Image via Respawn Entertainment

Australian Apex Legends players have expressed concern about the $35,000 Australian Apex Open following allegations of cheating and threats of violence against other players. Players also have issues with the qualifier format and the conduct of the admins.

The event, run by Mogul, is the biggest Apex Legends tournament in Australian history. Taking the best teams in Australian Apex from weekly qualifiers and knockout stages, the final eight teams were set to face off against each other in a single-elimination bracket. First place earned $15,000, while second through eighth place split $20,000.

Jackson “heykatie” Fussell, a player for We Love The Gong, brought the issues to light in two TwitLonger posts in May. On May 19, he said that there were “a few teams… [that] had not followed the rules and [used] configs to reduce shadows, draw distance, fog, and muzzle flash.”

The config policy of the Australian Apex Open said that teams were allowed to change settings inside of Apex for the tournament, such as resolution or video quality, but not edit the videoconfig.txt file to alter muzzle flash, smokes, or shadows.

Screengrab via Mogul

At the time of the tournament, config file changing was enabled, but it was often banned in a competitive environment due to its game-changing nature. Respawn has recently come out with a statement in Patch 1.2 that such alteration of the config files gives players too much of a “competitive advantage” and has patched the exploits out of the game.

But instead of banning the players from the tournament, the Mogul admins put out a notice saying “please ensure you are adhering to the [config] policy,” taking no action. These players continued to use these configs, with at least one of the teams qualifying for the finals. The problem was more widespread than that, however, according to one anonymous player.

“There was a large amount of evidence to substantiate claims of players using configs prohibited from tournament use,” they said. “Considering that only one member per team needed to stream in the qualifiers, the remaining two players would have been able to go nuts.”

The config altering didn’t stop in the knockout stage, though. Another player claims that there was “at least one player using no shadows in the knockouts.” The admins didn’t take any action.

Screengrab via Discord

Mogul delayed the finals until May 31 to investigate the issue before publishing the results of the investigation internally to participants. But the Mogul investigation found that “none of the eight teams [who] qualified for the finals were using a modified config to remove or reduce their muzzle flash…[or] obtained any other major advantages that impacts the way [players] see opponents.”

The rules for the finals were also changed. Every player was required to stream their POV instead of just one per team. This meant it was harder for players to hide their config files between the qualifiers and finals, but it didn’t stop players from trying.

Heykatie then came out with another TwitLonger on May 29 with screengrabs of the configs that the accused teams used during the tournament. One of these screengrabs included gameplay from Team Excellence, who qualified for the finals, playing with shadows disabled.

There were also problems surrounding players using macros to dramatically increase the accuracy of their first shot on some weapons, as well as help with bunny-hopping. These macros were allowed to level the playing field and “encourage skilled play,” according to heykatie.

“I don’t know of any tournament organizer who allows macros,” he said. “CoD 4 in 2007 had server bans for macroing your single shot weapons, and this is 12 years later.”

Players were also attacked for trying to raise attention publicly about the cheating allegations. Heykatie tweeted a clip from C10 Dodge’s Twitch, a player from Team Excellence, with someone threatening him on stream during a game in the tournament. It is unclear as to whether it’s C10 Dodge, zer0OCE as claimed in the tweet, or someone else in the call. There were also threats against heykatie’s partner, prominent Twitch streamer Oasis, as well.

Screengrab via Twitter (Jez is a player on Team Excellence)

Mogul has a zero-tolerance policy “against hate speech, racist language, or disrespectful behavior.” But when heykatie approached admins about the harassment, Mogul said that because the harassment occurred outside of its platform, the company can’t control or punish it.

Screengrab via Mogul

Screengrab via Mogul

In a support ticket to heykatie, a Mogul admin said that while “the clip might have been during the players finals stream, it did not occur in-game nor on our site.” “Our zero-tolerance policy cannot encompass a players private doings outside of the Mogul platform or tournaments,” the admin said. Mogul hasn’t responded to heykatie about this harassment since June 1 and has since closed the ticket.

There are also clips of Excellence players making racist remarks while playing the tournament on stream, although most of these have been removed. All of these remarks, including the insults to heykatie, were made while the players were streaming with “AAO by Mogul.gg” in their stream titles, meaning Mogul’s name was attached to these streams.

