Check out the clip below and ask your self -- would this qualify as cheating in Apex Legends?

You may have already heard about this from exploit from a video created by,  Lucas"Mendokusaii" Håkansson, popular Apex Legends streamer and competitor. In his video, he details how anyone can enter Apex Legends game files, create a file called autoexec.cfg and create a bind toggle command (particles_cull_all_ 0) that turns off particle effects in game at the push of a button.

The result is the ability to "turn off" smoke effects in game and create a huge advantage when playing as Bangalore or fighting against Bangalore.

Normally, this type of file manipulation would be protected by some sort of cheat protection, but it doesn't seem like that is the case in Apex Legends. In the video above, Mendokusaii shows how easy it is to create such a toggle and the strategic advantages are obvious. Opponents will see the smoke and have their sight inhibited while file edit'ed player won't.

Fortunately, there are some downsides of using this exploit. For one, you can no longer see the direction that enemies are shooting you from and various sight lines and helpful particle graphics are disabled. However, the ability to toggle this on-and-off allows players to circumvent the downsides and instead use it whenever it is tactically viable.

There is no ranked mode yet so perhaps fixing this exploit isn't at the very top of Respawn's priority list, as news of this exploit is about a week old. However, in the patch notes thread posted within the Apex Legends subReddit, Respawn community manager JayFresh did say that they "will be addressing" the exploit: