Let me preempt the rest of this post by noting that I am aware of the rules about account support requests. This is not a support request. The purpose of this post is to have a community discussion about the Apex Legends ban policy and its shortcomings.

Having cheaters in your games sucks. It ruins the experience and is particularly damaging to developers and publishers in the age of live games / games as a service, where they are depending on people sticking around and continuing to provide revenue in a free or cheap game. It makes sense that developers want to keep their cards close to their chests about how they catch cheaters. But the way bans and appeals work in Apex Legends is just unacceptable.

I know what you're thinking. Unwarranted bans must be super rare. If you get banned, it's because you were cheating. Everyone who complains about getting an undeserved ban is lying. And in the extremely rare case that it might happen, you can appeal your ban and it will be reversed. And lastly, you can just make a new account.

Well here's the thing. We have no way of knowing how many unwarranted bans are happening. But we do know that there have been times where large numbers of people have been banned, leading to situations such as this thread. Presumably the only reason Respawn/EA looked into these bans is due to the scale on which they suddenly got complaints. There's no way to know how often individuals are getting permabanned incorrectly in smaller numbers that doesn't result in a big enough public outcry that something gets done about it. Full disclosure, I got a ban during the wave of "incorrect" bans at that time. I'm not going to try to prove my innocence here, because that's not the point, but suffice it to say that I have no idea what the fuck triggered a ban for me and I can't do shit about it, which is incredibly frustrating.

For those who haven't had the pleasure, here's what happens when you get banned:

• You can queue, but as soon as the map loads, right before legend selection, you get booted to the splash screen with a message telling you your account is banned.
  
• You get a notice by email informing you that your EA account broke the rules, specifically:
  

When we talk about cheating, we mean things like using external tools, performing in-game exploits, or abusing glitches or bugs.

You break our rules (https://www.ea.com/terms-of-service#section6) if you:
• use software that interferes with or disrupts an EA Service or another user’s account.
• use undocumented features, exploits or cheats in-game that disrupts an EA Service or another user’s account.
• use software or cheats that disconnects other users from the EA servers.

• You can go to the EA help system and submit an appeal for your ban.
  
• The response you get looks like it might not be automated, but it is. After some googling, I found that everyone gets the same responses. First response:
  

Hello,

Thanks for contacting us about your account action.

We got your note and did a full investigation of your account. After reviewing your case, we determined that we took the correct action in accordance with EA policies and procedures.

What this means

We have confirmed that your account was involved in cheating. Because of this, we will not remove the sanction on your account.

• If you try to continue to appeal, you get this response:
  

We have received your most recent correspondence expressing concerns about the action that was taken on your account.

After thoroughly investigating your account and concern, we again found that we actioned your account correctly after it was found to have violated our User Agreement. We will also be unable to provide any details regarding our internal procedures.

Due to this violation, we will not remove the sanction that was applied to your account.

You can review the full User Agreement at http://tos.ea.com/legalapp/WEBTERMS/US/en/PC/

After completing two full investigations into your complaint, we consider this matter closed.

And that's it. There's nothing else you can do. You have no idea why you're banned, and there's no way to get more information. There's no opportunity for Respawn / EA to learn about what's causing false positives, and there's no opportunity for you to learn if there's some weird shit running on your PC that might be triggering it. So why would you waste time (and potentially money) on a new account if it might just get banned for no reason again?

I don't expect anything to come of this. I just wanted to let the community know what the experience is like, and to highlight that it's a flawed system. If nothing else, maybe other people in the same situation will see this and feel some validation. Apex Legends is a fantastic game, and I was really enjoying it, but having a system where the only recourse to a permanent account ban is submitting an appeal into a black box really sucks. I hope no one else finds themselves in this situation.

As a final point, just as a thought experiment, imagine this situation: You know that you did not violate any of the rules of the TOS in Apex Legends, but you find yourself banned. How do you prove that you shouldn't be banned? Should you just always record every match you play, so that you have proof you play fair? Should you record your screen with a camera to prove you don't have anything running that you can hide in a stream? There is no way to prove you didn't do something when you do not know what you are being accused of doing. And knowing that the cheat detection is imperfect, being able to engage in some troubleshooting-type of activity with the TOS team would be the only way to resolve the issue.

PS - If you're a cheater / exploiter / unfair player and you want to try to use discussions like this to scam your way back into the game, you can fuck right off.