Respawn‘s battle royale game, which came out silently and unexpectedly, had its banhammer hit hundreds of thousands of players.

Respawn has published a developer update post on Reddit. In it, Jay Frechette, the community manager of Respawn, says that more than 770 thousand players have been banned, over 300 thousand account creations have been blocked, and 4000 spammers got the short end of the stick as well in the past near quarter year. Because of these bans, on PC, more than 50% fewer cheaters and spammers have shown up in Apex Legends‘ matches, which is a respectable result nevertheless.

„We take cheating in Apex incredibly serious and have a large number of resources tackling it from a variety of angles. It is a constant war with the cheat makers that we will continue to fight. We’ve been working closely with key experts across Electronic Arts including EA Security and Fraud, the Origin teams, our fellow developers at DICE, FIFA, and Capital Games, in addition to Easy-Anti-Cheat. While we’ve already rolled out several updates (and will be continually doing so for the foreseeable future), others will take time to fully implement. 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,” Frechette said.

It’s still hard to believe how many people resort to cheating in Apex Legends. If Electronic Arts and Respawn had to ban this many people in this short period, we could raise our eyebrows for a good reason. It wouldn’t be surprising if they reach a million bans by July.

Source: VG247