Apex Legends™: Anti-cheat and Matchmaking Update

Last year we made a commitment to you that we were going to continue to grow our communications and give you additional development insight. For our first dev blog of 2025, we’re sharing progress on the last two hot topics we covered: anti-cheat and matchmaking. 

We touched on both of these in our Dev Update video that launched today, but we wanted to give a written overview as well. You already know that anti-cheat is an ever evolving process, but we wanted to update you with the latest on teaming, botting, and actioning your reports. We chatted about matchmaking just ahead of the holidays, but there’s so much more to catch you up on including new features in the works. Here’s a TLDR of what we’re covering in today’s dev update:

• Anti-cheat Update: 
  • Recent efforts against teaming including recent action being taken on ~1,200 accounts across all platforms, including the removal of ~17.4 million ranked points
  • An update on our progress against botting including a brand new machine learning model 
  • Report Feedback: a new feature that we’re investigating to provide additional insight into the report you sent in-game
  • Brief touch base around a recently resolved incident that saw some high-profile accounts become compromised
• Matchmaking Update
  • A sneak peek of in-progress features coming in the not so distant future: Unranked Skill Display, seeding skill values, and lessening Ranked resets
  • Looking at some new and upcoming tests: npc “Apex Bots,” preferential matchmaking (solos vs. premades), and queue time adjustments
  • Sharing some ongoing conversations for added transparency: Ranked premade restrictions, Ranked placement matches and skill difference and scoring

Catch up before you jump in with our previous matchmaking and anti-cheat blogs, and keep an eye out on our social channels for more continual bite-sized updates such as the Linux blockage results or adjustments to matchmaking.

ANTI-CHEAT UPDATE

Anti-Cheat and game integrity will always be a top priority for us and the fight continues as we work to put in safeguards and evolve our systems to stop and get ahead of cheaters. This is another topic that we’ll share updates on as often as we can, whether it’s through social updates or blogs. 

Today we’re sharing some advances we’ve made in combating teaming and botting, and an upcoming feature to better your reporting experience.

TEAMING

While Apex is a team game at its core, it’s not a team’s team game. If you’ve not encountered this before, teaming is when multiple teams collude during a match for a shared goal. For those that have experienced this in the past, you might’ve noticed a decrease over the last few months.

We’ve actively been targeting this negative behaviour in Ranked modes from multiple angles, including rolling out new automated teaming detection algorithms, swifter and more severe punishments, and stripping any ill-gotten ranked points from offenders. These efforts have led to action being taken on ~1,200 accounts across all platforms, including the removal of ~17.4 million ranked points, and we’ve seen a decrease in teaming thanks to this. We’ll continue to counter this exploitative practice and take appropriate action against bad actors. Teaming has no place in Apex.

BOTTING

There has been a recent increase in bots that’ve been circumventing our existing security measures and we’re actively working on addressing this. We’ve also created a brand new machine learning model that not only detects this new generation of bots, but was also built to be more future-proof to combat future variants and evolutions. At the time of writing this, our early reviews have found this new model to be incredibly accurate with low false negatives and we’re on track to have this in the live game by the time you’re reading this.

Encountering bots like these in your play sessions is not only frustrating, but it also muddies the player pool. Often these accounts are being used for various malicious purposes after they’ve been levelled up including cheating and harassment. Our work here is not done, but we expect another decrease in cheaters and an overall improved experience by continuing to reduce these bots.

REPORT FEEDBACK

Knowing your report against a cheater has been effective has been long requested by our community. We’re still in early stages, but we can share that this is something that we’re investigating. Look for an update with more details about this potential feature in the future. Please continue to send your reports—each one has the potential to make an impact:

• If you’re unable to report in-game, you can also report players via EA Help
• For concerns regarding game vulnerabilities or anti-cheat by-passes, report via our CVD program

RECENTLY COMPROMISED ACCOUNTS

Towards the end of January, a few high profile pro and creator accounts became compromised. While this has since been addressed, we want to share that we discovered and resolved two exploits that contributed to this One exploit targeted a party privacy status that impacted custom matches, and the other capitalized on our server-to-server handshake verifications—both of which we are confident are fixed and secured. We thank those impacted for flagging this and working with us to get this rectified as quickly as possible so that they could get back into the Outlands.

