For the United States based Respawn Entertainment, this past weekend was a holiday, meaning the studio was supposed to get some much needed time off. Typically during holiday weekends, studios add some sort of event for players to check out such as double XP weekend in Call of Duty games, or other special limited time modes in live service games. However, Respawn's time off wasn't quite as restful as many had hoped it would be thanks in large part to one Apex Legends hacker.
Seizing an opportunity, a hacker began what they called Operation Red Tape, a campaign to bring awareness to the rough state that Titanfall is currently in on PC. While Titanfall saw a massive boost in popularity when it arrived on Steam, Respawn's title was quickly beset with hackers and DDoS attacks which make the popular online-only game unplayable. While Respawn has acknowledged the issue, nothing has been done to correct the problem, which is the main reason for the current Apex Legends hacker campaign.
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The user hijacked the Important Message display at the end of games, pointing users to a website where the hacker indicates that the Titanfall community has been begging for a fix to the hacking issues, but the game continues to be sold without a warning to consumers about the current issues making it unplayable. While PC players could still access and play Apex Legends on July 4, the messaging, renamed playlists, and general disruption sprung Respawn into action to take back the game.
Starting as an investigation into the hack, Respawn continued to update the community over the status of the work they were doing into the issues. Soon the investigation turned into testing possible solutions, which eventually culminated into 6 hours of work to fully resolve the hacked game. A server update started rolling out around 9pm ET, restoring matchmaking to the pre-hack state. While Apex Legends players are likely thrilled to have the game back in normal order, others, including the hacker, are likely disappointed that the underlying issue with Titanfall was not addressed as well.
While this hack was relatively tame due to the fact that the individual seemed only interested in promoting a certain message, Apex Legends continues to have plenty of other issues related to hacking. Not only has cheating seen a rise during ranked matches, but distributed denial-of-service attacks are becoming more and more common as well, ultimately ruining the experience for everyone. Respawn has recently doubled down on fixing these issues, announcing new hires focused on manually banning confirmed cheaters as well as developing additional tools to automatically detect and stop DDoS attacks.
Apex Legends is available now on Nintendo Switch, PC, PS4, and Xbox One.