Spam bots on Asia servers approaching critical mass; reaction obligatory
I'm playing in Japan. When I started, I didn't see too many problems. Then occasionally I started seeing these bots spamming audio and chat messages (which I think have something to do with QQ usernames).
Today I started playing for the first time in two weeks and I started getting that stuff pretty much every other game. I'd be "kinda fine" with the spam otherwise, I can mute it, but of course it means the bot will disconnect and leave us as team of 2.
But then I realized it's gotten to the point where I start getting teams of TWO spammers by random chance (I'm pretty sure they're note in the same team, because that would be hurting their goals)
It's not an occasional inconvenience anymore. At least in this region it's gotten to the point where it's an actual plague that fundamentally affects the experience.
Also, yes. I would report them, but as far as I know the way to report them is to 1) search the in-game UI for reporting feature, like pretty much every modern AAA title has 2) google "how to report players in apex legends" 3) after random BS, get a hit for page about reporting people to the Easy anti-cheat system 4) ponder if spamming is "cheating" or not 5) google some more 6) after bunch of links, finally find an "official" way of reporting people for things that are not "cheating" 7) realize the "official" method is apparently among the lines of "use the Origin client to start adding the username as a friend, but instead of completing the process, abort and use a context menu to go to 'report user'" 8) realize you don't remember the username anymore because the game for some reason doesn't have any sort of match history.... or (a popular) "recently seen players" feature... or even an API for for allowing other people to clean up your mess
As a game developer, I understand you want to get the core of the game out first, but you can't do that anymore in CURRENT_YEAR. There's probably tons of publisher pressure too, but still, to the developers and to the publisher of this game: you should realize by now these days it's not as simple anymore. You can't just make a game that works in LAN environment and launch it globally. You NEED to have features like easy-to-use in-game reporting system and - since it's free - advanced (presumably ML based) recaptcha-style risk analysis framework for categorically banning problematic users and networks, like cheaters and spam botnets who can just automatically make new accounts.
I don't even really blame solely Respawn. The developers just want to make a good game. As far as I'm concerned, problematic (and extremely tedious) issues like this fall mostly outside of the "let's just make a good game" mandate.and the publisher should step in.I don't know where the line is drawn in this case, but for your own sake I hope you figure it out pretty f***ing soon.
