Since Apex Legends Season 9 opened a few months ago, free-to-play battle royale has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity. However, as with any popular competitive game, as public attention has increased, so have the number of potential cheaters. The recent influx of malicious players and DDoS attacks have disrupted Apex and affected the development of a planned and rather large feature, Cross Progression. [According to Chad Grenier, game director of Apex Legends, recent troubles with hackers in Apex and Titanfall have slowed work on cross-progressions as a direct result. In response to a tweet asking for an update on the cross-progression, Grenier said, "It's in development, but due to the recent hacks at Apex and TF, we are switching to resolving live game issues, which is slowing down progress.

Cross-progression has been one of the most anticipated features in Apex since crossplay was introduced last year. Players were excited to know that they would not have to re-buy all the legends and cosmetics on their accounts in order to comfortably switch platforms, but the wait was long.

Even before the recent spike in cheating, Grenier had been open about the difficulty of adding the feature; in February, Grenier told players that "adding cross-progression to a game that has been on the market for two years is certainly challenging." Overwatch and Rainbow Six Siege are two FPSes that have made cross-play available years after their release, but have yet to make cross-progression a reality.

Cheaters and DDoS attacks have been a major problem for Apex recently, and Respawn has promised to step up its crackdown on rule-breakers; one of the issues Grenier's tweet mentions is that on July 4, Apex Legends' main menu was probably hijacked. During the holidays, hackers took control of the game's playlist feature to protest the Titanfall server hack, displaying the message: "SAVETITANFALL.COM, TF1 is under attack and so is Apex."

Ryan Rigney, director of communications at Respawn, later said that the hackers "got nothing of value" by attacking Apex, pointing to problems the studio was already working to remedy with Titanfall.

Given that "one or two people" are working on Titanfall's server issues, it appears that all hands are on deck to bring Apex Legends back to full health; in June, Respawn security analyst Conor Ford reported that 30 a day or more DDoS attackers were shadow-banned, he said." We care and are as frustrated as the players."

Eurogamer