When Respawn Entertainment dropped Apex Legends out-of-nowhere in February, it shot to popularity incredibly fast. Initially, behind the scenes, the game first saw actual development in 2017 when PlayerUnknown’s Battleground began to pick up speed as a popular battle royale game, inspiring the creation of Apex.
Despite this, the release of Apex Legends was definitely surprising and exciting. The lack of advertising prior to the game coming out worked as intended – without reviews and forum talk to encourage people to try or not try the game, they had to test it out for themselves, which resulted in an influx of players at the game’s release.
That being said, there was a significant flaw that came with not showing off the game and testing it ahead of time – the very reason that Respawn Entertainment chose to keep it secretive in the first place. Without talking about the game ahead of time, Apex Legends couldn’t receive any bad or good feedback.
Because of this, players couldn’t point out flaws in the system early on. Apex Legends has done a decent job at keeping up with current feedback, but they still have a lot of issues that they need to address. In particular, one problem they’ve had is cracking down on players who like to leave games.
Rage quitting is a common occurrence that almost every gamer will experience one way or another. Whether a trolling teammate or someone choosing the character is the final straw, sometimes it’s hard to keep a cool head.
When this happens, players tend to leave games ahead of time, but for the rest of the team, this can be very frustrating.
For this reason, most games have some system in place to penalize players who frequently abandon games. This helps to prevent even the most hotheaded gamers from leaving early, or at the very least keeps them from immediately requeuing into a new match.
Apex Legends introduced this very system at one point, but it didn’t work out entirely as intended and was subsequently removed. Unfortunately, though, rage quitters are too frequent to not have a penalty in place.
Now, the game finally got this feature back.
When a player goes to exit a match before its over, a warning message will prompt them to rethink their decision by stating that if they leave too many games, they’ll eventually face a queue penalty.
If a player leaves a game three times in a row, they’ll have to wait five minutes before they can queue up again. This duration extends to ten minutes if the player leaves four consecutive matches.
While this isn’t the harshest system, especially without any significant penalties for serious match-leaving offenders, it’s a good start for Apex Legends to expand upon eventually.
On the flip side, players won’t face a penalty if they queue up and someone else has already left the match, or the system throws them in with less than a full squad. Regardless, hopefully, this will deter players from rage quitting and abandoning matches in the future.
