Respawn is taking a hardline stance against Apex Legends players exploiting a bug in Season 9 to clip inside a rock and block all damage. The "ghost rock" in question is on the Phase Runner map, one of four launch maps in Apex Legends' new Arena mode. A fix for the rock clipping bug was supposed to be in yesterday's patch that nerfed the new Bocek bow and Spitfire, but Respawn said in a follow-up tweet that it was delayed for "quality control reasons."

Respawn then warned players that exploiting Ghost Lock for personal gain would not be tolerated. The developer wrote, "Please note that exploiting this exploit while it still exists may result in a ban."

From the looks of it, it is quite annoying to deal with players who glitch into the nasty rocks. They can simply walk into the rock, clip into the rock, and not be able to see through it or shoot into it.

Respawn's warning may come as a surprise to players of other competitive shooters: many games, including "Rainbow Six Siege," "Valorant," and "Call of Duty: Warzone," have made exploiting known bugs and exploits technically banned, but anecdotal evidence suggests that these rules are not strictly enforced (which is understandable when you have bigwigs like hackers.) When Warzone's infinite stims glitch was recurring for months, Activision focused on fixing it and didn't talk much about banning it. They didn't talk about it much.

Since that was a game-breaking exploit that could single-handedly ruin a 150-person match, it's worth noting that Respawn is trying to sheath the ban hammer for a single rock that players can occasionally use to cheat through team fights ...

Still, how does Respawn detect these rock offenders? While it is possible to report player cheating in-game, I'm curious how this can be confirmed unless there is video evidence that clearly shows the offender using the ghost rock, which is reassuring since Respawn seems to be heeding the warnings, and I'm not sure how they're doing that, but I'd like to know how they're doing it.