Titanfall suffers massively from hacker attacks. Many players are angry at the developers – and one group is now turning the tables by attacking Apex Legends.
If you wanted to play Apex Legends over the weekend, you might have been faced with a problem: Some playlists were locked. The reason for this was a hacker attack with an unusual intention: the perpetrators want to save Titanfall. We explain what exactly happened and why Titanfall is in a bad situation in the first place.
The Apex hack is a protest
An important piece of info if you’re not familiar with the games involved: Apex Legends is a spin-off of Titanfall, both developed and maintained by Respawn Entertainment. By player numbers, Apex is currently the fourth largest Steam game, with nearly 250,000 concurrently active players in the last 24 hours.
What happened: For a few hours, playlists were locked in Apex on all platforms due to the hack, and players were unable to join matches. Instead, a message popped up pointing to the savetitanfall.com website. This apparently affected most of the servers.
This is the goal of the Apex attack: A hack of this popular game naturally attracts a lot of attention – and that is exactly what the hackers wanted. Because they want to draw attention to a problem that is causing many players a stomachache: Titanfall 2 has been plagued by hacks for months, Titanfall 1 has even become almost completely unplayable. The developers are not reacting appropriately, a large part of the community thinks.
The biggest problem of Titanfall: Titanfall 2 has been suffering from regular DDOS attacks for a long time, which cause server downtimes and the like. Behind this is probably a single hacker or a very small group under the name “Jeanue”, who also attacked the first Titanfall and completely paralysed the servers: Whose
The Steam-Reviews illustrate the desolate state of the game and are just 36 percent positive. Players have been demanding help from the developers or publisher EA for months, but so far shockingly little has been done. In May, a developer announced on Twitter that they were working on the problems but were frustrated:
I wish all the hackers/cheaters/malicious actors who ruin games would find more fulfilling hobbies. Why use your talent to tear communities apart?
The situation affecting the Titanfall games right now is so frustrating. Weeks of work required to address each new stupid thing.
— Ryan K. Rigney (@RKRigney) May 25, 2021
“(…) The situation affecting Titanfall games right now is so frustrating. Weeks of work are needed to tackle each new thing. Instead of building new things, building incredible things for players, our people are pulling their hair out over the latest exploits, the latest attacks, a new way to attack streamers or high-level lobbies or everyone.”
This is how players react
Despite the news from the developer, however, many Titanfall fans have little sympathy. They demand:
– That technical vulnerabilities that allow such serious hacking attacks to happen in the first place be fixed.
– That Respawn and EA communicate better with the community about the problems
– That Titanfall 1 is no longer sold until the problems are fixed – or at least only with a clear warning for new players.
The Apex hack is welcomed by many because they hope it will force the developers to react. Such actions have been called for on Reddit and co. for some time, for example here:
“To be perfectly honest, I wish Apex Legends was attacked by hackers. Then Respawn would take action immediately and if they don’t do the same for Titanfall then there would be a lot of headwind. Don’t get me wrong, I know this system is very complex and changes take time, but honestly, Respawn just doesn’t care.”
In Twitter comments the action also finds a lot of approval, although it is of course still an illegal attack on Apex Legends. It remains to be seen whether something will really happen with Titanfall.
