Respawn senior system designer Eric “Gho57” Hewitt previously said that “Judgment Day” was coming for Apex Legends players abusing the dashboard bug to climb the ranked ladder. And now, it’s finally here.
All culprits who used Alt + F4 to leave a ranked match and avoid losing Ranked Points (RP) faced heavy consequences yesterday after season four kicked off. Senior designer Chin Xiang Chong tweeted out an email that all dashboarders should’ve received, explaining the punishment in detail.
“Your account was found to have benefitted from repeated and excessive intentional abuse of a bug,” the email reads. “Because your account was cheating, we have removed Ranked Points from your account. You will receive Ranked Series 2 Rewards appropriately to the amount of Ranked Points you have after the removal action.”
Players who used dashboarding to climb to Apex Predator or Diamond were also demoted to Platinum. Though the punishment is fair, Chong wanted an even harsher penalty of giving dashboarder a full reset to zero RP. But “more forgiving” people decided that wasn’t a “good idea.”
Respawn was able to track dashboarding by logging the exit codes to see exactly why the client closed, according to data miner That1MiningGuy. If the client was “force closed” instead of disconnected, it was pretty obvious that a player was trying to save RP.
Despite the punishment, Respawn devs didn’t outright ban accounts. Season four is a time for redemption, where dashboarders can now attempt to climb the legitimate way.