Respawn Entertainment swung the ban hammer and the result should mean Apex Legends players in lower ranks will have a better time as they won't get brushed aside as often.
Battle Royale genre is inherently competitive and when there is competition, you know there will be cheaters trying to worm their way through the ladder, despite other players being superior to them. Apex Legends is no example to this unwritten rule but the latest ban wave proved that claiming consoles are free of cheaters is a misconception.
Namely, the Apex Legends security team recently cracked down on "dashboarding", which involves shutting down your game just before a cheater would lose a match. Upon logging back in, the cheater would find their Ranked Points loss was diminished by abusing the RP-loss forgiveness system that was meant to prevent crashing and disconnects from having too much impact on the climb.
Furthermore, this exploit allowed highly ranked players to join bronze lobbies and farm them for easy RP farming. As you can imagine, this resulted in players being placed way higher than their skill ceiling would allow otherwise while ruining the matches for bronze players, who would get stomped by what are essentially smurfs.
A total of 2,086 accounts were suspended for dashboarding, with distribution across platforms being:
- Switch - 15
- PC - 44
- Xbox - 62
- PS4 - 1,965
As you can clearly see, PlayStation players made up the vast majority of dashboarding cheaters, leaving the statement "PC is bad because it has cheaters" out to dry.
Apex Legends fans also pointed out that numerous highly-ranked console players are using illegal tools to remove recoil, keep their crosshair on enemies or allow aim assist even when mouse and keyboard are plugged in.
Overall, PC likely has the largest cheater pool but it's pretty obvious that consoles are far from perfect in that department and assuming cheating is exclusive to PC is plain wrong.