MATCHMAKING UPDATE

Our last dev blog provided a good baseline which we can use to focus on what’s coming next, things that we want to test, and ongoing conversations. The team has been hard at work to act on what we’ve been hearing from the community of players as well as our own data.

COMING SOON

Some of what we’re sharing today is still in progress and may change before it goes live, but here’s a sneak peek at some features coming in the not-so-distant future.

UNRANKED SKILL DISPLAY

Pre-Match Skill Display in Ranked has been an asset and we’ve seen the impact it has had on your matches, strategizing, and potential flagging of issues. Since it’s seen such success in Ranked, we’ll be rolling out a version for Trios BR at the start of the next season. Its purpose is the same as its Ranked variant: to provide context on where your squad’s skill level sits within the rest of the lobby.

Unranked Pre-match Skill Display will look a little different as there isn’t a visible skill value for players in pubs. Here’s what you can expect from this feature:

• How “wide” the skill is for the entire lobby
• Where the bookends of the lobby skill sit in the overall skill distribution of all players in this match
• Your squad’s skill in the context of both the lobby and the overall player-base

Note: the following examples are taken from internal testing, so the width of the matches are for illustrative purposes only.

In this match, the skill width is incredibly tight and all of the squads have some of the most skilled players for the game mode. Your squad’s skill rating is at the top of this lobby, but it may not make too much of a difference given how close all squads are here.

The skill width of this match is very wide with the lowest skilled squad being on the lower end of the overall skill of players in the mode, and the highest skilled squad being quite skilled. Your squad’s skill score falls on the lower end, so you will be facing some more challenging opponents in this lobby.

One thing that isn’t here that is in the Ranked Display is the number of squads throughout the distribution. We had an early version that included this, but it was not easy to read at a glance. We’ll be releasing a more simplified version to start with while we continue to iterate.

SEEDING SKILL VALUES

How players start with new modes and LTMs has varied in the past, but it’ll soon have a more consistent approach and result: your starting skill value when playing a new mode for the first time will be influenced by your skill value in other modes. Modes that you’ve played before (including returning LTMs) will already have your match history to work with.

Your starting skill value will be more elastic than your other skill values, meaning that it can change more quickly and with a larger swing based on your performance. It will stabilize over a number of matches and your matches will get more consistent. TLDR: the launch of a new game mode will be less chaotic in terms of skill mixing. Now all players will have a starting skill value to match from and they should start to be paired with like-skilled players from their very first match.

This will be coming to unranked matches first, but will quickly be followed by a solution that allows matchmaking to seed players into their correct Rank Tier based on their performance in other modes.

LESSENING RANKED RESETS

On the topic of skill mixing, this happens the most at the start of each Ranked season and each split. We’ve also seen a good amount of chatter about the dislike of both seasonal RP and split resets, and this is an active conversation for us.

For the near future, we will be tuning the reset values and reset placements to reduce start-of-season skill mixing even more. This should help reduce skill mixing for players that participated in the previous season, but doesn’t prevent new Ranked players from climbing. This is just one step we’re taking to reduce skill mixing and more are on the way.

TESTING

These next items are either in testing or will be soon and we’ll aim to share some results and decisions for future in-game changes in a future dev blog. Note: the dates of these tests haven’t and won’t be published to avoid outside influence, but we’ll circle back and share after our internal analysis is done.

APEX BOTS (NPC)

Bot Royale created an approachable way to build your skills and onboard with a squad, but when you’re ready for Unranked pubs you’re thrown into the thick of it. It’s clear that you’re looking for tighter and fairer matches, especially those who are newer and early-tier players. We’ve started testing something that we think will not only help developing players, but also deliver on the lobbies you’ve been looking for.

We’ve slowly been introducing a small and deliberate amount of npc bots, “Apex Bots,” into lower-tier public lobbies. These bots only deploy as opponents and will be a full squad; your squad will not be filled. We want players to have fun playing Apex, and we see this as a potential path to deliver more of that, but we didn’t want to just drop them on you.

