Uninstalled Apex. When Will These Devs put Legitimacy at the Forefront

On this topic - for me Apex was always about "can I adapt, make it to "top legit" level". Meaning my goal was to be able to play whatever is meta, new map, get comfortable with it. Reach Diamond 4+ in ranked which used to be between 5-8% of top ranked players before Respawn started giving away Diamonds and Masters and before current state where 99% of Diamonds are boosted or bluntly hacking.

Another big part was kinda problem solving / puzzles - I saw people do something be it movement or recoil control or whatever and I had fun figuring it out. Even back in season 9? I made my own no-recoil script which basically did whatever new cheats these days do to a perfection.
I even bought a controller to try to master it but fast enough realized that I am too MNK to join that disabled player pool :D and give up on so many aspects of the game just to be able to shoot better in close range fights. (still pains my eyes to watch Pathfinder "mains" on controller).

Finally I put out challenges to myself to play every legend. Typical cases were: 1. Wattson as I still have not seen good regular grinder who plays Wattson well without cheats and just shooting straight up everyone. I mean skill of fencing, placing ults, controlling space, trapping people etc. So I did main Wattson for a season. 2. Same thing with Crypto.

And I just overall came up with some goals that made game interesting for me because to be fair I had a clear idea that I am not going to get further than borderline Masters in a legit soloq way and at the same time people are very inclined NOT to team up or NOT to play in a grinding way so making 3stack without having friends who play Apex was not an option / multiple times failed experiment especially in Discord LFGs where people rather jump from squad to squad forever (they were doing that back in season 10 and they still keep doing that 15 seasons later).
So I randomly decided each split/season that I will play X legend(s) and focus on tracking or positioning or 1v1s etc.

But now with hackers appearing already on Gold level and community still treating 3v3 as 1v3 1v3 1v3 has become painful experience + I have experimented so much that there is just no motivation to play this game at all.

p.s. on a note of following mobile legends - actually many people play on too low sensitivity (over past 2 months I have increase mine to almost 50% WHILE PLAYING VALORANT - which requires much lower sense than Apex) that allows them to aim / track easier but then they usually struggle with legends like above mentioned + Ash, Octane, Pathfinder. Imo you must increase your sense to a level where you can follow them, feel comfortable looking around the map constantly (doing 180/360 turns, looking up and down = vertical axis) and then learn how to aim with that sense. Otherwise for MNK on low sense = typical controller player = can look only side to side in limited range and shoot well targets that are in front of them, loosing fights when flanked and having 0 or close to that awareness of what is going on, where enemies are shooting from.

Wow Respawn did ban #1, 2 and 3 Preds on Xbox :D

If not mistaken #1 had like 160k RP. 

Now the philosophical question - current remaining #1 has 105k... what are the odds that he is legit? :D

Or will it take another case of Zeus making video where dude on stream admits hacking and exploiting, before Respawn is able to actually draw a line where legit players end and cheater RP grinders start to ban them all in masses?!

In comparison #1 PC Pred has 206k RP and is playing with ImperialHal as far as I know :D

Not to mention that difference between #1 PC and #10 PC is 2x more RP and difference between #10 and #20 is 30%...

Circus act.

The sad thing is that if it weren't for Zeus and his video, these cheaters would still be playing today.

Should it be that a ban is only possible after a video like this?

Where are the security measures? Where is the anti-cheat?

Unfortunately "Should it be that a ban is only possible after a video like this?" this part has been true since I started competitive shooters way back when in early 2000s.

Somehow people want to believe in miracles and always leaned towards "amazing game sense" when it was wallhack / radar or "amazing aim / reaction speed" when it was aimbot.

I was famous by calling out oh so many. Years later and with invention like replay system (Valorant) where you can actually spectate everyone on demand after the game, my conclusions are:

1. part of my claims were incorrect because I did not know something about the game when I called out people who did (apologies to that)
   most recent example of 30%+ HS percentage on average in Valorant that looked 100% sus to me -> one day I realized something about my aim + bought traction pads for my mouse and new skates -> my aim increase above that level and I posted even 55% HS game in my rank level lobby which was insane to me yet it was legit.
2. part of my claims were just my brain tricking me into seeing one thing when actually something different happened (you can only understand this one when you have ability to watch enemy's POV)
3. 30%-50% of my claims were on point and in some cases also bluntly proven similar to this case with #1 Pred

Given above said + understanding now how F2P games work, my guess would be that:

• devs don't have pro level player in their team = they have no skill to be able to know what is / is not humanly possible in their game (like Zeus said people like him or similar should be added to Respawn ban hammer team to manually ban ppl via having significant knowledge / experience about the game, game sense, what is / is not possible)
• devs don't have really motivation to ban anyone who potentially will spend money on the game or attract someone who will, clearly numbers of players leaving because of cheating issue have not been spending enough money to matter :) vs remaining player pool
• in some rare cases MAYBE Respawn don't want to get into situation where they falsely ban someone who is legit good which might and will happen when you manually ban players based one other human decision making

What people who follow cheating evolution must understand - there will be always "50/50" call when manually banning people, because in some cases even I land a totally lucky instinct based flick (two days ago e.g. landed a headshot on partially obscured enemy who was in jumping motion in Valorant), read situation where someone is ratting and prefire him/her successfully just based on this hunch that comes from 10k+ hours in shooters, sometimes my mind wonders and I do stare at the wall where it happens to be enemy on the other side of it = seemingly wallhack etc.

