'Apex Legends' Update Adds a Hilarious New Way to Punish Cheaters

Apex Legends developers at Respawn Entertainment have set their sights on cheaters in the battle royale game, and they’ve come up with the most devilishly righteous punishment by pitting those cheaters against one another in-game. Yes, cheaters will soon be forced to murder one other with their aimbots.

In a Friday Reddit post dubbed the “7/12 Respawn Check-In,” community manager Jay Frechette discussed how reports of cheaters have become a prevalent issue in the Apex Legends community, particularly in Ranked matches. As always, Respawn remains committed to transparency and outlined some of the ways the dev team is combatting cheaters.

Respawn is “using machine learning to create behavior models that detect and auto ban cheaters” and making use of other methods to detect and adapt to new and emerging methods of cheating. But the best piece of Respawn’s strategy involves “matchmaking that matches detected cheaters and spammers together.”

Put all the cheaters in an arena together so they can fight to the death and frustrate one another. It’s the kind of righteous punishment you only see in Dante’s Inferno. Even normal players who willingly party with cheaters could face getting banned from the game or worse … being forced to play against only cheaters.

“As we’ve said before, the war against cheaters will be ongoing and remains a high priority for us,” Frechette wrote. “There will always be work to do, improvements to make, and new things to adapt to. We’d like to thank the players that have been getting involved with helping us squash cheaters over the last week whether it be submitting reports or assisting with the vetting process for suspicious behavior.”

Respawn doesn’t reveal their precise plans to detect and ban cheaters because then the cheaters could work around those methods, but it sure seems like the war on cheating in Apex Legends remains as hot as ever.

The most common cheats in games like Apex Legends involve removing recoil from weapons or aimlocking, a hack that automatically pivots the targeting reticle in the direction of an enemy, even if they aren’t visible. In most cases, hacking software is used to install the cheats into a version of the game. It’s a lucrative business for, who typically sell a subscription-based service. In March, Kotaku reported that one anonymous cheat-maker made $5,000 in just four days selling Apex Legends cheats.

That same month, Respawn claimed that the developer had already banned more than 355,000 accounts for cheating. By May, that number broke 770,000. Since then, the war on cheaters has continued.

The best thing players can do is report others they suspect of cheating. EA has a guide for reporting players within all of its games, including Apex Legends, but there’s also an online form that anyone can fill out.

Apex Legends is currently available on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.