Respawn to ban 'piggyback' Apex Legends cheats who intentionally don't participate in games for XP

Respawn has dropped a brief update on the changes coming in Apex Legends' next undated patch.

In a post on Reddit, Respawn community manager "Jayfresh_Respawn" updated players on the progress made since EA shared an Update to Apex Legends blog post last month.

"We are currently working on the next patch that will have improvements in the areas we’ll discuss below," Jayfresh said, before going through each item in term. The studio has now been able to reproduce and "locally fix" many cases of incorrect hit registration, and believes the issue mostly relates to "mismatches between the way the game client and server pose characters in their animations, but also caused by various other factors".

While the developer believes the next patch will address most of these issues, it acknowledges that there's still work to do, and that the incoming fix "will help weed out many of the less severe issues people are noticing, which will help [Respawn] understand more about whatever bugs may be remaining".

In regards to the strange slow-mo issue, the studio now believes it "affects some datacenters more than others", but as it happens on many different server configurations and it doesn't seem to hit multiple server instances running on the same machine, it's not caused by something as simple as an overloaded server. The team is still trying to "work backwards" to understand the root cause.

The recent balance changes to Gibraltar and Caustic will be re-tweaked yet again and an audit of servers has resulted in some dedicated machines being removed following the identification of faulty hardware. There's also hope that the dropping/stuttering in audio will be addressed in the next patch, but for now, the team's still keen for you to keep report clips that catch audio issues.

"We are continuing to profile our servers to catch hitches, persistent slow-mo, and other game quality issues," Jayfresh said. "We have a few server optimizations rolling out but there are many more areas of work left and as we identify these, we will be rolling out optimizations and fixes and keeping players updated."

Finally, the post addressed "piggy-backing", the incredibly frustrating practice of players intentionally not participating fully in matches but still share in the spoils/XP despite their lack of participation.

"We had been seeing some feedback from players around this and have been doing some internal investigations looking at game data to understand how many of the matches being played are affected by this behavior," Jayfresh said.

"After looking at the data and internal discussions, we’ve decided that in the future we’ll start instituting temp bans for players that exhibit piggy-backing behavior and extreme cases could lead to a permanent ban. This change will not be immediate but wanted to give a heads up to players so you can adjust that behavior."

Respawn recently banned 770K Apex Legends cheaters, promising players that it is "attacking this from every angle".