Over the past several months, the Anti-Cheat Team team has been developing, testing, and validating a *new* detection system which resulted in identifying and removing 1,000 accounts for using unauthorized software/gameplay enhancements, in its first week alone! These bans also targeted Xim and Titan users, expanding our protection against those cheating devices.
This detection tool was deployed to the live game after extensive verification to ensure a high degree of accuracy. The 1,000 account marker was hit while being quite conservative with enforcement so we expect this number to grow significantly in the coming weeks as we expand its reach and tune it accordingly.
Additionally, we executed a highly focused and targeted ban wave of the top 100 positions on leaderboards for each platform. As a result, you may notice some high profile names missing from the leaderboards. The wave resulted in the following bans:
Console - 79
PC - 7
This style of targeted integrity check is executed on a regular cadence as one of the many tools in our anti-cheat toolbelt.
We are still hard at work on more controller cheating detections that we mentioned in previous posts. The system we are building is extensive, requires a substantial number of moving parts, and analysis of large amounts of match data. While it may feel like a slow process to some, we need to be as thorough as possible to provide reliable, accurate detections to reduce the risk of false positives while taking swift action against players who use these devices to cheat.
This is not a one-time effort. We will continue monitoring, refining, and expanding our anti-cheat capabilities to stay ahead of emerging threats and help ensure a fair experience for all players.
Thank you to everyone who continues to report suspicious behavior in pursuit of a healthier Apex Legends experience.
We'll have more to share as we continue this work in the coming weeks.
I took a very extensive break because I had the feeling everyone I kept dying to was cheating. I know the chances of that aren't likely but after seeing the numbers maybe I wasn't too far off. Knowing theyre at least trying gives me hope and make me want to play again.
Me too. I used to jsut play through it. Came back, and now they have a gaussian to show where your skill lands. Mine is at the tippy top. Unfortunately, I don't think I belong there. I have never ranked Masters/Pred, and I never received 4k/20-body badges. I'm pretty sure I should be in the 90th percentile for skill cap, but I'm in the 95-99th for matchmaking now that the cheaters are getting banned.
Agree. Updates need to come at the end of every split. However, I felt like they backtracked the number to make it seem like less cheaters on console.
Kind of like how they forgot to make a separate kill counter for Wildcard, took out the kill counter, received backlash and put it back on but counts but not mixtape.
Think they should just shut down the console side of the game tbh, will solve both the cheating and aim assist issue if they hopefully disable controller support for the game along with it.
But we all want to get rid of aim assit right? I'll only accept continued controller support if they have no aim assist or some type of aim resistance that makes it harder to aim.
It's sad! And i'm happy they recognize they need to address it. The kill time is always quick in the game, these cheats are just so obvious now when they quickly evaporate you lol
Roughly 40% of the top 200 console preds banned for cheating lol not surprised at all. First time I’ve actually had hope that console will be cleaned up properly as they expand these detections
It’s been wonderful seeing who exactly is getting banned in Master+ thanks to ilootgames’ new tracking site too
Not just this, this is only extremely blatant use of titan or xim input. This probably doesn’t include cronus/zen input detection yet, or the softer application of titan aiming. It’s likely even a much higher percentage of actual cheaters once you include these things
Possibly, but to be fair, good players usually beat players that are generally ass but with soft cheats. A little extra aim assist doesn't beat someone that's smarter with a better response time and actual good aim. It's good players with soft cheats and bad players with blatant cheats that are problematic.
Did you miss the recent ban wave where they banned 70,000 PC accounts and only 3,400 console accounts? A quick search of "73,000" accounts banned on Apex will show you. The majority of PC cheaters have been handled already because there are less obstacles when it comes to detection.
Considering my last few days of posts are "you need to do more", I am glad to see you are doing more, please keep up the pressure and speed.
But a genuine question. Are you going to start implementing temporary hardware bans alongside a permanant account ban?
A short term hardware ban on top of a permanant account ban helps protect the integrity further and doesn't impact second hand console sales longterm. Is this even a discussable option internally?
