Repeat Apex Legends Cheaters Slapped With Hardware ID Bans

Cheaters are ruining Apex Legends for everyone else, and though Respawn has banned tens of thousands of them, they keep coming back with new accounts. The ability to rapidly return to the game is due to its free nature, forcing Respawn to take a more drastic step against these players: hardware ID (HWID) bans. An increasing number of cheaters have started complaining about these bans in forums.

Most of the time, a game ban involves a cheater's account being suspended. This removes the achievements and items the player has acquired, but they may have the ability to create a new account and start over fresh. In other cases, a company may choose to ban a player's IP address, but there are fairly simple ways around that, too.

Respawn has taken a more drastic approach to dealing with repeat offenders. Rather than simply banning their account or IP address, the company has started issuing hardware ID bans. Once a player has been slapped with a HWID, any new account they create will quickly be banned.

This type of ban is based on the unique ID of the hardware owned by the cheater. Apex Legends players recently noted complaints from cheaters lamenting their HWID bans on the game's subreddit, with one reporting that every new account they made was banned shortly after they started playing.

The decision to start hardware ID banning cheaters has been largely praised by Apex Legends players. Respawn has been dealing with large numbers of cheaters since the game's launch. In an update published one month ago, the company revealed that it had banned more than 355,000 PC players via Easy-Anti-Cheat.