Respawn permabanning cheaters in Apex Legends by using hardware identification

Respawn has finally begun to lay down the banhammer on hackers and cheaters in their battle royale craze Apex Legends- starting now.

This topic is nothing new, as players have been complaining about the sheer number of cheaters found in the game and Respawn saying that they’ll be doing something about it soon- including adding a “report player” button. Hackers are rampant across all platforms, but mainly on PC to no surprise. Redditors even called for Respawn to region lock China because that’s where the majority of hackers are stemming from.

Now, Respawn is finally bringing out the banhammer to ban heaters with permanent hardware bans.

Several cheaters have already started to feel the pain, with players discussing that they’re getting banned for cheating across some popular cheating forums. Respawn will ban a player permanently- both the account and PC from ever playing the game again. This isn’t a soft or temporary ban- it’s permanent unless you get a new PC with a new IP and account. But that’s an expensive purchase. Or unless you know how to mask or change your PC’s ID, which I have no idea if that’s even possible.

Redditors also stated that if there’s another account created from the same PC, the account will be auto flagged and banned within 30 minutes.

However, players are still looking to find a way around this permaban. Hackers will find ways around even the most impenetrable line of defense and are typically a step ahead. But for the haters just using scripts or hardware created by others, this will be a problem until a workaround or loophole is found. Some cheats are being sold and I found one that’s selling for $150 depending on the sophistication of the program.

Overall, Respawn is doing what they can to get rid of the rampant hackers in Apex Legends– this permaban approach should drastically reduce the number of hackers in the world’s newest battle royale craze.

What do you think? Is this too much? Should they take a different approach?