Respawn rolls out sneaky Apex anti-cheat update that has cheaters telling on themselves

If you haven’t been able to open Apex Legends over the past couple of days, well, you might want to stay quiet about it. Respawn revealed today that an update on Sept. 11 introduced an anti-cheat feature that made the game unplayable while running many third-party programs in the background.

It’s a sly move from the security team at Respawn, but that’s probably necessary given how big of an issue cheaters have become over the past several seasons of Apex. The team only just revealed that the number of accounts banned for cheating each month is in the six figures, and that news came only a couple of months after a highly publicized hacking incident in an ALGS match had most of the player base scared to even touch the game. Cheating is a real problem right now, and the new update seems to have targeted everything from custom shaders and crosshairs to more nefarious means of gaining a competitive advantage in the game.

“If you are unable to launch the game, please disable any programs running in the background that may interfere with Apex,” the announcement reads, which is an extremely nice way of saying “if you can’t open the game, try not cheating.”

Respawn didn’t go into any detail about what types of programs the new update targets, which is undoubtedly intentional to try to stay as far ahead of cheaters as possible. Many players have reported the update affecting some scripts that seem relatively minor in terms of the advantage they might convey to a player, like programs that increase vibrance and contrast beyond what the base game allows. But it seems highly unlikely those are the only programs the update targets—and that makes some of the recent posts on Reddit and small spikes in outage reports on sites like Apex Legends Status and Down Detector a bit more amusing.

It seems more than a few people had trouble opening the game after the update on Wednesday, Sept. 11, and given the message from Respawn today, we might know why. I don’t necessarily think every person having trouble launching Apex and posting about it was cheating, but given a hundred thousand accounts get banned for cheating every month? Well, I don’t necessarily trust those people, either.

And yes, while a custom crosshair or some different shaders might seem like incredibly small advantages to give yourself while playing the game, heed the warning. You’re probably not going to be able to play the game with them anymore.