Apex Legends started its fourteenth season, hunted, this month. The latest content update adds a lot of things to the game, including another playable character, tweaks to the OG Kings Canyon map, and a level cap increase. While this should be – and likely is – an exciting time for players of Respawn Entertainment’s battle royale shooter, the community is showing differences between casual and pro players to the think the other is ruining the game for everyone.
Launched February 2019, Apex Legends has undergone a ton of changes since then, moving to a seasonal model and introducing new characters and weapons, as well as making balance adjustments and map fixes to keep things lively. This benefited Respawn, as despite a wayward effort to convince people to boycott the game for August, the game broke concurrent player records just this week. That’s tight except Apex Legends‘ The player base is now melting across a variety of issues visual disturbances to fight suffering “constant voice spam.” However, one of the biggest complaints dominating the game’s subreddit is the “garbage” matchmaking system, which unfairly pits casual gamers against pros (and other high-level players in the Apex Predator ranks).
As the name suggests, an Apex Predator is the seventh and highest rank in the game. The top dogs. The best of the best. It is bestowed upon those who truly master Apex Legends, achieves a leaderboard (RP) score of over 15,000 and becomes one of the top 750 players on that particular platform. The rank of Apex Predator is a tough mountain to climb, but it comes with a number of rank-specific cosmetic awards like badges, amulets, and dive trails.
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Corresponding a very strongly worded and highly upvoted post by Redditor Azrael462Respawn should “listen to the community and not the fucks [pro Apex Legends] Streamers,” arguing that lower-ranked players shouldn’t play against higher-ranked ones because the game uses Skill-Based Matchmaking (SBMM), a system designed to pair you with others of your same skill level. Azrael462 popped up even more in the post, saying they were “tired of watching ‘Champion Squad.’ [teams] with triple stacked fucking [Predators] or [Master] Badges and fucking losing to them.” A separate Redditor called Ok_Kaleidoscope7434 shared a similar opinionand tells Respawn to “keep ranks together” as mixing and matching skill levels “ruins rankings” for everyone.
Casuals aren’t the only ones frustrated Apex Legends‘Matchmaking, either. professional players such as Jacob “HisWattson” McMillin and Phillip “ImperialHal” Lecturer, seem to agree that season 14 matchmaking is broken. Most pros have pointed out specific issues, including the self revive mechanic that was simply hacked earlier this season, and says it’s Respawn that’s ruining the leaderboard, not them. In the meantime, Apex Legends Content creators like Lucky Chappy lashed out at pros, calling them “narrow-minded and selfish influencers” who allegedly complain about everything from the Arc Star grenades and Kraber sniper rifle being nerfed to demands that Kings Canyon be removed completely out of ranked play this season.
How one side of the playerbase points fingers at the other This one Spiderman memes, it seems that lower ranked players are teaming up against higher ranked ones to take them out of the game as quickly as possible. in the a YouTube video through Apex Legends Content Creator Inqo, you can see Inqo being hunted by multiple players for simply being an Apex Predator, the highest rank in the game. The dead giveaway for everyone in a given game is the fiery dive path Pros drop a cosmetic item in their free fall, which you can only get when you reach the rank of Diamond, Master, or Apex Predator. Once Inqo lands, they are immediately hunted down and executed by a bunch of other rival players, all of whom teabag Inqo’s corpse in celebration, showing just how much these casual players hate pros.
Inqo, who attended the annual Apex Legends Global series esports tournament in recent years and has “achieved Predator rank in multiple seasons,” he said my box via Twitter DMs that while the current state of matchmaking in public matches is fine, the same cannot be said for rankings at this time.
“However, the matchmaking for ranked is terrible at the moment and that’s why I’m not playing. as preach [Predator] you will be brought into plat [Platinum] and Diamond lobbies, which is wild and shouldn’t be happening. When I’m pred I enjoy the challenge and don’t want to play plats every game. I don’t think pros or casuals ruin Apex, but casuals seem to blame every bad update on the pros. Regarding the removal of self-resolve (very glad it’s gone), many casual players just didn’t understand that it was ruining endgame lobbies at high ranks. And it was the fact that her squad would still be alive after killing all three that she broke in the endgame. Not the fact that they could rez themselves. Same goes for the Kraber nerf, every pro just wanted it gone from competitive lobbies only! We didn’t want a nerf, we just wanted it to be gone. And casual gamers don’t seem to understand that.”
my box has reached out to Respawn Entertainment for comment.
This is not casual and professional for the first time Apex Legends Players have accused each other of allegedly ruining the game. The heated debate sparked posts from casuals on social media last summer Reddit to the publisher EA’s forums, bemoaned the influence that professionals have. Even T-Pain said streamers like FaZe Clan co-owner Nicholas “Nickmercs” Kolcheff impaired the experience of casual workers.
