Apex Legends, the battle royale that places more than a few people into an arena where RNG loot tends to play a massive part in precisely how well you will rank in the battle (as is BR tradition), is now available to play on Steam.
The battle royale enjoyed a surprisingly healthy first couple of seasons with astoundingly full servers before tapering into a more stable player base for the future seasons; it’s theorized that the drop onto Steam will help boost the population in much the same way that Titanfall 2 experienced a metaphorical rebirth after it was offered on Steam as part of the EA Play package.
That both are developed by Respawn may point to a pattern where they are perhaps hindered by the walls of Origin; who would have thought.
This isn’t to say that Apex Legends has a noticeably flagging player base at the moment for anyone aside from the upper-crust of players, as is expected.
This is perhaps what bleeds into the second announcement, where a whopping 419 (we seriously couldn’t find one more to ban?) players at the higher tiers of competition have been banned from Apex Legends as they were using exploits to queue into Bronze lobbies where they would feel good about beating on literal noobies.
This is apparently the player-led result of higher-tier players being frustrated with having to play against people as good as they are: they’ll just use exploits to queue into new players so they can feel great about themselves while no one else gets to play.
This, once again, leads us back into the hot debate about whether skill-based matchmaking (SBMM in the parlance) is fair for better players that can no longer run through servers with impunity, as they’re now being challenged by players that match their own skill.
This is, to many streamers and content creators, a controversial move; it makes stringing together clips and highlight reels that much more difficult as they’re playing against others that similarly know what end of the barrel the pew-pew comes out of. Attempts by these content creators to get their audiences to side with them, arguably against their own interests, have thankfully fallen short thus far.
Conor Ford has been readily swinging the ban hammer for weeks, and the latest result shows that Respawn doesn’t offer much wiggle-room for exploits and those that are actively trying to exploit the system for a feel-good moment.
At the expense of everyone else getting dumpstered.
