An even weirder tweet came from Respawn Entertainment: they went around asking Apex Legends players to submit their best gameplay clips. The whole point was for the developers to try and guess your rank just by seeing your gameplay. You know, it could be an Apex Predator chilling in the lobby, or maybe someone who’s been hardstuck in Silver forever. Submission window is open till August 26th, so working against the clock is advisable.
Nothing special came from the answer of the community. The mixture-included clips being submitted-and a lot of outcries. Loads of them. It was kind of funny, yet telling of the game’s current state.
In the blink of an eye, Sinnay46 gave the clip request the middle finger and got straight to the point: “no but we do want to see the dev nerf the re45.” Oofff. That’s quite a specific weapon complaint. And they weren’t the only ones. ZeRoHouRTwitch put forth: “can you instead answer why do you have so many unbalanced and clearly broken weapons/legends/input to carry bad players into ‘good’???” Seems like balancing is very infuriating to a lot in the hardcore community.
Server issues: quite the other unpleasant matter. M3atAlonso gave voice to the people with his submission: “Why are the servers so awful? I’ve been playing this game for over 6 years since day 1 and I’ve never experienced this. Ping spikes every 5 seconds. Not enjoyable.” UsamaRaheel, on the other hand, went for closed questions: “Are servers down again? Can’t seem to get in.” Notwithstanding, it seems the community at this point, and it’s definitely not getting better for some.
Another great source of angst is the ranked experience itself. Describing solo queue turmoil, BertaEh403 said, “You know what would be cool? If I didn’t have to fight all diamond/pred teams while solo q plat and getting a plat teammate that brings his silver friend. That would be cool.” This matchmaking pain rings true for a lot of players. And chasebekk has a very specific complaint about a visual bug: “Maybe, i could have my platinum aura be platinum and not silver in game. That would be really cool.” The little things, right?
But it was not all about the complaints! The monster drew some support from the community. RoyceFPS shared a clip from earlier in the season when a “clean squad wipe” happened and stated he’s currently Plat 4 solo queue. In the replies, CSG4ming was trying to guess someone’s rank based on a clip. Wraithlyshine admitted to being “Hardstuck gold fs” and posted a clip.
Quite a few players piled in for some requested changes to the game modes. Anthony cole pleaded: “Please put a penalty if you leave early in wildcard.” Blane443585 went on to say: “I just wanna see 3v3’s return as a permanent gamemode.” Alongside all the criticisms are the specific things that would make the game better in their view.
These were peppered with some frankly antagonizing statements. SHDGDARK just threw “Your game is boring now 😴”. Gotta keep it one hundred sometimes.
So what’s the real takeaway from all this? Respawn basically tries to put on a fun, community-engaging event, and instead, the players just turn around and give the event a whole laundry list of issues they want fixed first. It’s a typical developer-community relationship example. They really do love the game; that is why they are still tweeting. The problem, however, is that they want some things fixed pretty badly. Server stability, weapon and legend balance, and ranked matchmaking all seem to be on just about everyone’s list.
Will the devs actually watch these clips and try to guess ranks? Most likely. But the overall tone of all the replies is saying loudly and clearly: “We’ll go along with your fun little distraction, but could you please fix the actual game now?” It’s really quite interesting to see that dynamic come to life—the developer’s fun outreach-meets-the-reality-of-their-game’s-persistent-issues. There’s enough passion here both for playing and criticizing, and that’s what continuously keeps Apex Legends in the conversation every year after year; for better or sometimes for worse.
