Forum Discussion

AvengArnie's avatar
AvengArnie
Rising Traveler
2 years ago

Proposal and call for 2nd tier account option in APEX

I like Apex. I really do. I supported the game financially and by playing (a LOT, about 6K hours) almost from the beginning. I have played roughly 20K games (not counting arenas, mixtape and LTMs not collected by the stats) and have spent well beyond USD 5K on this game (e.g. the price of 100+ AAA titles) over the last 5 years. I do this not because I need the 329th legendary Wraith skin that when equipped I do not even see while playing but I give financial support because I see the value in the fun this game can provide and the unique ideas it brought not just to the genre but to computer gaming in general.

Problem Statement

But then again playing the game has to be fun. And fun it was for a long time even though it definitely had its ups and downs I always felt that I got something from playing this game but that feeling is now fading very quickly.

Even with more than 20K APEX BR games behind my back I do not consider myself exceptionally good player. Maybe I do better than okay, some days I am satisfied with myself and feel a sense of accomplishment and other days I suck and that is okay if the competition is fair. And there of course comes the problem of Apex (and other free-to-play titles): smurfs and cheaters. Since creating a new account is free, smurfing and cheating cannot be really penalized since they can just create a new account and start making other player's life miserable all over again.

I understand that it is very hard to efficiently fight against cheaters and detecting smurfing can also be problematic and I do not expect that this issue will be resolved anytime soon. What I expect is EA/Respawn to realize that the real value is the core player base - the people who are supporting this game with their time and/or money and just want to play on a level playing field without having to deal with smurfs and cheaters in almost every game played.

Proposed Solution

So there will always be cheaters and smurfs and I am okay with that. What I am not okay with is that I need to play against them. And the solution is very, very, very simple: create a 2nd tier account for people either financially or with time invested enough into the game. Cheaters get banned sooner or later and smurfs need to create new accounts over and over again to be able to exploit their advantage by getting into lobbies with people having a lot lower skill levels. So what is common in both? They both are using low-level accounts. I am proposing creating a 2nd tier account for everybody who are over level 100 and/or spent X+ USD on the game (call it premium, verified, whatever). Once reached, give the 2nd tier account the possibility to opt out from lobbies that are below the level 100 mark or spending limit. This would almost immediately resolve all issues for players who invested (time OR money OR both) into the game and just want to have the ability to play in lobbies that are 99% free of cheaters and smurfs. And this would NOT be pay to win: if you put in the time playing without smurfing and/or cheating you would eventually reach the needed level.

This would of course leave the (I am guessing) very small minority of real new players who have to fight (or buy) their way out from 1st tier but I guess this is a fair price to pay if you are interested in playing the game on the long run and everybody else could have a LOT better experience playing in (almost) smurf and cheater free lobbies.

Bonus: aim assist

I do not want to go into whether granting controller players aim assist gives an unfair advantage or not. There were plenty of discussions around this already (and always will be). You guys at EA/Respawn are sitting on a huge throve of information and statistics. The question is: is the median kills/game the same for controller players and MNK players? If not, please, please, pretty please start adjusting the global aim assist efficiency until they do match. I think we can safely assume that the skill level of the average player with large enough sample size (and when it comes to sample size, you must have enormous amounts of data collected during the potentially billions of games played during the last 5 years) is the same on both inputs so then if their performance differs it must mean that one input gives an unfair advantage over the other. Having everybody pushed to using controller is not a solution. Having the effectiveness of both inputs balanced is.

Epilogue

I think I am talking not only for myself but for a lot of other people invested a whole lot of time and/or money into this game nearing the end of their patience when it comes to the above issues. I want to keep playing and even financially supporting this game but I will not for much longer if the above concerns are not being addressed.

Thanks for listening!

discussion

2 Replies

  • WTF_Huitzo's avatar
    WTF_Huitzo
    2 years ago

    @AvengArniethe proposed solution sounds good but doesnt work.
    most smurfs are waaaay above lvl 100.
    when you shred every lobby your level goes up super fast.

    and the real problem is that once you reach diamond EVERY lobby is full of wallhacker/aimbot from a certain region so your only way to dodge them is to smurf (cuz yeah since even pubs have mmr now).

  • AvengArnie's avatar
    AvengArnie
    Rising Traveler
    2 years ago

    Level 100 is like a totally arbitrary number for all that I care it could be 1000 :D According to the stat tracker I am like top 0.5% with my level 1476 with only 25K players ahead of me so it would be potentially a very small club...

    So when it comes to fighting smurfing with technical tools you would need to generate a unique ID for the client itself (and there is such a thing today) to detect multiple accounts playing from the same asset but then again that would not be immutable if the smurf understands how it is generated they could just find a way to alter it, use a different client, etc. Also there would be the problem of shared PCs / internet caffe PCs, etc. You can only rely on player reports but if what you say is true, that most smurfs are beyond level 100 it might be really problematic to distinguish between legit and smurf here.

    When it comes to cheating (aside from strike packs and other mechanical tools outside the client) the cheat client needs to rely on reading the memory space of the game client process to find the coordinates of other players in the virtual space of the map. One would think that it would be really easy to create a generic anti-cheat software that would only need to accomplish this one thing. The only issue here that since you do not control the client environment the owner of the client has 7 ways till Sunday to work around you trying to catch those read attempts so then you are left with the antivirus approach: try to discover known cheat processes by signature, etc. and that is a battle lost from day 1. You will be always 1 step behind with detecting new popular cheats and you will essentially never find custom-made, fine-crafted ones. E.g. you will rely on forensic evidence (spectating) to find the cheaters and EA/Respawn will never have the human resources to cover that obviously. Dead end.

    I really do not see means to really cut back on cheating and smurfing using technical tools there must be a way to social-engineer around the guys doing it. Cheaters and smurfs need to bee discouraged and If needs be then yeah, just really create a paid premium level account and have a (real-money) spend limit attached to the premium accounts. You will think twice to create a new account if you had to pay for it...