Respawn Entertainment is reportedly ramping up the crackdown on Apex Legends cheaters through permanent hardware bans against PC players.

The permanent bans against cheaters on the battle royale shooter’s PC version first surfaced on a thread on the official Apex Legends sub-Reddit. The thread contained screenshots of posts from cheating forums showing complaints from players that they have been unable to rejoin the game after having their account banned.

The ban, apparently, is no longer just on the cheater’s account. Respawn is reportedly issuing permanent hardware bans, so the cheaters who create new accounts on their PCs are getting banned almost immediately.

The screenshot in the opening post of the aforementioned thread on the Apex Legends sub-Reddit revealed a cheater who has tried nearly everything, including changing the MAC address, reformatting, and partitioning the hard drives of the PC, all to no avail.

There still appears to be a limited number of ways for players who received permanent hardware bans to get back into the game, including buying a whole new PC. That seems like a pretty bad deal just to play one game, but it goes to show that cheaters never prosper. Apex Legends players who choose to play the game the correct way, meanwhile, are not sympathetic to the plight of cheaters, even ones that claim that they will no longer use cheating software.

With the permanent hardware bans, Respawn is raising the bar for other developers in addressing the issue of cheating in online multiplayer games. While Epic Games is notoriously unable to fight against cheating in rival Battle Royale shooter Fortnite, Respawn is making sure that cheaters do not ruin the Apex Legends experience.

Fighting against cheating has always been one of the major focuses of Respawn with Apex Legends. In less than two weeks after the game was launched, the studio said that it had already banned more than 16,000 cheaters. Earlier in March, Respawn said that the number of banned cheaters was up to 355,000 on the PC version of the game, while promising that an in-game report feature will soon be added to make it even harder for cheaters to escape the banhammer.

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