Apex Legends developer Respawn has banned over 2000 accounts for cheating as it gets set for next week’s Harbingers Collection Event.
In a note posted to X/Twitter, the studio said it had identified and removed “2000+” cheaters and reminded players to “report any suspicious player activity through [its] in-game tools”.
The Harbingers Collection Event – which sees our Legends “gear up to fight the end of the world” – launches on all platforms on 19th September and includes Living Shell Trios, World’s Edge After Dark, and the usual cosmetics.
Considering less than a month ago they were making headlines for mistakenly banning linux players (but eventually unbanning them, thankfully), makes me wonder how many of those bans are false-positives.
I was one of the linux players who was banned. It took them about 8 days for them to unban me in-game, and then it took another week for my EA ban history to change from “active” to “overturned,” with an email from EA. No apology, no sort of in-game compensation, just basically a “be thankful you can play again.”
~25% of the linux players are still banned. Some definitely cheated, some I would be shocked if they cheated, just considering the amount of hours and money they had put into their account, along with how enthusiastic they were about getting themselves (and others) unbanned. So shocked that I’m almost certain they’re false positives. Which makes me hesitant to keep playing - what if that happens to me? If they treat their Steam Deck and linux users this way, is that a game I really want to support?
That’s the problem with non official support. You’re basically in an unending beta-testing phase. Theres’ no easy solution here I’m afraid.
Well Respawn explicitly enabling Easy Anti-Cheat’s Proton support (plus the game being Steam Deck Verified) is about as official as we’re gonna get for the vast majority of multiplayer games. I think it’s more of an issue around EA firing 99% of their QA testers…
Well the thing with those “enabled EAC on Linux to see where it gets us” is it’s non-binding and non-commital. And it’s made explicitely that way so that support cannot be demanded from Linux users unlike Windows users who are explicitely mentioned in the systems supported by the game.
We legally don’t have any ground to be supported the same as Windows users.