Respawn's latest Apex Legends anti-cheat system bamboozles hackers who can't find a workaround

Respawn has seemingly unleashed another ban wave on Apex Legends players and hackers are whining about it.

Apex Legends players over on Reddit are revelling in the discovery that Respawn is bringing the ban hammer down on cheaters in their droves. Screenshots have been posted in the thread from a forum where some of these hackers congregate, and shows their reactions to the revelation that making a new account to get around a ban just isn't going to cut it.

"However they handled this s**t is beyond me," wrote one affected player. "They can now detect the program or look for the IP for the software insert because I got banned on 3 accounts so far for just having it running in the background and this is while it was temporarily offline."

"Ran my MalwareBytes and removed this s**t off my computer, was 27$ well spent too bad it cost me 40$ after going to play my main and getting banned for nothing after the fact."

The blasé suggestions about not caring because Apex Legends is a free game, and how you can just create a new account to circumvent these anti-cheat measures, are being swiftly shot down as more cheaters are having their new accounts banned.

A suggestion by one helpful commentor to "change IP address from router" resulted in another person saying that they'd tried this, but ended up banned again after five hours.

"I have been banned..unfortunately..I don't know how they did it," added one remorseful soul. "I don't use it to cheat for over 3 or 4 days..it was just a waste of money..I blame myself for this."

No cheating for half a week? Blaming yourself for getting caught because of your shady s**t? You are a paragon of virtue, sir/ madam. Don't you dare lay the blame at your feet.

Back in February, Respawn revealed that it had banned over 16,000 players for cheating. Since then, the number of banned players on PC has risen to over 355,000 since the game's release, and in March the developer promised to "scale-up" the anti-cheat team to improve the system.

Apex Legends patch 1.1 dropped earlier this week, introducing a number of quality of life features, as well as fixing a bug that affected progression.

Respawn also accidentally rolled out a new feature it's been working on that will penalise players who leave matches early. It's since been rolled back, presumably for deployment at a future date.

If you're new to the game, you should check out our Apex Legends guide on how to get started in Respawn's new battle royale.