An Apex Legends developer has confirmed that a player has been banned after being accused of cheating by popular Apex Legends streamer Rogue, which sparked controversy in the community.
A Taiwanese streamer known as ’15y’ and his two friends got into the same game as the popular streamer and content creator for NRG, Tanner ‘Rogue’ Trebb. After Rogue 15y downed Dropped, another top-level player on Rogue’s team, they were quick to suggest that 15y was cheating.
While the altercation between 15y and Rogue took place, Eric ‘Ghost‘ Hewitt, Lead competitive development manager, and Conor ‘Hideouts‘ Ford, security analyst for Respawn, were watching Rogue’s stream.
A few minutes after the game ended, Ghost asked for the user name of the suspected cheater in Rogue’s chat.
Shortly after, 15y was banned. The followers of the Taiwanese squad quickly flooded Rogue with hate for supposedly being responsible for the ban, claiming that 15y was not in fact cheating.
“I didn’t ban him. I’m not the guy who bans people. Hideouts is the one who bans them guys, not me,” Rogue said. “Ask Hideouts why he got banned. If we think someone is suspect, and we think they are potentially cheating, Hideouts comes in chat and asks, then he checks their account. He’s not just going to listen to me.”
This led fans to accuse the developers of jumping the gun on the ban, with a Reddit thread posted on August 9 garnering significant attention, labeling Rogue’s actions “evil.” However, Hideouts responded to the thread, explaining 15y’s account was connected to another two accounts that were caught cheating.
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“Ban was temporary while investigated,” Hideouts said. 15y supposedly gave his friends the accounts to play on, and they were apparently caught used cheats. Although 15y claims he didn’t cheat, account sharing is still against Apex Legend’s TOS.
“User is not banned right now but may lose account privileges due to selling of accounts to cheaters,” Hideouts concluded.
Hideouts is a well-known name in the Apex community, often at the helm of dishing out bans for hackers and players using exploits, particularly in high-level ranked matches.
Players were initially angered, believing that the devs had blindly banned the player on nothing more than the word of Rogue, but it appears they had good reason to take action in this case.