The currently ongoing mid-season update of Apex Legends has been subjected to a set of tuning adjustments and bug fixes, whose patch notes have been made public by Respawn Entertainment. The notes are quite delightful and even contain a little about the reasoning behind some of the alterations. Nice work, henchmen! However, the new alterations are too dull for the community to refrain from expressing their worries by merely going through the tweet replies.
What are the patch notes, if not yet another round of developer notes? A little bit of tuning, a few fixes, and a scattered explanation are included. Quite the usual stuff indeed. You would believe that all this would be enough to temper people for at least five minutes, wouldn’t you? Well, the replies to that tweet are practically like entering a room where each person is shouting a different problem. It is absolute mayhem, and one might even call it somewhat intriguing.
The first scenario where such disorder took place was the matchmaking system. Oh no! The matchmaking! The developers’ matchmaking system has attracted so much criticism that it has become the number one complaint. Player ‘Schorts94’ and ‘Dominik’ have their complaints supported by logical reasoning. “I’m sick of dying to top 50 pred players holy fuck fix the matchmaking,” one player writes. Another player gives an account of how annoying it is always to meet the same people in their lobbies when there are hundreds of thousands of players in the game. A lot of people have already been in that situation – that you are just a cheap kill for the absolute top player every time, game after game. Sometimes you just want to… close the app, you know?
Then the topic of legend balance comes up for discussion. Always a hot issue. ‘AnX’ has already called for Bloodhound buffs, alleging that the tracker is “in a pretty bad spot” because of its low pick rate. ‘nk’, instead, does not regard the recent Crypto buff as “very impressive”. According to him, the devs have just “been pampering Crypto with updates.” ‘superwaveykam’ is still holding her breath for a quality-of-life tweak for Catalysts, claiming that she is “the least popular legend.” It is a bait-and-switch; one character is altered and five other mains are omitted. No way to satisfy everybody, yet the noise can be so huge!
Bugs, glitches, and other strange problems also belong to the complaints. ‘凯露ovo’ is facing a problem with their ranked aura, where even after being promoted, their aura still shows a Rookie badge instead of Diamond, which is rather harsh. ‘bossw’ complains that Horizon’s new skydive trail is so faint that it is practically invisible. ‘Infernos’ has a weird experience – they say that for the last four seasons, they have never been able to either open the event packs or use the crafting metals on event items. That is a very long time to miss out on the chance to buy the items you want.
And of course, the major ‘C’ word comes up: Cheaters. ‘James’ says very bluntly: “There would be no issues with events if the game was not 90% cheaters.” ‘John Wayne Collection’, who claims to be a week one player with 5,000 hours, says that the game was finally uninstalled in December, and he is now retired until the moment there are real permanent private lobbies to avoid them. A veteran quits! That’s a Dagger! The ensuing stream of replies is just as painful. ‘aH_Pulsating’ and ‘MiniMuffinBoi’ are at odds about whether the game is “dead” or not, with their arguments based on Twitch views and Steam charts. But the major annoyance is one that is shared by all, whether you play on PC and deal with aimbots or whether you are on console facing Cronus and XIM adapters.
And some people are still discussing them. ‘Cyclone’ is only waiting for Ash’s passive to be fixed and ‘Bored_DaD_81’ cracks a joke saying that the game’s speed would be so high that everyone would end up suffering from arthritis. But it is quite unbelievable how the entire conversation switches so rapidly from the actual updates to the continual deep-rooted, systemic problems that have been simmering over seasons.
It gives a very unmistakable impression. Apex Legends is still a great game, that’s for sure. The extent to which people are so passionate – or so angry – is an indication that the game still matters. Still, the mid-season patch, although critical for the current event balancing, feels like a band-aid on a much bigger problem. Players are not just asking for tweaking of one weapon or legend, but they want the whole daily experience – cheat-free fair matches.
