419 top-ranked Apex Legends players banned for using a glitch to beat up Bronze players

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The players were farming RP in Bronze lobbies.

Apex Legends Season 7
(Image credit: Respawn Entertainment, EA)

Apex Legends ranked play is divided into six tiers—Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, and Apex Predator—each (except for Apex Predator) subdivided into four divisions. Your rank is determined by Ranked Points earned through gameplay in ranked matches: The better you are, the higher you climb in the rankings, and the stiffer the competition becomes.

This is all fairly basic stuff, but it's worth a quick refresher to emphasize the gap between the Bronze tier, which is the basic entry level, and Diamond, which requires 7,200 RP to enter. The most you can earn from a single ranked match is 100 RP plus bonuses for kills and assists (I'm told the maximum possible is 225 RP per match), and finishing as anything less than Apex Champion will get you considerably less than that, so the number of players who reach Diamond tier is relatively tiny: In season 6, for instance, only two percent of ranked players managed to achieve Diamond ranking or higher.

That's why it's noteworthy that 419 players who ranked Diamond or higher were caught abusing an exploit that let them play in Bronze lobbies despite their rank:

Ford said the bans were made across all platforms—"justice has no boundaries lol"—and while he didn't get into the specifics of the glitch, a quick search turns up all sorts of results explaining how to do it. In fact, it appears to be something of a long-standing issue: This EA support site entry from July 2019, for instance, complains that "higher ranked players of any rank (Example Platinum) can glitch into a lobby for the lower ranked games (Example Bronze) to farm easy RP and grind their rank."

The video below, by YouTuber TaylorHobbs, indicates that the exploit requires a little bit of timing, but not much else. (This may not be the specific glitch exploit that's being banned, but it illustrates the relative simplicity of the process.)

As you might imagine, Bronze-tiers players aren't super-enthusiastic about top-ranked heavy-hitters tearing things up in their games, and so the reaction to Ford's tweet is generally pretty positive.

And in some cases, very positive.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Cheaters actually prosper quite often, but sometimes they get busted and suffer for it, and it's always fun to watch when they do. I've reached out to EA for more information on the crackdown, and will update if I receive a reply.

Andy Chalk
Andy Chalk
US News Lead

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.