Apex Legends has banned 770,000 cheaters

As cheapskate circus owner Larson E. Whipsnade famously said, you can't cheat an honest man*. You also can't cheat Respawn Entertainment, because they will find out and ban you from Apex Legends. Or so they say: that's the main takeaway from their wee developer update on cheaters and spammers, who Respawn have been cracking down on like a lion loose in a hot-air balloon. I dunno. I don't watch many films.

The Apelegs devs took to Reddit to do their boasting. Are you ready for some numbers? They're real big, I'd be careful.

Since the game's launch, they've banned 770k players and blocked 300k account creations. Banning players doesn't mean all that much in a free-to-play game where people have evidently had some success just making new accounts, but hey ho. You gotta try.

They've also banned 4000 cheat-seller accounts in the last 20 days alone. This is all weird to me because I don't believe I've encountered any Apelegs cheaters, but then again I can't shoot for toffee and so cheaters and merely decent opponents might have taken me out with equal ease.

"Total affected matches on PC impacted by cheaters or spammers has been reduced by over half in the last month due to recent efforts", say the banhammer wielders.

There's no rest for the wicked, though: "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... It is a constant war with the cheat makers that we will continue to fight."

Oorah.

The first three comments on that Reddit post made me chuckle, incidentally, which I needed because I've never come into work with a hangover before and now I have and it's all Graham's fault.

*You can.