Apex Legends’ Victories Against Cheaters And Bots Detailed In “First Of Many” Blog Posts
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.”