It doesn’t get any more blatant than this. Yesterday, two videos appeared on the Apex Legends subreddit showing two different views of two confirmed cheaters that just so happened to be the number four and six ranked players on Xbox.
The videos (from Reddit users Loloshooter and Jaronxz) both show the exact same sequence of events. Both players get the drop on the two Predator-ranked cheaters and down them before suddenly getting disconnected from the server. When they reconnect, their roles have suddenly reversed, with the Predator-ranked players standing over the two Redditors with guns drawn.
Another disconnect, and then the Reddit players return to the lobby dead.
This is a textbook example of a DDOS attack that seeks to overwhelm the game server with incoming data in order to cause the targeted disconnection of a player. The video received 44,000 upvotes from players outraged at such blatant cheating in Apex Legends.
Thankfully, Respawn security analyst Conor "Hideouts" Ford caught wind of the post and dropped the ban hammer on both cheaters.
DDOS attacks have become an increasing problem on the console version of Apex Legends, especially at the higher levels of play. Ford recently tweeted that Respawn is aware of the issue and is preparing for a "reckoning" on consoles.
"You can't hide any of it," tweeted Ford.
Respawn's fight against Apex Legends cheaters is a never-ending one. Just last week, Ford tweeted that Respawn had banned over 700 players in March so far, with many of them in Gold and Predator rankings. An exploit that has since been patched allowed higher-ranked players to join lower-ranked games in order to stomp on newbies, which isn't great considering there are a lot of new players thanks to the recent Switch release.