Apex Legends' Anti-cheat is too weak. Policy improvements needed.

Just what is going on with EasyAntiCheat? It's apparently not doing much, because every match I am seeing cheaters of a wide variety. The last 2 days has been absolute hell trying to find one match that doesn't involve wallhackers and no-recoil 'soft-lock' players. The reason I'm ranting right now is getting two-tap headshotted by a bloodhound I never even saw, who did the exact same thing to my teammate two seconds later. While we were spectating him, his aim was snapping to random points of the screen - staring at walls - obviously where other 'rectangles' were floating on his screen, while he was trying to loot us.

If you can't prevent these cheats from entering the match to begin with, you've failed.

Now, this particular instance was a low-level player, but I've seen the *exact same behavior* of staring at walls and pinging enemies across the map that don't even have a pixel visible while spectating them from players with 10k+ kills and the Wraith heirloom.

If you can't ban these players before they accumulate kill counters, emblems, and all the "goodies" - the only tangible benefits of doing well at your game, you've failed.

There's clearly far too much control available clientside over the game and being able to manipulate it. I've seen multiple times the idea that the source engine itself is the ultimate weakness here.

Now, I fully understand I can't ask for specific details. I know explaining anything about what you're trying to do would defeat the entire purpose of you trying to do anything about the cheating. But whatever is going on, is not working.

I can't enjoy the game when I'm being headshot lasered, when I'm up against competition that has completely perfect knowledge of all other player positions at all times without fail, when I'm seeing these same players gain all the renown and benefits of "winning" that I'm supposed to be striving for.

I've seen anecdotes of college students making a pasttime out of cheating in Apex and profiting off of it - that's how low the bar has fallen here.

It is my firm belief that these things need to happen if Apex is going to stay around for the long haul, with the recognition that this will likely take the cooperation of EA and other groups external to just Respawn:

1.  Preventative & early-detection methods need to go up to the highest priority. If you can't stop it before it happens, you really may as well not try at all. Do whatever it takes. Preventing that player from ruining the rest of the match & further matches, and all the other players there, is more important than avoiding giving a cheatmaker incremental feedback on what does & does not work.
2. Any possible shred of 'client-side' activity needs to be pushed to server-side. The more you leave client-side, the more is exposed to anybody seeking to create an exploit - going right down to the nitty gritty details of bullet travel, recoil, control input, what-have-you. Clearly, there is currently far too much that is being left visible to the client; not only that, but the more that is hooked into server-side, the more you can detect and hit with the banhammer (e.g. server being able to immediately notice when a player has obviously impossibly perfect recoil control - that should result in an instant ban or being forcefully disconnected and sent to "cheating server" purgatory.)
3. Build much more rigorous account & account-creation control. Require two-factor authentication. Implement better filter algorithms to prevent "asdffj88ffdf9I'manobviouscheater" names from being accepted (thereby throwing a wrench into account creation botting; as an example, more than 7 seemingly-random letters & number sequences would trigger a "name not acceptable" response [admittedly the math for that is beyond my ken, but with all the things modern mathematicians have achieved, it must be possible]). Require regular password changes - not only does it improve security, it makes things a pain for maintaining a cheating account. Make email, password, and account name changes more difficult to do and require verification at every step.
4. Take every opportunity to pursue legal action and persuade law enforcement to come down on users & creators of cheats alike. The goal here is foremost to send a message, but even small victories in this avenue is likely to pay off huge dividends down the road. Visibly taking this wrongdoing in serious fashion benefits both your players and discourages would-be mischief-makers. Anybody can spend a few hours browsing google and find Apex cheats, so there's plenty of investigative leads that can be taken.
   
   
   

If all else fails, or that seems impractical and insustainable...you could always shift gears, and create a PvE experience in the form of a sequel to a certain cult-classic game series you're known for. Otherwise...you signed up for this dire need to focus so heavily on anti-cheating.

Either way, please pursue the utmost of success. For the time being, I'll be waiting until the June update and hope that improves things.