May 2019
Well, for the love of Apex, here comes (maybe) my first post to a EA website.
I've been playing Apex on PS4 for a while, and I love this game following Titanfall series. Recently I opened an Origin Account and started playing PC version of the game, fully aware that there are huge cheater problems. I have some thoughts and maybe suggestions the dev team might want to consider, to at least make the game experience a little bit better.
The way I see it, we are currently focusing on anti-cheat mechanism, and players are actively reporting cheaters, we are good at the frontline. However, there is a huge problem backstage, where players' experience were ruined a lot --- the bots making ads for the cheat engines. I saw in another post titled "Bots imposing players and quitting after game start", I've been seen this a lot, especially in asian servers. I have to point out that what the author failed to realize is that these bots have a mission, that is to input advertisements of cheat engines and how one can acquire them, in the legend selection panel. They use audio message or simply text messages on the left to spread the ads, then they quit after entering the battle, leaving only one to two players in a team and thus ruining the game experience.
First we need some patch to the gaming mechanism as well as platform function. The problem right now is that we don't have a very effective way to report these "bots": we cannot report a player in the same team in a in-game context, not before entering the battlefield, nor after the whole match is over where you can only invite players to join your team again. I read a bit about the [GUIDE] for reporting players, and I have to say that the way to report players in Origin platform is way to difficult to encourage players to do so --- the Origin interface is confusing for people who just want to find their friend lists, not to mention we need to memorize a player's id and type it in the field to search for the very "bot" and access the report function.
Second we might need to think of a better registration process that prevents bots from registering the system in the first place. Three hours of game last night, I've seen similar IDs that spread cheat engine advertisements, they all started with "LoveAn" plus a series of random number, it means that these ids are automatically generated to register in the system, a simple anti-bot mechanism (like picture recognition) would certainly reduce a lot of false registrations, and in a way, reduce the imposing bots.
I believe above thoughts could be implemented without overly burdening the dev teams as they got EA lot of work to do, let me know what ya all think about this.
May 2019
@ScarVaapadNice of you to take the time to write your suggestions here.
You can find more information about how to report cheating, hacking, or * websites here.
There was some information about progress against cheats and spammer in a recent check in.
"While we can’t share details on what we’re doing so as to not give a head’s up to the cheat makers, what we can say is that we’re attacking this from every angle, from improvements to detecting cheaters, bolstering resources and tools, to improving processes and other sneaky things to combat sellers and cheaters. We can share some high level stats of progress that’s been made:
The recently added in-game reporting tool has had a big impact on discovering new cheats, including previously undetectable cheats that are now being found automatically via EAC
Total bans are now at 770K players
We have blocked over 300K account creations
We have banned over 4,000 cheat seller accounts (spammers) in the last 20 days
Total affected matches on PC impacted by cheaters or spammers has been reduced by over half in the last month due to recent efforts"
You can also report teammates in game and there's a nice guide on how to do that here.