Apex Legends Bans 419 of their Best Players for Picking on Newbies

Apex Legends has a ranked mode, as most Battle Royale games do, that's split into a number of tiers: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, and Apex Predator. And within those tiers, each one is subdivided another four times (so Bronze 1, 2, 3, 4). The exception is Apex Predator, which is basically where all the esports nerds live, and they have a system all on their own.

To climb up this enormous ranked latter, you need to grind out a lot of games: you get 100 ranked points, or RP, with every victory, with a bonus for every kill and assist you claim on the way, and if you're not ranked Apex Champion, you get significantly less. Which makes the climb to diamond, which requires 7,200 RP to reach, all the more daunting: you basically need to win 72 matches, or less if you happen to get a lot of kills on the way.

As PC Gamer points out, not a lot of Apex Legend players make it that far: in fact, last season, only 2 percent of the player base managed to pull that off. That's going to be a pretty small pool of players, since while Apex Legends has a lot of registered players (around 70 million), their active user count is doubtless much smaller.

So why are we talking about this? Well, we just learned that a whooping 419 Diamond players -- which, again, has to be a pretty big chunk of diamond players -- were just stripped of their rank and banned when it was uncovered they were abusing an exploit that allowed them to easily grind RP by joining bronze-ranked cues and thrashing those players.

While we don't know much about the glitch they abused to make this happen, it must have been relatively easy and well-known for over four hundred people to use it.

In any case, it's always dope when cheaters get whats coming to them.