Apex Legends Devs Banish Cheaters, Promise Relentless Community Outreach
Cheating in multiplayer games is rampant, highly annoying, and regrettably it is largely unavoidable. The important thing is, how do the developers respond? In the case of Apex Legends, the hot new battle royale that has taken the gaming scene by storm, developer Respawn Entertainment is actively hunting down and banning cheaters, and would like your help in continuing the effort.
"Cheaters suck. If you run into one, please try and capture the evidence and let us know...
Even if you don’t get proof, get their ID and flag it and we can investigate the account. We have heard your feedback about a report feature in the game. I’ll just say that’s a very good idea :)," a Respawn community manager posted on Reddit.
Respawn Entertainment has already whacked 16,000 sucky cheaters with the ban hammer. Dealing with cheating players is not the only challenge the development studio faces, though. As the community manager further noted, "when you drop your game out of nowhere and 25 million people show up in the first week, there's being to be all kinds of issues, bugs, exploits, etc. discovered." Fair enough.
The developer has put in place a "wonderful QA team" that curates reported issues and attempts to reproduce them. If they are able to, a ticket is created and the issue gets added to a list of known ones, which are scheduled to be fixed. The more information a player can provide, the more likely the QA team will be able replicate the issue. Specifically, the QA team asks for the following when reporting an issue:
- What platform are you playing on?
- Origin ID / Gamertag / PSN
- What were you doing leading up to the issue?
- Can you reproduce it? What are the steps?
- PC players - provide hardware specs, OS version and GPU driver version.
- If possible, it’s great if you can capture a screenshot / picture or video.
- Pay attention for dev updates.
Having millions of gamers flock to your game is sufficient motivation to stay on the ball, and Respawn Entertainment is promising to do exactly that. The development studio also says it is striving for transparency and intends on staying in the touch with the community.
"We’re going to start doing more regular updates like this moving forward. I’ll be making posts daily starting Tuesday next week. Not all of these will be ground breaking or major news but think of it as our way of checking in each day to address what we can," the community manager added.
Respawn Entertainment is also working putting together a sound stage for upcoming livestreams. All of these things are encouraging, both for gamers, and for publisher Electronic Arts, which has a blockbuster franchise on its hands. As we have seen with Fortnite, free-to-play games can generate massive amounts of money through in-game purchases, and Apex Legends certainly has the same potential.
