Apex Legends to force cheaters to play together

[AnotherGills 25]

Respawn Entertainment, developers of Apex Legends, typically engage in weekly check-ins on the Apex Legends subreddit. These check-ins typically provide information on updates and upcoming promotions.

In a recent check-in, Jay Frechette (Community Manager for Respawn), disclosed to the public how Respawn plans on tackling a recent wave of cheaters in ranked play.

Quote

• Using machine learning to create behavior models that detect and auto ban cheaters.
• Requiring TFA in certain regions on high risk accounts.
• Improving detection that identifies and bans new spam accounts before they are used.
• Ongoing work to adapt to new cheats.
• Matchmaking that matches detected cheaters and spammers together.
• Investigating how people party up for matches. Even if you are not specifically using a cheat, partying up with cheaters is still cheating.
• Increasing resources whether that be people or tech.

Of all these methods, separating known cheaters from the general player populace seems the most interesting. While it would seem more useful to just ban the cheaters outright, a match exclusively composed of hackers and cheaters would be quite a spectacle to watch.

[Mastan 13]

BTW matchmaking that forces cheaters play with other cheaters is already implemented in some games - Max Payne 3, Titanfall.

[Aemony 141]

I would imagine most games with matchmaking have something of this nature. For example, League of Legends have for years matched disruptive or negative players together, so that their negative attitudes does not affects as many other players as it would otherwise do.

This kind of individualized matchmaking is just another way of preserving the integrity of the game as much as possible.