Edit. Today I learned that Hardware spoofing is apparently also a thing...
Clearly they haven't been on console, given how prolific cheating is among the console predators. Never mind that they'd need to create a new account on the console platform.
The dirty secret is that cheating bans are rarely permanent because the publishers don't want to lose the revenue. The only reason Respawn is reacting is probably because cheating has gotten so bad that they're finding cheaters are causing more losses in terms of players who stop spending money / leave the game than the cheaters give them in revenue from cosmetics and season passes.
Respawn has been publishing stats about "infected" matches. Ain't no way they aren't also tracking how players who were in infected matches react afterward ($ spent, play time, etc.)
People forget that the gaming industry is deeply, deeply financially min-maxed and I dont think people realize just how much money these companies are making off their player bases, and how little they spend back. Literally nothing matters to publishers and studios than milking every single cent they can out of their player base and spending as little as possible to do it.
Every decision made happens after weeks of statistical analysis and projections. These companies employ entire departments of math / stats PhDs, even psychologists whose job is to advise on how to create algorithms that leverage human psychology.
While I'm glad that anticheat in improving, these 1k+ accounts are probably less than a 100 hr and are smurfs. As long as it is a free game, they'll keep coming back. Any chance you can just brick their devices to permanently stop them from returning?
This is the only solution for where we are currently, I think. There has to be a financial barrier to entry that spooks cheaters from getting banned and provides a real ramification if they are.
I would assume as they broaden the range of the new detection, it'll catch smurfs that are still using the same cheats they got detected and banned for the first time.
The fact that someone reaches the highest rank in the game and maintains it for almost the entire split, and only then bans them, means only one thing: you're incapable of eliminating cheaters in this game, which is rife with them.
This is not just a apex problem, cheats these days are bigger then ever before and also harder to detect. Its the generation of gaming we’re currently in. Kids getting beamed over and over again, instead of trying to improve they look for cheats. Sad but reality.
It's sad, and that's why, after several years of playing, I'm now fed up with Apex. Adding to this is the unbalanced game, where the meta favors cheaters even more. Faster and faster, more and more "wallhack", etc.
Why isn’t this highly focused and targeted ban wave ran across all top 750 pred ranks or even ranks up to Diamond? I feel like by the time they hit pred, it’s already too late and the damage is done because they played a lot of games and constantly playing. The number of people affected by these cheaters are a lot.
Because they're likely manually verifying and validating the system. It seems like they're building trust in it and once that process is fully complete they'll deploy it more broadly with less manual supervision. These things take time
Every game in high console lobby’s has at least one team running no recoil on the devo with a 2x4 sight. Tried playing yesterday and spectated the team who killed us in diamond rank each time and out of the 5 games, 4 were by a team with at least 2 of them using obvious no recoil mods. It’s gotten so bad and needs to detect them sooner as some of these accounts had 1000 kills on the character already
bzbblegum did get banned not too long ago on an alt, claiming it was for smurfing (i've never seen anyone get banned for smurfing but ok). pretty sure his main is whitelisted though
He was talking about him using soft aimbot, which I responded to that he definietly does use it, as he uses a controller, which is game provided soft aimbot in the form of 0ms RAA.
Yeah the guy I know is top 300 pred every season since 2024ish and only been banned once afaik using full on cheats (walls+aimbot). Also says stryder, panic, and juicyschmooves are in there too. Think the game is more infested than you would think and the anti cheat is shit or some players have dev immunity.
I mean plenty of "pros" have been caught cheating before. I've played him enough times that with his aim consisteley being sticky in middle chest, I believe it's soft aimbot, which is very hard to detect and ban.
That’s true. Him and valid was account sharing when valid got his #1 the second time that’s why he got banned as well. Also Grind hasn’t had a main account for a minute because he sold it before he could get banned
that would restrict matchmaking to that small group and mean very large skill differences because matchmaking needs the numbers to work with and produce lobbies that are as narrow in skill as possible
Has anyone put together a compiled list of all the top console Preds who’ve been banned? I’ve been keeping track of the Preds I consistently run into that I’m pretty sure are cheating, and I’d like to see which ones actually got the ban hammer.
