Apex Legends’ new DDoS protection feature is good news, but it isn’t foolproof

Apex Legends and Respawn continued to strengthen their lines of communication between developers and player base to start off 2023 yesterday, announcing some big news for players in the higher ranks of the game. So far, though, it doesn’t seem like everything is working out exactly as the devs intended.

Players that are ranked at Diamond and above will now benefit from a DDoS protection feature. Respawn announced that they were rolling out the feature last night, and included that the appearance of a new shield icon in the game’s performance display meant that games’ servers were now utilizing the feature. Despite this announcement and the appearance of the shield icon, however, it doesn’t seem like the feature has prevented players from causing disruptions in ranked servers entirely.

The Respawn account also mentioned that this feature and the fight against people DDoSing lobbies was “ever-evolving,” which means this probably isn’t the last players will hear about the feature or other new security measures going forward.

Distributed denial-of-service attacks (more commonly abbreviated to DDoS attacks) usually try to disrupt servers to which players are connected. In Apex, DDoS attacks have been used in the past by salty players that are about to die in ranked to avoid losing ranked points or to try to cause all other players in a lobby to crash and disconnect from a lobby, leaving a few players to clean up immobile legends for free kills and wins.

While it’s great news for the high-ranked players, streamers, and pros that are more likely to experience DDoS attacks on Apex that Respawn is trying to better their game experience, it doesn’t seem like the DDoS protection is foolproof by any means.

While playing ranked shortly after the news, TSM’s ImperialHal ran into a now-familiar and frustrating situation after his and his squad’s lobby froze immediately after taking down an enemy squad. Considering his teammates all reported similar lag spikes and freezes at the same time, it seemed like yet another DDoS attack, despite the presence of the shield icon which is visible in Hal’s performance bar.

This time, however, the freeze and lag spikes were momentary, and the game returned to normal shortly after. Both Hal and his teammates speculated that the team they had just eliminated attempted to DDoS their lobby and were briefly successful in disrupting the game’s server, but the attack was eventually repelled.

Preventing and stopping DDoSers from ruining other people’s games is vital for Apex and its longevity, as no one wants to play a game if they know that they’ll just be met with freezing and crashes over and over again. But it still seems like there’s work to do in this department for Respawn.