The Real Reason Apex Legends Just Banned Over 400 Ranked Players

The ban hammer has been brought down extra hard in EA and Respawn Entertainment's Apex Legends. Now some players — including a few high-ranked competitors — find themselves on the outside looking in.

Conor Ford, one of the game's security team members, hopped on Twitter to deliver the news of a ban that wiped out more than 400 Diamond+ ranked players. "To the 419 Diamond+ ranked players who abused an exploit allowing you to get into and farm bronze lobbies for RP, enjoy watching Season 7 from the sidelines," Ford said. It turns out that the newly banned players received their punishment due to them relying on a glitch that let them hop into lower-ranked player lobbies. By doing so, those Diamond+ players were able to easily farm RP (Ranked Points) by dominating Bronze lobby players. A video posted by YouTuber TaylorHobbs offers an inside look at how the glitch works.

PC Gamer offered a breakdown of how Apex Legends' ranked play works. The competitive online mode is split into the following tiers — Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, and Apex Predator. Each of the tiers (except for Apex Predator) are subdivided into four divisions of their own. Players' ranks are determined by their RP total, which can be earned by simply playing well. An official blog post for the game stated that only 1.89 percent of its player base reached Diamond rank during season six. For some, it may be disappointing to learn that a good amount of those highly ranked players cheated their way into staying there.

Judging by the community response on the Apex Legends subreddit forum, it sounds like players are pretty happy about this recent development. "I'm unsure which upsets me more," one poster said. "That 419 people decided to abuse the game in order for a false sense of skill and gratification, or that we were 1 person off the funny weed number." Another poster called out the banned cheaters by stating, "just stay hard stuck at d3 like the rest of us and get better over time. Why get to masters if you didn't earn it? The whole point of ranked is to earn your rank."

This exploit seems to have been plaguing Apex Legends for a pretty long time. Over on Electronic Arts' support site, a post made in July 2019 made mention of it. The original poster who brought up the recurring issue even offered a solution to the game's developers. "Respawn should seed the brackets up to plat/diamond based on S1 kills/wins/KDR and rebalance it to allow people to progress up through brackets by gaining RP," they said. "But more importantly — FALL through brackets by losing too much RP for all brackets other than Apex Predator."

With this recent ban, it looks like Apex Legends' seventh season should have fewer cheaters ruining all the fun.