Apex Legends Banhammer Crushes PC Cheaters With Permanent Hardware Bans: Report

One thing that will ruin a game as quick as any bug are prolific cheaters that make the entire gameplay experience unbearable. Respawn Entertainment is working hard to curb cheating in Apex Legends. As cheaters evolve to exploit the game, Respawn has been swinging the banhammer to crush them as quickly as possible. So far, that banhammer has crushed 355,000 cheaters.

Respawn is taking things a bit further and is now reportedly issuing permanent hardware bans against PC gamers who are caught cheating. Word of the permanent bans first surfaced on Reddit with alleged screenshots from cheating forums where players were complaining about being unable to rejoin the game after being hit with an account ban.

One of the cheaters had reportedly tried several things to regain access to the game, including changing their MAC address, reformatting their drive, and partitioning the drive of the PC with no luck. One of the limited methods for players to get back into the game after being banned is reportedly to buy a new PC. Permanent hardware bans are the latest way that Respawn is trying to set Apex Legends apart from the battle royale masses by curbing cheating. Respawn has promised that an in-game reporting feature for cheaters will be added.

Apex Legends has been a huge success for EA, and it invested heavily in marketing for the game. EA allegedly paid streamer Ninja $1 million to stream the game when it launched. Cheating isn't the only way to get ahead in a game; GPU maker NVIDIA did some research that showed gamers in titles like Apex Legends and Fortnite have a better kill ratio when using powerful gaming PCs.