Screengrab via Twitch/Zer0OCE

In addition to the config issues, the Mogul admins also allegedly failed to act on instances of intentional disconnects. On multiple occasions, another finals team, KamiKaze, disconnected from their lobbies, claiming that they experienced server lag. On two occasions, other teams in the finals were in the server, which could have impacted their chance of getting points.

Disconnecting during the finals without admin permission was against the rules since all teams had to play three straight games in each round. The rules also said that once the players landed, they must play out the map. While some admins acknowledged they disconnected without approval, they were able to keep playing.

Screengrab via Discord

Screengrab via Mogul

One of the KamiKaze players, Tempplex, also said his VOD went missing during one of the games after experiencing server issues and restarting his router.

The Mogul admins made a decision on May 31 that KamiKaze did disconnect outside of the rules and lost points as a result. But less than 24 hours later, they were given their points back and they were able to proceed over Athletico to the semifinals. KamiKaze have since qualified for the grand final against Team Excellence, which is set to play at 11am AEST on June 8.

Screengrab via Twitter/@TCampar

Screengrab via Discord

Tempplex, formerly known as Yasu, has been permanently banned from PUBG Pro League events indefinitely for hacking and buying a third-party service to circumvent the ban. But he said that he made his ban public when he joined the Apex community.

“I was banned from PUBG six months ago, and I made it very clear to everyone that was part of the Australian Apex scene,” Tempplex said. “However, I deny cheating in any competitive environment. It was stupid of me to try it out casually, even for just one day, but I didn’t do it in tournaments.”

Video via Twitch/AirSaaan

Video via Twitch/AirSaaan

Team KamiKaze’s ThatCampar also said on June 1 that at least one of the disconnects in their finals game was approved by the admins. They also reuploaded the missing four minutes of Tempplex’s VOD where he describes the lag that he experienced.

Other people in the community are supporting KamiKaze. An anonymous finalist claimed that the admins were trying to ban KamiKaze to allow a bigger organization into the finals, thereby getting more publicity.

“It came across that they were trying to have a team banned with a small following, so that an org could get through to the finals and give the tournament better publicity,” they said.

But no matter how many times the players approached the admins, their complaints and warnings fell on deaf ears. According to heykatie, the admins could never agree on an interpretation of the rules and their calls often overruled one another. Head admin Rohan “Brucy” Bruce, the manager of tournament operations in Oceania at Mogul, was to blame, according to heykatie.

“Brucy was the head admin that always made the final decision, and as far as I can tell, he’s also the main perpetrator of the confusion,” heykatie said. “There’s images of other admins acknowledging and agreeing with complaints, only for Brucy to overrule them.”

Screengrab via Discord

Another player also claims that the admins didn’t actually conduct an investigation into the issues or attempt to find any extra information on the cheating allegations.

“They claimed they investigated the players, but they didn’t really find anything. All the evidence they used was already submitted by other players, and I felt like they did nothing themselves,” they said. “I feel as though the whole thing was really uncoordinated. They made decisions and rules out of nowhere on the spot and then went back and changed them progressively over time.”

Heykatie added that “none of the config rules, or macro rules, were stated anywhere in the original ruleset. They just made it up as they went along, and that’s where the problems started.”

It was clear to the players as well that the Mogul admins had very little knowledge of the game they were trying to run a major tournament for.

“The whole tournament was run pretty poorly,” Tempplex said. “But I think it’s because the Mogul admins don’t have any game knowledge, and made a hasty decision without doing any investigation.”

Another player said that “as someone who has put hundreds of hours into the game it is quite clear that none of the admins play the game, as they believe macros and majority of configs do not give an advantage, which they clearly do.”

Players of the Australian Apex Open were also concerned about the tournament format, especially in the qualifiers. Teams played four weeks of qualifiers, with the best five teams from every week making it to the knockout stage. Over the course of each week, teams would log their five best games every day and their top four days would go toward qualification.

This meant that teams had to play over 20 games in the time period. But to get an optimal placing, most teams had to play eight hours a day for the entire week, constantly resetting matches to try and get five high-kill games. According to heykatie, “there’s just way too much randomness in the design…[and] we were forced to play an inherently broken system.”

While these issues were raised to the admins, they didn’t change anything about the format, leaving players disgruntled. The admins actively asked for feedback, too, but “they ignored all of it,” according to heykatie.

Mogul is a publicly-listed tournament organizing platform that’s been servicing events in the wider Asia-Pacific region for the last 12 months. This was meant to be the platform’s big tournament of the year in Australia, capitalizing on the booming success of Apex.