What it’s like to (try and fail to) play Apex Legends in Asia
April 22, 2020 This feature was originally published in March 2019.
With trepidation, I click the Ready button in the Apex Legends matchmaking menu. And yep, there it is, straight away. I’ve been teamed up with not one but two screaming spambots.
In speaker-shattering and rapid pre-recorded Mandarin, they both try to shout their sales pitches over one another, peddling their hacks to me as fast as possible. Their on-screen names are a series of numbers and characters - their IDs on the Chinese chat app QQ where I could continue the transaction. This is necessary as Chinese online shopping site Taobao has banned the sale of Apex Legends cheats. The character selection timer ticks away as I race to the main settings to turn down the volume of all voice chat, which is the only way to mute these obnoxious robots in the lobby.
Despite the banning of several hundred thousand accounts, playing Apex Legends in Taiwan still means dealing with huge numbers of cheaters and scammers, enough to make the game nigh unplayable. What I experience in this one moment is a common occurrence throughout any night I try to play Respawn Entertainment’s battle royale game. And it’s nowhere near the worst of it.
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