The number of Apex Legends bans has exceeded 1 million accounts. Respawn Entertainment’s first foray into the world of Battle Royale games has been a runaway success, but a greater deal of success also comes with a greater deal of troubles. Cheaters, hackers, account thieves, and all sorts of other problems have plagued the developers ever since adoption of the game took off in February of 2019. Thankfully, Respawn Entertainment has been doing a great job at taking down disruptive players.
A dev update on the /r/ApexLegends subreddit states that the number of Apex Legends bans has now crossed 1 million accounts in total. Respawn Entertainment has been approaching the problem from multiple angles. Aside from improving cheat detection, the developers have increased staff resources to combat cheating and doing “other sneaky things” to get the job done. Obviously, they intend to keep as much of their process secret as possible so as not to tip their hand to the Apex Legends cheaters.
Here is the breakdown of the banned accounts along with the reasons they were banned:
- 770,000 total accounts banned
- 300,000+ accounts prevented from being created in the first place
- 4,000 cheat sellers (people spamming chat to sell cheats) banned in the last 20 days alone
One other interesting data point is the number of games that were affected by cheaters. These Apex Legends bans have reduced the total number of affected games on PC by half. As an example, if you previously saw a cheater in one out of every ten games, that number has now effectively been pushed back to one out of every twenty games.
Cheaters are never fun to deal with and it seems like Respawn Entertainment is taking the problem very seriously. This update on Apex Legends bans is a follow-up of the developer’s promise to stay committed to their first battle royale game. Another update from the devs will be coming next week to address some more issues highlighted by the playerbase in recent weeks.