Apex Legends, Respawn's infamous shooter set in the Titanfall universe, has been long-plagued with cheaters looking to get a cheap win ever since the game started to pick up speed back in 2019. The FPS game's cheating has hit an all-time high as remote hackers hijacked the ALGS NA finals to destroy pro players with aimbots and wallhacks.
During the recent Apex Legends ALGS NA finals tournament, remote hackers began adding cheats to the games of pro players. ImperialHal, the self-proclaimed CEO of Apex Legends and one-third of the reigning champ team TSM, quickly realised he had aimbot halfway through one of his games on Storm Point. Once Hal realised he'd been hacked his only option was to leave the game, and given how apparently fantastic Apex Legends' anti-cheat software is, was promptly gifted with a ban.
Genburten of Dark Zero suffered a similar fate, with aimbot and wallhacks that allowed him to see the location of every other living player on the map. To add insult to injury, the now infamous hacker Destroyer2009, who has been spam-gifting packs to professionals, used Genburten's account to gloat in team chat about the hack as it was happening.
Another member of TSM, Verhulst, was also delivered with a swift ban, as was Disguised's iiTzTimmy, and due to this multi-million dollar professional esports space being unable to stop even standard cheats, it was certainly not equipped to deal with remote hackers uploading cheats onto their professional players. Eventually, managers made the decision to halt operations and indefinitely postpone the ALGS NA finals.
As frustrating as this whole situation must be for these professional players, the only silver lining is that EA and Respawn might finally look into better anti-cheat software for their game. Almost every season has seen social media explode with complaints about hackers, and there was a time last year when an actual cheater was removed from the ALGS. But in the entire history of esports, the community has never seen hackers upload cheats to professionals' accounts during live games.
We'll keep you posted as to when the ALGS NA finals eventually resume, and whether Respawn publicly addresses the situation.