Apex Legends found itself at the center of a scandal due to cheating: the game was compromised during a high-profile event when a hacker remotely activated cheats for some players. Such a precedent has never occurred in any other title, and it remains unclear how Electronic Arts and Respawn Entertainment plan to address this issue.
On March 18th, at ALGS 2024: Split 1 Pro League - North America, a hacker remotely breached the accounts of TSM_ImperialHal and Genburten, activating forbidden software, including aimhack and wallhack. Upon noticing this, the players immediately exited the match and notified the organizers. As a result, the tournament was abruptly halted. As reported, the hacker sent "gifts" to players containing fake in-game items, which contained malicious code: most likely, this is how access to the players' computers was obtained. The incident sparked outrage within the community: many fans accused the developers of not preventing such a critical vulnerability.
The ALGS 2024: Split 1 Pro League - North America concluded only on March 25th, several days after the incident, and the final matches were pre-recorded and broadcast just on March 27th. The peak viewership for the event before the scandal was 192.5K viewers, and it never went above 72K on the very last day. The final day of the American stage turned out to be the least popular day of the entire event.
After the scandal, the number of active Apex Legends players declined. According to SteamDB, the average daily online player count in the title dropped from over 430K to 360K players in just a few days. However, what truly increased was the number of discussions about cheating in Twitch chatrooms.
The incident at ALGS sparked vigorous discussions in Twitch chats. On regular days, channels dedicated to the title saw fewer than a thousand mentions of cheating and unfair play. However, on March 18th, the number of such messages skyrocketed by 23 times. For several days, Apex Legends dominated by the metric among all esports titles.
What about other game fandoms? Looking at the data over two months (February and March), cheating discussions were most common in chats of tactical shooters and battle royale games. Among them, Call of Duty: Warzone stood out, leading in the total number of messages and chatters. On average, Warzone fans discuss unfair play more frequently than Apex Legends viewers, even though there wasn't a similar surge in activity due to a scandal.
The topic of unfair play was also quite popular in Fortnite streams, with message counts sometimes reaching 4-6K per day. However, this high figure is partially due to the game's popularity — Fortnite significantly surpasses CoD: Warzone and Apex Legends in both viewership and the number of active Twitch channels.
It's worth mentioning Counter-Strike: fans of this shooter regularly complain about cheaters on social media, and Valve consistently bans suspicious accounts. However, discussions about this issue in Twitch chats are not as active: the number of messages on this topic is half as much as in streams of CoD: Warzone or Fortnite.
As for MOBAs, the topic of cheating is much less relevant here than in shooters. There even were more messages about unfair play on Overwatch streams than on League of Legends, and it's considering LoL is far more popular in general than OW. Dota 2 fans discuss cheating even less frequently: there were just over 13.7K mentions of unfair play in the past two months. For comparison, this is three times less than in League of Legends and twelve times less than in Call of Duty: Warzone.