Also when there are clear checkboxes to catch a hacker, people will get to know that sooner or later and will adjust to fall right outside that criteria e.g.:

• not bluntly tracking people through walls but be aware of their position, have ideal crosshair placement, have amazing plan in place to cut a corner and instantly flick on target because you know it is there
• adjusting your recoil cancellation to X% < 100%
• adjusting your aimbot headshot percentage to X% < 50%
• adjusting your aimbot reaction time not to instant but say 50ms delay
• throw some fights or even games just to look "human / normal", play parts / some of the games without using hacks
• play with 3stack and switch who uses hacks at which point or which hacks which player use - one use radar/walls to guide the team, other uses aimbot to gain advantage in fights / clutch when needed
• list goes on and on

Thus it is tedious process to ban people as you need to gather data over time on their performance and then it is 100% or close to that clear when and how people cheated. Great example - Lance Armstrong in cycling. But Respawn in game like Apex clearly will not bother unless they automate such task via what is rumored to be AI server side anti-cheat.

Do you have any knowledge of whether Respawn might be manipulating the statistics on Steam Charts?

This season, there's been an increase of about 16,000 people, but I still play with the same people in the lobby day after day. So what's going on here?

If you are referring to apexlegendsstatus.com you can actually ask their support, in my experience they are super friendly and responsive.

I personally never looked into this one as I had exactly same experience since I can remember. My typical grind experience that in many cases forced to switch servers for seasons (like 5-10+) has been:

• same names in discord LFG (my rank)
• repetitive soloq random teammates, especially ones that I call dumb duo stacks = two clowns who can't find the 3rd yet has no skill or intention to teamwork with random solo teammate assigned to them each game
• actually having same teammates in consecutive games since re-queue option was invented in game
• same top / champion squads game after game
• overall same lobbies = you can easily see that when using overwolf that has an option to list all lobby players

That's why I used to switch servers say from Frankfurt to London to Belgium? I guess it was, these days (latest seasons) I just switched from EMEA to NAE.

For me something was not right, for sure those figures of 200k online were doubtful especially when talking about Preds and their lobbies = multiple 3stacks streaming from same region while rarely getting matched in the same lobby / Pred, Masters exclusive lobby. This was like the biggest obvious sign that Respawn matchmaking / player data is shady af. As how shady I guess I do not care as I care to have legit SBMM one only to purely enjoy playing vs +/- same rank players.

I actually reached out to them, here is reply to your question:

Which I guess makes sense = people actually might not be playing Apex actively or like at all, but if you launch Steam and game is in your game list as active = you register.

So rough math would be like if there are shown to be 200k players => usually just half play ranked 100k => out of that 30-40% are in <Plat = Plat+ is at most 50k world wide => divide by regions approx 10 = 10k per region -> remove bots and smurfs probably some 10% at least if not more = 9k... eventually I guess we would be lucky if at any point in time per region in Plat+ ranked there would be like 1000-2000 active players...but I don't even feel there are that much and if you take out Plat and go from Diamond+ then it matches my experience over the years = same few hundred people active, 3-5 simultaneous lobbies running per region.

This explains why I play with the same people day in and day out. This makes SBMM even more important to remove or modify.

For players who play the game "the right way" - yes.

Unfortunately as we all have seen over the years there is a very big group of people (at least 5 squads per game in some cases even more) that want to hotdrop in ranked and just go for all-or-nothing and for them requeue time is the most important so they can do this bs 100 times per hour at least. Which Respawn tailored towards clearly.

I still remember when I had a 3 stack around season 9-12 and we were D4s it actually took us like on regular basis 3 min+ to get back into game. We regularly managed to discuss in detail previous game errors before getting into new game.

Now even at D4 matchmaking is instant pretty much and maybe goes close to 3 min only when you play odd hours - late night / early morning.

And to finalize - not goona lie even I sometimes get into this weird mode of "reactive behavior" where I am tilted from previous game (even if we won but that win was more luck than execution) -> press requeue automatically -> get into the next game before I reset mentally -> more often than not I make some stupid decision early in game because I am still mentally not there.
If queue times would be "normal" and balance lobbies better this would not happen, would give me and others time to restart our brain, focus. But that's bad for business I guess and probably as with any emotional issues some might even get so tilted that they go and by Heirloom after say 5 game loosing streak :D

p.s. in this regard I feel like Valorant's matchmaking that sometimes does that 3-5 min even on low Elo lobbies (<gold) does a better job. I in many cases even notice that it balances teams out even when hackers are online by putting one hacker in one team and other in other. Not fun overall but at least balancing works :)

Will we be seeing a legitimate response regarding this issue before next season or are the developers just reinforcing what we are all saying?

The game is dead until they put legitimacy at the forefront.