Apex Legends’ Tap-Strafing Controversy Shows It’s Hard to Combat Macros

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home January 20, 2025 8 Views 6 Min Read
Apex Legends' Tap-Strafing Controversy Shows It's Hard to Combat Macros



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In competitive shooter games like Apex Legends, serious players often use any technique and tool necessary to get an advantage. The best players make the most of the game’s dynamic movement to slip and slide away from their enemies’ crosshairs during firefights. One movement technique that continues to polarize the Apex Legends community is tap strafing, which lets players do a fast hairpin turn while air strafing. This mechanic shows the complicated relationship between difficult techniques and competitive multiplayer games.

Apex Legends was released by Respawn Entertainment and Electronic Arts on February 4, 2019, to much fanfare. Being a spin-off of the Titanfall franchise, it only made sense for Apex to also feature the series’ excellent movement mechanics. How well players can bunny hop, air strafe, tap strafe, and wall jump is just as important as their ability to aim. All of these mechanics can be done with a mouse and keyboard, and to some extent, a controller. However, some players who find such movement techniques difficult may resort to macros to execute them, which is a hot-button topic in the community.

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Apex Legends’ Tap Strafing Controversy Explained

How Tap Strafing in Apex Legends Works

To those unfamiliar with the maneuver, tap strafing involves slide jumping, air strafing, and using the move forward input and mouse to do a 180 turn. Players can utilize this technique in various situations, like blazing through corners to quickly shake off enemies. They can also chain a tap strafe into a wall jump to juke an opponent and then follow up with a shotgun blast up close.

A common way to tap strafe in Apex Legends is to bind the forward movement key onto the mouse’s wheel. This way, players can consistently trigger it while they’re air-strafing. The technique takes some practice for players to nail down and do consistently.

The Failed Removal of Tap Strafing

Tap strafing can only realistically be done on the mouse and keyboard, as controllers inherently lack the functionality of repeatedly triggering the move forward key like the mouse scroll wheel. The devs saw this as an unfair advantage, so they announced the removal of tap strafing in Apex Legends Patch 10.1 in 2021. However, this change didn’t come to fruition, as the process of removing it could negatively affect the game’s other movement mechanics. The devs promised to revisit ways to tone it down in the future.

The Controller Macro Debacle

Some avid Apex Legends controller players also tried to execute tap strafing through dubious means, like using macros, which are scripts that simulate multiple actions within a single button press. Using them can result in a ban if the game detects them. Others used Steam Configs to bind movement keys to the joystick and activated the “Hold to Repeat” function to execute the action up to 1000 times upon triggering the forward motion. The devs got on top of this exploit and blocked Steam Configs altogether. However, some macros remain undetectable by the game’s anti-cheat.

The Nerfing and Un-Nerfing of Tap Strafing

Respawn made good on its 2021 promise in 2025 when it found a way to nerf tap strafing. It added a buffer to tap strafes, which resulted in a delay in the players’ ability to change directions, and is supposed to combat undetected macros by making the move less rewarding. After some backlash among players, content creators, and pros, however, the game walked back on the change.

Tap Strafing’s tumultuous history is a significant example of how difficult it is to pin down macro users in the game. It seems hard for any game’s anti-cheat to distinguish between the movement of a good player and another that’s using macros. This is because some players can do frame-perfect executions on their own and banning them would be outright unfair. Meanwhile, macros can also disguise their presence by making their inputs less perfect.

Respawn tried to combat it by nerfing Tap Strafing, but this ultimately seemed like a band-aid solution. Respawn Entertainment hopefully finds a more intuitive way to buckle down on macro users without sacrificing the movement techniques that players have come to love.

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