Apex Legends has just hit 50 million players and isn’t showing any sign of slowing down. With so many players and such satisfaction in winning a match and becoming champion, it is inevitable that some will turn to cheating instead of putting in the effort to play better. Today I’m going to cover how to report hackers and cheaters in Apex Legends.
There is currently no in-game report function for cheating. It is one of the most requested features for Respawn and EA and there is still no definitive word as to whether we will get one or not. There is a way to report hackers and cheaters in Apex Legends though but it is a pain.
Reporting hackers and cheaters in Apex Legends
I don’t know if the reporting system is purposely obtuse to make us not bother or whether it was just an oversight not to add it to the game. Either way, you can report cheating but it isn’t as straightforward as it should be.
To report hackers and cheaters in Apex Legends, you need to go to the Easy Anti-cheat website and fill in a web form. The form isn’t long but is only available in English and says ‘The general response time may vary from 3 to 14 days.’ Nice.
The form does have a free text message at the end but nowhere to attach video or a screenshot and nowhere to add any evidence. You will have to upload the video and provide a link in the comments at the moment which is clearly not enough.
It’s a frankly derisory system that is hardly worth the name ‘Report a Cheat’. Of all of the excellent design decisions made in Apex Legends, this is one of the worst.
Sure investigating and stopping cheats is a pain but if you want a game like this to survive, it’s necessary. Even if nothing much happens, giving players the feeling that our concerns and complaints are being taken seriously is vital. The current reporting system is anything but.
There may be something on the horizon if a recent quote from a community mod is anything to go by. They reportedly said Respawn ‘have heard your feedback about a report feature in the game’ and that it’s a ‘very good idea’. Nothing has been confirmed yet though.
Cheating in Apex Legends
There is clearly a hacking or cheating problem in Apex Legends as Respawn mods banned over 16,000 cheaters within ten days of the game launch. That number has probably increased at the same level as the player base and won’t slow down or stop until effective measures are taken against those cheaters.
Most competitive online games have to use some kind of anti-cheat system to try to keep things fair. Apex Legends uses Easy Anti-Cheat like many other online games as it works pretty well, stays out of the way of other games and does a credible job of catching cheaters.
It isn’t foolproof as nothing is, but as long as it installs correctly and can communicate with its server, you should never even know it is running.
East Anti-Cheat installs onto your computer or console along with the game. It is middleware that sits between your hardware and the game and scans everything that happens with the game executable. It scans and verifies all processes that interact with the Apex Legends executable and checks memory for the same. It’s job is to ensure only verified, approved processes interact with the executable in the hope of discovering cheats and blocking them.
Cheats are often programs that inject themselves into the game stream to allow you to walk through walls, shoot around corners, never miss, use an aimbot and all sorts of other annoying stuff. There is big money in game cheats which is why they are so persistent.
While not perfect, Easy Anti-Cheat works much better than PunkBuster used to or the many other anti-cheat mechanisms games used. Not only did these earlier applications crash often and cause issues with games, they were also suspected of checking your computer for a lot more than just cheats. Nothing was ever proven as far as I know but suspicion was enough to make us dislike them intensely.
Anti-cheating software has moved on a lot since then and Easy Anti-Cheat seems competent enough. I run it in Apex Legends, Fortnite, The Division 2, Warface, Ghost Recon Wildlands and other games and it never interferes and never crashes.
The current system to report hackers and cheaters in Apex Legends is poor to say the least but it is better than nothing I guess. Hopefully, Respawn really have listened and are developing an in-game reporting mechanism we can use to clean this game up. Hopefully!
