An Apex Legends player has discovered an exploit that allows them to crash the server to get easy kills.
The person who posted the video to Reddit, halo_shot, noticed a number of videos on someone's Xbox account showing opposing players who were frozen in place, unable to react to the ruthless cheater as they tore their way through the map one body at a time. "I hope he gets banned," halo_shot said.
Within hours, the user was no longer to be found on the Apex Legends tracker network. Players like that can give games a bad rap, and the free-to-play Apex Legends does not need one bad player spoiling the game for the rest of the bunch. Some are unintentional such as Loba's broken hitbox, but crashing servers and freezing players like this is, quite simply, bad form.
There are plenty of theories for how this player was able to crash the servers in the first place. Other games running Source are known to run into problems with server crashes when a player uses a script to spam requests to the server, effectively DDoSing them similar to what has happened in Call of Duty. That means that there are more requests coming into the server than it can handle, so it ends up freezing players in place while it tries to calculate what everyone should be doing based on the spam. The result is only the person doing the spamming being paid attention to, so they have the opportunity to run circles around the other players.
Whenever this kind of thing crops up, server administrators need to act fast to make sure their players continue to have a good time in spite of bad actors. Luckily, it seems Respawn Entertainment had addressed this player, but it's an issue that occurs everywhere. For example, Destiny 2 bans over two thousand players a week for cheating, and there are always more lurking in the shadows.
Bug exploiters had better beware, because game companies have sued over DDoS attacks and other forms of cheating. It can be especially rampant in esports, like when 80 players were disqualified for cheating at CS:GO. When looking at it from the outside, it's hard not to wonder why someone would risk incurring that kind of wrath, just in exchange for a higher number of kills.
Apex Legends is available now on PC, PS4, and Xbox One