Apex Legends servers are up and down in ranked games this afternoon. Is it DDoS or are the servers performing poorly? The problem is only happening in ranked at the moment, with players taking to social media to complain about the crashes on both console and PC.
These are hard crashes that go straight to code: net with no opportunity to get back into the game. Even the method I covered yesterday is not effective. Although you won’t lose RP for these disconnects, you will likely get a 10-minute abandon penalty.
Back in April, Samy Duc, the Lead Software Engineer on Apex Legends, wrote a detailed blog post about the state of the Apex Legends servers. The post into great detail about the server crashes, particularly code: net.
Code: net is a “generic message” that “might refer to any number of different problems.” The post goes on to say that the best way to help Respawn and EA fix these problems is to report the issues directly to them.
However, the post did not speak openly about the state of server DDosing. More recently, Respawn has stated that they are looking to crack down on players that tamper with the server, whether that be DDosing or hacking.
Several Apex Legends ranked players were banned back in March, particularly on Xbox. The accusations were that they were DDosing the servers, and the video evidence at the time was pretty clear. These were two of the top 10 Apex Predators on the console.
After these players were banned, Respawn promised a “reckoning” for console DDosers, although it’s now two months later and the problem still exists. Unfortunately, it’s not obvious whether the server crashes are caused by DDOS attacks or general Apex server performance.
This has lead to some pretty frustrating experiences on console. Now that Xbox and PlayStation share their Diamond and Predator lobbies, players on both consoles are being subjected to the same issue.
What is a DDoS attack? A “distributed denial of service” attack floods a server with requests and causes it to crash. There’s a method that allows players to target a specific server, i.e the server they’re currently playing in.
DDoSers on console will drop the server and proceed to run around killing AFK players. It’s an easy way to farm RP, which can be used to boost accounts for money.
