Pro player sweetdreams has launched #SaveApexRanked and a community-wide movement to get higher ranks of the game cleaned up.
Every competitive game has seen its fair share of cheaters. From aim and wall-hacks in earlier shooter series' like Counter-Strike and Team Fortress, to scripters in League of Legends, they inevitably hit every game genre. Battle Royale has always had it particularly bad. The genre's first hit, PLAYERUNKNOWN's Battlegrounds, has always had massive cheating issues. Now the issue has seemingly hit a climax when it comes to Apex Legends ranked.
Chris "sweetdreams" Sexton, a professional Apex Legends player for NRG, put out a tweet earlier today, simply saying "Empty Promises and False Hope. #SaveApexRanked before it's too late," and linking to a TwitLonger.
The problems with Apex ranked
In the TwitLonger, sweetdreams painstakingly detailed the issues with cheaters in Apex ranked. According to him, you can reliably find several cheaters in every Apex Ranked game. Furthermore, several will DDOS the servers upon dying, making it impossible to play without them.
"...All times of the day you can almost 100% get a cheater in your lobby who even IF killed, will IMMEDIATLY DDOS the server and take it down so nobody can continue to play, and you then queue into the next game with them again," said Sweetdreams.
"All times of the day you can almost 100% get a cheater in your lobby who even IF killed, will IMMEDIATLY DDOS the server and take it down so nobody can continue to play"
"Myself and other daily ranked grinders know this fact [sic] almost every stream, you turn the stream on and just cross your fingers and hope that it wont be as bad as it was the day prior in terms of cheaters (...) the term unplayable has never had more validity," he added.
He also went through Respawn Entertainment's poor response to the situation. There was only one staff member, Connor "Hideouts" Ford, actively focusing on the cheating issue. This meant that things went downhill whenever he couldn't be online. He also mentions that they've received "empty promises of focus on the issue", which have resulted in little to no action being taken.
As it turns out, just a few hours before sweetdreams' tweet, Respawn mentioned that they were "pursuing several options to crack down on cheating."
Whether this will be significant action or another of the "empty promises" sweetdreams mentioned remains to be seen. What is certain, though, is that cheating issues, particularly in Apex ranked, have never been more prevalent among the community.