Apex Legends' Asian Servers Are Being Flooded By Chinese Ad Bots

Apex Legends has been doing phenomenally during its first month of release but Asian servers on PC are not the best place to play as they are currently being flooded by Chinese bots, blasting ads in a loop during the hero selection screen. Once drop off begins, they disconnect from the game, leaving the squad at a disadvantage.

Youtuber Will Grass uploaded a perfect example of the ad bots in action, which you can watch below.

The bots are currently haunting the PC version of the game, and many of them go by absurd handles like Qqun940516020. Since the start of this month, I’ve experience at least three per session. The option to mute the player is only available after the hero selection phase. By the time drop off begins though, the bot has left and pretty much done its job, leaving their team out to dry.

My default server is Hong Kong and I attempted to switch data servers to avoid these encounters. I got the same result on Singaporean servers. Trying out any other server is a no go for me as that has an adverse impact on my ping.

There’s been no official word yet from EA or Respawn Entertainment regarding this issue and the reports seem to be ramping up, especially on Reddit.

Hackers on the rise as well

To make matters worse, what these Chinese bots are selling are actually cheat programs that give players wallhack/aimbot software for Apex Legends. So not only are players suffering ad bots, but matches are now populated by hackers using said programs. You can read the complaints in this Apex Reddit thread here, which is now closed.

Here’s another example by LifeBoxGaming, and yes, their audio is clear and loud every time.

Apex Legends just hit the 50 million player mark, which is a big achievement for Respawn Entertainment. But something needs to be done with these ad bots because even I feel discouraged to sign on, in fear of running into these bots.

Report a Player Added in the latest patch

[UPDATE] (3/20/2019) - Apex Legends’ first Battle Pass and new hero Octane is due this week but the Asian servers in the PC platform are still flooded with ad bots and hackers. This latest Reddit post shows the continued frustrations of players.

But the Battle Pass comes with a new 1.0 patch that not only fixes a few bugs and balance changes, but includes a new report system to combat the growing cheaters found in the PC version of the game.

Here’s the portion in the patch notes regarding the new Report a Player feature:

Added Report a Player feature for cheating and abuse on PC.

• Players can now report cheaters they encounter in-game and it’ll be sent directly to Easy Anti-Cheat. You can do this from either the spectate view after dying or when looking at your team’s Banner Cards in the Squad tab.

• We have lots of other work going on behind the scenes and this remains high priority for us. We won’t be able to share many specifics of what we’re doing but we’ll strive to provide updates on progress for the things we can talk about.

• As the notes were finished this morning, 499,937 accounts and counting have been banned for cheating.

• Speed hacking: We do currently have anti-speed hacking in Apex Legends, but it’s not being as effective as intended due to a bug that we believe we’ve identified and will be addressing in our next server update. Will provide ETA for it when I have it. Working to get it out ASAP.

You can read the rest of the 1.0 patch notes here.

Console platforms seem to have no issue as it’s difficult to apply a third-party software to either the PS4 or Xbox One.

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