June 2019
The war against hacking is a never-ending one. Hacking will always exist, but we CAN at least limit the amount of paste-scripters infecting our games if we can't outright keep up with the blazing speed of new releases and variations of hacks.
Unfortunately, companies get hounded for their seemingly failed efforts at combating cheaters. Apex certainly receives it despite its astonishing numbers of cheaters banned.
The prime example we need to address here is Valve and their Anti-Cheat. Despite being heralded as an industry leader, their Anti-Cheat isn't impenetrable, and as a result of the increased amount of cheating, they've had to employ a premium queue into some of their games.
This premium queue requires a phone number attachment to one's account.
What good does this do? Well, especially for free games, because it's so easy to create another account and resume cheating, no matter how up to date an Anti-Cheat software is, it remains as the sole line of defense. Implementing factors outside of obtaining cheats and creating a free account, however, will inhibit this further.
In this case, phone numbers are a lot more difficult to spoof and verify than it is to just create a free account and resume debauchery.
With the recent announcement of an Elite Queue, the obvious question is cropping up, "Won't cheaters rule this mode?" The short answer is yes, they will - IF we keep up the current state of the Anti-Cheat, which ISN'T inherently bad, but not as good as it can be.
Now, aside from just a generally healthier community that would be a result of phone-verification, the issue with the Elite Queue is that there are seemingly going to be rewards tied to this mode now or in the future. This will become a problem for those whose skills aren't up to par with the robotic-nature of scripts - this is basically NO ONE.
Please bring attention to this idea. Respawn, I implore you to make this consideration.
2FA via phone number registration. Since Apex is webhooked through Origin, this will likely require escalation to Origin/EA themselves. Not only would this aide in cleaning up Apex, it could clean up EA's other games as well. If Apex can have it by itself, I'd call it "Apex Prime".
June 2019
Yeah