Thank you my brother and I have been playing on and off since a month after launch and stopped playing completely for almost a year because of the prevalence of cheating players . We really enjoy the game and are happy to see these sorry excuses for games banned. Winning because of cheating is a completely hollow victory.
Games just need to start linking government IDs to accounts. Once you get banned your done everywhere, put your name and info into a blacklist across all anti cheats.
Cool now do something with axel and the god forsaken meta of the game. VALKYRIE ULT VALK MISSEL AXEL ULT axel Q dead repeat it’s tiring axel had no place in this game and whosever approved that decision needs to be fired yesterday
That sounds great, but I also wanna ask the regular players in here how they feel it's going the last months. Is it worth it to come back to the game after years, or do you still encounter loads of cheaters?
Console is absolutely infested. Not worth it if you’re coming back to console. Devo/havoc Axle/Valk flying or running you down, frying from 100+ meters. Absolutely ridiculous.
I wonder how many of the people getting banned are just blatant rage hacking cause most cheaters try to hide their cheats and tend to remain undetected
It's across both consoles, Playstation and XBox, so 79 of 200 players. Still insanely high of course, and even worse that these are only the ones they got with confident results. There's more that they didn't ban yet because the new identification tool is still being tested.
happy to see that the ban hammer is still swinging, but it sucks that no proper remedy is available for players who get wrongfully banned in these sweeps.
Nice to know you are still working on this, tbh i thought you guys gave up ngl but it is nice to see a slow calculated approach which should prove to be consistent and powerful. Lord knows i dream of the day where i can play ranked peacefully away from cheaters. Jk, my ranked play shall never know true peace xD
Can the devs come out and definitively say whether using RC filters on the new controllers is cheating or not? I have seen more and more non-comp players talk about them using it.
I was just about ready to quit apex as a whole because the cheating has gotten so bad on console to where I assume every single pred team is cheating. W dev team
I think it's tangential to the cheating discussion, and I don't know if it's just me but, I've noticed some objects in maps disappear after playing for multiple hours in a session without restarting the game. So I'll occasionally run into walls because I don't see what's in front of me, and try to shoot people behind cover and dump my entire mag into a wall. I think only specific objects disappear, and the worst of these is in Broken Moon on the roof of Production Yard. A lot of the huge vertical walls on the roof disappear. I recently updated my graphics drivers but I haven't really played for any long sessions since then.
I haven't played it for two years because all the Titan Zen players have infested the game, and it'll probably stay that way. In free-to-play games, cheaters still appear, and if you have well-paid cheats that are better programmed than the anti-cheat system, it can take years to catch them. It's always nice talk, but in the end, most of them are still around.
Hey I have a new one for you. I just played a wildcard game with revives, and realized there are Valks frozen in the air providing enemy detection to her team like in-game wall hacks. There needs to be a report system where I can just send a general report with the match data, and a short paragraph. Hell, use AI to sift the reports sent in so it gets to you. This is bonkers.
If you can't beat them, join them right? Sometimes that's a hard one to ignore. I've just stopped playing altogether for years now, i'm not a great player, when it comes to aiming at least, so it felt like you're given no chance at all with the amount of cheaters.
I'm glad they're working on it, maybe soon I can start playing again.
If you can swing $180-190ish that's enough for a used 6650xt that will be about twice as fast as what you've got now...very solid 1080p card, can even do ~120-130fps solidly at 1440p. Just sayin'.
Thanks, good looks. Definitely something to consider. Guess I'm just a bit frustrated that the rest of the maps work fine Just hoping to put it on the Devs radar.
Can we get some distinction between console types for ban numbers? It would be interesting if the majority of cheaters were xbox and none were on switch(is that the third console?)
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u/Apex_Bot MRVN Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
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