Apex Legends's Anti-Cheat Plans Include Forcing Cheaters To Play Together

A less-than-fun fact of competitive gaming of any kind is that some people are just going to try to cheat. So, it should be no surprise to anyone that cheating is an issue in Respawn Entertainment's Apex Legends. In fact, it's enough of an issue that an entire section of a recent developer check-in on the Apex Legends subreddit was dedicated to how the developers plan to address it.

The post lists some of the standards that most developers use when dealing with cheaters, spammers, and bots, such as using machine learning to detect and autoban the guilty parties. But, developer plans also include something some people might find a bit more entertaining.

It seems that rather than just banning everyone caught engaged in these activities, the dev team may be planning on forcing them to play together. Effectively, the game's matchmaking system will know if someone is a cheater and pair them with other cheaters. Of course, this has the potential to suck all the fun out of cheating because that's only really useful when you're competing against people who play fair.

Some people have questioned why Respawn's list of anti-cheating steps include both banning and making cheaters play against each other. After all, both require the system to detect cheaters. So why not just ban every one of them?

There are a few possible reasons for this, but the most likely is that banning players in a free-to-play game doesn't exactly stop them from creating a new account and starting the process over again.

Whether or not this is a better solution remains to be seen, but it is kind of amusing.