The hashtag #SaveApexLegends trended on Twitter Monday, after Apex Legends professional player Chris "sweetdreams" released a Twilonger calling on the devs to do something about the endemic cheating going on in the game's ranked mode.

The player, who currently competes for NRG, released a Twitlonger entitled "Empty Promises and False Hope. #SaveApexRanked before its too late" in which he laid out his issues. The TL;DR is that he feels Respawn has not done enough to address cheating, and he explained how the community of pros, players, and streamers alike were being harmed by the ongoing cheating problems. 

The Twitlonger prompted a response from Respawn, who said they will be taking the following courses of action:

• Hiring more people to focus on manual detection
• Developing better automatic tools
• Investigating ways to improve their systems

The response was the usual generic "we will do better" that gamers have come to expect, but with such a loud and expansive outcry, many players are hopeful that changes are actually coming in the near future.  

A Summary of the key points in sweetdreams Twitlonger 

"We are going into about the 8th or 9th consecutive month of cheating and ddosing being the principle issue facing the ranked ladder and its integrity," sweetdreams said in his opening. "Streamers ability to consistently make content while playing ranked, and the general quality of life of anyone who plays ranked at a high level across any region has been declining and fast. . . the game has spiraled out of control to the point where the term unplayable has never had more validity."

According to sweetdreams, the cheating problems started in earnest about six months ago when a number of legitimate players from servers in Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore jumped over to NA servers, despite the lag, to avoid the rampant cheating problems on their home servers. sweetdreams posited the theory that many cheaters then followed them over in search of faster queue times. Regardless of why, the cheating has ballooned in a similar way to what we have seen with Warzone and other free-to-play online titles. 

"Myself and almost every NA/EU streamer or public competitive figure have come together because we literally can't see the game spiral further out of control," sweetdreams stated.
"Ranked is the backbone of Apex and we can't take it much longer. We have been offered empty promises of focus on the issue which from a results standpoint have been complete lies."

In his conclusion, sweetdreams laid out the negative impact that cheating has had on the community. He explained that it not only harms thousands of average players every day, it also harms streamers and their viewership since viewers don't want to tune into an Apex streamer just to watch them die to cheaters and get DDOSd for the rest of the night. The cheating problem was framed as an existential threat to the game's long-term success.

sweetdreams suggested that Respawn should invest into more personnel to handle the issue. He also suggested that "high profile reputable streamers" should get to see a special roadmap and be able to suspend cheaters. Both of those final ideas were scrutinized by some readers of his Twitlonger, even when they agreed that cheating was a big issue.

"All in all, something needs to be done," sweetdreams concluded. "We are so done with it, it's to the point where we literally DO NOT know what to do, we just sit around month over month and nothing changes, and it's demoralizing. Please take initiative and #SaveApexRanked, before it's too late."

Apex Legends Community rallies behind sweetdreams #SaveApexRanked movement

The online community of Apex streamers, viewers, and players expressed their support for sweetdreams call for change on Monday by using the #SaveApexRanked. By Monday evening, that hashtag was trending on Twitter.

While some criticized the way he wrote his message and others criticized some of the specifics of his suggested solution, most everyone was in agreement that cheating is a big problem. Among those supporting him were a number of popular Apex pros and influencers:

The war between developers and hackers has been going on since the beginning on online gaming. While there has been a lot of back and fourth, right now, across multiple titles, developers are struggling to stem the tide of cheaters. Apex Legends is no exception.

We will see if Respawn can do anything to actually improve the cheating issue, or if this problem is just here to say.