The latest season of Apex Legends, Takeover is right around the corner and it is bringing with itself a ton of new changes and overhauls to the core gameplay experience. Although there is no new Legend, weapon, or map update, there are a lot of balance and meta changes. The time to kill all the weapons has decreased, the ranked points system has changed once again, and the anti-cheat system of Apex Legends is being upgraded once more. In the latest patch notes and developer updates, Respawn Entertainment went over everything we can expect from the upgraded Anti-Cheat engine.

Developer Blog

The first developer blog of Apex Legends in the year of 2025 is none other than this one, going over the massive changes to the matchmaking and anti-cheat system. Cheaters have been plaguing this game for quite a while, and putting salt in the wound, the matchmaking system is also in pretty rough shape. Fixing both of these issues will significantly improve how the overall Apex experience feels.

This blog went over a lot of things, which we will break down below. The topics of discussion were the updates made to the Anti-Cheat engine, the teaming problem in the game, and botting. There are also a lot of comments on the matchmaking system going over how the skill rating and matching work in the game. It is important to note that not all of these changes will be going live with the launch of the new season of Apex Legends.

Teaming & Botting

From the Anti-Cheat perspective, the main topics of discussion were botting and teaming. Teaming is the process in which different enemy teams collaborate to get higher positions and hence get more ranked points. Respawn Entertainment has emphasized that they have implemented automated teaming detection algorithms to detect this issue. They also mentioned that they have penalized more than 1200 accounts that were found under this offense and also removed 17.4 million ranked points.

The developers behind Apex Legends have also developed a brand-new machine-learning model that detects all the bot accounts present in the game. They have emphasized that this model is future-proof, meaning all other bot accounts that might be created and evolved in the future will be detected by this model. Closing this topic, they also reminded us that reporting any suspicious accounts is a great way to help the game.

Matchmaking Update

Respawn Entertainment admitted that the update they made to the Ranked playlist, where the skill rating of every player and the overall distribution received positive feedback from the community as a whole. Doubling down on this feature, Apex Legends will also have a similar system for unranked games. They acknowledged that while there is not a clear-cut rating and point system in unranked games, the new system will give the players a general idea of the collective skill of the lobby.

Respawn is also improving matchmaking in limited-time modes (LTMs) by having the performance of the players in previous LTMs affect matchmaking in new LTMs. Players dropping in new LTMs will have a starting skill value that will be affected by their performance in previous modes. However, this skill value will be extremely elastic and will be heavily influenced by how they perform in the starting matches. After a few matches, the skill rating will be stabilized.

Other updates that were mentioned in the blog were lowering the amount of time Ranked Reset occurs in Apex Legends. There will also be Apex bots in the game to help new players have a fun time in the game and learn the core mechanics. They also mentioned that the changes made to the Queuing system in the previous while led to longer matchmaking. It also had a positive impact on the quality of matches. So they will be further experimenting with it. All these changes are set to be released soon, and we will have to wait and see how it all works out.