Apex Legends has had a major problem with hackers for some time now. However, this seems to be greater in some parts of the world than in Europe. Some fans attribute this to Chinese players and are calling for a regional lock for China.
Who wants to shut out the Chinese? The player Xenton wrote a long post on reddit, in which he again drew attention to the hacker problem. The thread quickly received over 3000 upvotes with about 97% approval. (As of: April 21)
In his post, Xenton explains that in the regions of Oceania (OCE) and Southeast Asia (SEA), the problem with hackers is particularly pronounced. Players from these regions, as well as those from North America and Japan, agree with the post.
This is the problem with the Chinese: Xenton sees the problem of hackers and cheaters, especially on PC, in China. He refers to his own experiences and cultural differences.
According to Xenton, who claims to have grown up in China, there is an extremely competitive mindset in China that drives the Chinese to always be “the best.” However, it is not only about being “better,” but especially about standing out from others. The others must be worse.
Xenton explains this cultural “problem” in another post. Chinese players are said to exploit every advantage they can get, including hacks. And from a Chinese perspective, this is not even considered reprehensible:
If you can hack and the game doesn’t stop you, you should hack. If the developers didn’t want you to hack, they would have closed the holes in their program or banned you outright. It is their responsibility to stop hackers. Otherwise, it’s my right to hack.
How do the Chinese ruin Apex Legends? In Apex Legends, this leads to increasingly loud complaints about hackers, especially on PC. Since players can also manually select their region, this is particularly critical in Oceania and Southeast Asia.
Here, Chinese hackers are rampant, as they do not want to do this on their home server in China and because they still have a somewhat acceptable ping there.
However, since both OCE and SEA have very few players, it results in encountering a Chinese hacker in every second to fifth game.
The regular players thus have less and less motivation to play. Games like PUBG, H1Z1, and Day-Z have already become unplayable in these regions. One might wait over five hours and find no full game.
According to Xenton, the problem is not only hacks but also “teaming”.
He describes “teaming” as the collaboration of Chinese players who do not play together in a team. This way, they can form teams beyond the actual squad size of three players and win battles and games through overwhelming numbers, causing the “foreigners” to lose.
This is how to counter it: As a solution, players see a regional lock, similar to the one already implemented in genre peer PUBG. Players want to exclude the Chinese from playing on OCE and SEA servers.
However, since these regional locks can be bypassed through a VPN (virtual network to simulate a different location), a “ping lock” could be an alternative. Players with too high a ping would then not be allowed to participate.
Although Apex Legends is already taking action against cheaters with new features and cheaters are even complaining about it, it seems the problem is still present.
What do you think of the solution?
Some vendors even brag about their profits:
