• Increasing resources whether it’s people or tech.

For future games, we can expect cleaner matches with fewer cheaters thanks to a slew of improvements including AI learning, two-factor authentication, and an increase in resources to combat hackers.

Players who aren’t cheating but team up with cheaters are also given a stern warning. Respawn is seeing this as cheating as well, so be well warned and aware of your teammates and their actions.

Fighting Fire With Fire

Respawn has also taken another approach in eliminating the unfair menace. Rather than banning hackers, they will match up the cheaters against each other for what I think would be a rather interesting spectacle. The winning team should be rewarded a ban as the cherry on top.

Can you imagine how hilarious it will be if these cheaters started to report each other?

This move is potentially larger and beneficial as compared to immediately taking the cheaters out of the equation because this gives the developers an opportunity to study and gather valuable information on how the cheats work.

Playing Nice

Respawn has also assured players of the game that they will continue to put the effort into improving the Apex Legends experience. They wrote, “The war against cheaters will be ongoing and remains a high priority for us. There will always be work to do, improvements to make, and new things to adapt to.”

The notorious ‘code:net’ and ‘code:leaf’ disconnects plaguing the servers are also being looked into and the devs are working on it as we speak.

The effort made by the developers is a great one, but in all honesty, this should have been done since day one. Valve and Steam have implemented two-factor authentication (TFA) to curb hackers in competitive shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to impressive results. It’s better late than never.