Why Apex Legends players have run out of patience with Respawn Respawn EntertainmentSomething strange has happened to Apex Legends. Or, specifically, the Apex Legends community. For a lot of its life, Apex has been held up as the best a battle royale could be: Innovative, fun, story-driven. So why has the player-base turned on Respawn, the developer? Even a cursory look on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube comments, and other places where fans gather online, shows a deluge of criticism about nearly every facet of Apex Legends. From lack of new content (there hasn\u2019t been a new mode added in 6 months), constantly faulty server issues and connection problems, a slow turnaround on crucial game fixes, you would think everything is going wrong for Apex. In reality, the game is as popular as it\u2019s ever been. Steam player counts show that Season 10 has the highest average player count of any season. Twitch stats for Apex are up across the board \u2013 more streamers, more viewers, more hours watched. So, what has Respawn done wrong? There are three main problems that have caused this unprecedented level of animosity towards the Apex development team. Surprisingly, monetization, a problem that has been central to previous anger from the community, isn\u2019t top of the list. Servers and errors The first is the servers. Or just general connection errors. Throughout Season 10, and especially since the Evolution Collection Event, the game has been close to unplayable for some. A barrage of \u2018code\u2019 errors are an hourly issue for certain players: code:leaf, code:net, code:snake, code:wheel, code:shoe. It\u2019s not clear why the frequency of these errors has increased since the collection event dropped on September 14, but it is clear that no other battle royale game, or online game in general, has this volume of connection errors, two and half years after its release. This is certainly an ongoing priority for Respawn \u2013 at least the devs say it is, and we have no reason to doubt them. But at this point, it has to be questioned if the fundamental infrastructure that underpins the game\u2019s network is insufficient and in need of an overhaul. Slow to fix, quick to sell The next issue, and one that affects everyone \u2013 even those lucky enough to escape the majority of server issues \u2013 is a slow turnaround on fixes and quality of life changes. Read More: Best Legends to use in Apex Legends – An \u2018unready bug\u2019 (where a player is repeatedly \u2018unreadied\u2019 for a match, and has to ready up over and over) has been in the game for over 100 days. Wattson\u2019s Ultimate ability, central to her gameplay, has been effectively broken for over 30 days. Animated Banners have been causing game crashes. Making matters worse, two of these bugs were said to have been fixed, but remain a problem now. Slow fixes are one issue, but it is compounded by a very quick fix for other problems \u2013 namely those that affect revenue. A bug causing packs to give higher chances of epic and legendary items was patched within 3 hours. Animated banners still cause game crashes, and yet three new animated banners were added for players to acquire in the Monsters Within event. Crazy! You guys were about to lose money so you acted fast! Pity you cant even recognize\/acknowledge the Wattson ult issue let alone fix it \u2014 BirnoOCE (@BirnoOCE) October 12, 2021 And there are more bugs beyond this; friends lists, inability to purchase bundles if you own one of the items, inconsistent audio, music randomly playing in-game, crashes caused by Crypto\u2019s drone. Certainly, some minor fixes like pack drop rates are likely a lot easier than fixing a core gameplay bug like Wattson\u2019s Ultimate, but for the average player, all they see is months of waiting for meaningful fixes, while store errors are fixed in a matter of hours. Skins, not content The Halloween event for 2021, Monsters Within, can be seen as the straw that broke the camel\u2019s back. Halloween events in previous seasons have been a highlight of the year, with custom lobbies, the Shadow LTMs, and yes, new cosmetics. This time around though, we only get one of these \u2013 and it\u2019s the cosmetics. Admittedly, the Shadow Royale LTM will return later, but only for the last week of the event. The trailer showed a nighttime Kings Canyon, but that too will only be in play for the final week. There\u2019s no spooky Halloween lobby either. While this is a minor point in the grand scheme of things, it\u2019s another thing that players can point to as a disinterest for events to do anything other than sell cosmetics. And, cosmetics are not content. Now, players are calling for others to boycott the event entirely, feeling it is the only way they can send a message to the developers. What can Apex devs do? Challenging as it is, Respawn need to target two areas to get fans back onside: game stability and communication. If the server and connection errors were alleviated as much as possible, to a more acceptable level, a lot of built-up frustration would subside. This has been a constant, ongoing task for Respawn\u2019s network engineers though, so it\u2019s difficult to be optimistic. The other is communication. Respawn devs have largely shut down on social platforms, and given the animosity they face, it\u2019s understandable. But, it\u2019s also no excuse for the lack of consistent, transparent communication. In April, they released the first \u2018Respawn Responds\u2019 blog post \u2013 which was promised to be delivered every month. It\u2019s now October, and we\u2019re still yet to get the second post. So this appears to have been canned \u2013 but nothing has been presented in its absence. Instead, players are left to random Twitter replies and the odd Reddit comment to get any kind of indication of what devs are working on, and even then these responses are often vague and filled with developer-jargon not accessible to the average player. Ryan Rigney, director of comms, has a thankless task in trying to turn this around, and explained the difficulties they face in a well-thought-out Twitter thread. https:\/\/twitter.com\/RKRigney\/status\/1448290225923497986 This acknowledgment goes both ways though. While players need to understand that it\u2019s not simple to \u201cfix the game\u201d, the developers should equally understand it\u2019s not good enough not to do so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Why Apex Legends players have run out of patience with Respawn Respawn EntertainmentSomething strange has happened to Apex Legends. Or, specifically, the Apex Legends community. For a lot of its life, Apex has been held up as the best a battle royale could be: Innovative, fun, story-driven. So why has the player-base turned on Respawn, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}