Enemy bots don’t always create the best in-game experience, so it’s worth repeating that this is a test. We’ll be monitoring and measuring for impact in a few areas: decreasing skill width, decreasing overall queue wait times, and whether or not this helps players increase their game sense and combat effectiveness. We hope to have enough data for next steps by mid-season, so that we can report back and share updates and if we can leverage these Apex bots for increased game health in the future.

PREFERENTIAL MM: SOLOS VS PREMADES

A desire for premades to play only against premades and solos to only play against solos is something we’ve frequently heard, but a full splitting of the queues isn’t a possibility that we’re going to pursue in the near future. We need to keep premade squads and solo queueing players together to maintain healthy queue populations and ensure that matchmaking quality isn’t compromised. It’s worth calling out that there would be a significant impact to queue times in order for this change to be felt by players and reach the level of desired impact.

With that in mind, we’re going to run a lot of testing to understand the impact of adding preferential matchmaking criteria based on premade vs. solo. The goal of this is for the matchmaking system to take into consideration premade vs. solo queuers, and attempt to match them together as much as possible within the acceptable level of impact to queue times and skill width. We’re looking forward to digging into what is possible and feasible with this as it’s one of the most requested matchmaking changes.

QUEUE TIME ADJUSTMENTS

At the start of From the Rift, we adjusted how much time CWMM takes to expand the search for differently-skilled players in both Unranked and Ranked BR matches. While this increased wait times, it had the desired positive effect of making matches tighter overall, meaning more encounters with like-skilled players. This also led to more damage output and kills per player, and we believe that these combat-focused measurements roughly translate to both “fun” and “fairness” for the majority of players.

While this has had some success, we’ll be continuing to experiment and optimize maximum wait times for various skill bands in order to increase match tightness. We’ve not yet found the sweet spot for this—more work needs to be done.

ONGOING CONVERSATIONS

These next topics we’re going to cover are ones that are hot both internally and externally. We’re just starting to formulate tests to help us validate our ideas on each and we’ll hopefully have more to share once they’re out of the investigating phase.

RANKED PREMADE RESTRICTIONS

With the Ranked Skill Display showing that yes, sometimes a Silver can be in the same lobby as a Master, it’s less clear that this is partially due to premade squads allowing players within 2 Tiers of each other. A Silver can pair with a Platinum, and they can then get pulled into a Diamond lobby which also allows Masters (including Preds). Too many ranks for one lobby.

We could further restrict premades to reduce the width of matches caused by premade squads, but this would limit who could play together in its current form. We’re not a big fan of that route as this is a team game and forming squads with your friends to compete is something we’d like to see more of. This one needs the most cooking time, and we are going to keep talking about other solutions to this specific problem.

RETURN OF RANKED PLACEMENT MATCHES

We want players having fun as quickly as possible and one aspect of that is playing against players of similar skill. Previously, we had implemented placement matches where players would play 10 matches and then be placed into their starting Division and Tier for that Ranked season. We’re looking to return to a version of this system as it’s both easy to understand, and effective at detecting and properly placing players even before their first official Ranked match. This system will leverage skill seeding to assist in each player’s placement based on past performance in other modes, and will also rely on Ranked Placement Match performance to influence their starting position.

SKILL DIFFERENCE AND SCORING

This is a fairly new topic of discussion for us and it’s an interesting one: how can we leverage scoring outcomes to make the match more fair when there’s wider skill mixing in a lobby. One broad example would be if the least skilled player in the lobby got killed by the highest skilled player in the lobby, would they lose less RP? And vice versa, would they get a major bonus to RP (or XP if unranked) if the opposite occurred?

Scoring and balance is a super delicate topic and requires a lot of work even before being ready for testing. Right now, the feedback we’re hearing is that it is very much not worth the risk of being in matches with higher-skilled players. While we are doing many things to actively reduce skill mixing, there will always need to be some level of mixing and want to explore options to make it more fair.

SEE YOU ON THE DROPSHIP

We’re committed to continuing the conversation with you, our community, and we’re reiterating that promise now in 2025. Apex Legends should be fun and competitive without any loss to the integrity of the game, and this is just the beginning of how we’ll be focusing on the issues that are impacting your experience in-game.

Look forward to more of these updates as we continue to action this commitment while implementing changes, running tests on community requests, and improving on your in-game experience. Cheers for your patience and feedback, and we’ll see you in Takeover.

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