Apex Legends

Casual players of Apex Legends believe the pros are ruining the game.

The community’s disagreement over how Respawn Entertainment’s battle royale shooter is evolving is being blamed on one side by the other.

This month marked the start of Apex Legends’ fourteenth season, Hunted. A new playable character, changes to the original Kings Canyon terrain, and a rise in the level cap are all included in the most recent content update. While it should and probably is an exciting moment for battle royale shooter fans, there are divisions between casual and professional players in the community, with each believing the other is ruining the game for everyone.

Since its launch in February 2019, Apex Legends has seen a plethora of modifications, including switching to a seasonal schedule, adding new characters and weaponry, and making balancing changes and map fixes to keep things interesting. This has worked in Respawn’s favour because, just this week, the game broke concurrent player records despite a clumsy attempt to get people to boycott it in August. That’s good, but the player base of Apex Legends is currently losing it over a number of problems, including graphic flaws, battle pass issues, and “continuous voice spam.” However, the “garbage” matchmaking mechanism that unjustly pits casuals against pros is one of the main issues consuming the game’s subreddit (and other top-tier players up in the Apex Predator ranks).

The seventh and top rank in the game is an Apex Predator, as the name would imply. superior dogs. superior than all others. It is given to individuals who have mastered Apex Legends to the point where they have over 15,000 ranked points (RP) and are among the top 750 players on that platform. Although achieving the level of Apex Predator is challenging, it rewards you with a variety of rank-specific cosmetic gifts, including badges, charms, and dive trails.

Read more: Players Ask Fans To Stop Playing Apex Legends As Apex Legends Breaks Records

Respawn should “listen to the community and not the fucking [pro Apex Legends] streamers,” according to a strongly worded and well-liked post by Redditor Azrael462. Azrael462 argues that because the game uses skill-based matchmaking (SBMM), which is meant to pair you with players of similar skill, lower-ranked players shouldn’t compete against higher-ranked ones. In the comment section, Azrael462 went off even more, complaining that they were “weary of seeing ‘champion squad’ [teams] with triple stacked fucking [Predators] or [Master] badges and always fucking losing to them.” Similar sentiments were expressed by another Redditor, Ok Kaleidoscope7434, who urged Respawn to “keep ranks together” because mixing and matching skill levels “ruins ranked” for everyone.

Not just casual players are dissatisfied with Apex Legends’ matchmaking, though. Professional players like Phillip “ImperialHal” Dosen and Jacob “HisWattson” McMillin appear to concur that matchmaking in Season 14 is broken. The majority of pros have identified particular problems, such as the self-revive function that was recently removed at the beginning of this season, and said that Respawn is to blame for rankings, not them. While this was going on, Apex Legends content creators attacked pros, branding them “narrow-minded and selfish influencers” who allegedly complain about everything from the nerf of the Kraber sniper rifle and the Arc Star grenades to the demand that Kings Canyon be completely removed from the ranked play this season.

It seems that lower-ranked players are joining up against higher-ranked players to get them out of the match as quickly as possible as one half of the player base points fingers at the other like that one Spider-Man meme. You can witness Inqo being pursued by several players in an Apex Legends video that the game’s highest rank, Apex Predator, uploaded to YouTube. The blazing dive trail pros leave behind as they freefall, a cosmetic item you can only obtain by earning the rank of Diamond, Master, or Apex Predator, is a dead giveaway for everyone in any given match. When Inqo landed, they were immediately pursued and killed by a group of other competitor gamers who all teabagged Inqo’s corpse in jubilation, demonstrating how much these amateurs despise professionals.

Inqo, who has “reached Predator rank in numerous seasons” and has previously competed in the annual Apex Legends Global Series esports competition, told Kotaku over Twitter DMs that while matchmaking in public games is currently working correctly, the same cannot be said for ranked games at this time.

“However, the matchmaking for ranked is terrible at the moment, which is why I’m not playing. You will be placed in the Platinum and Diamond lobbies as a Predator, which is absurd and shouldn’t be happening. If I’m a pred, I like a challenge and don’t want to switch positions every game. I don’t believe that either pros or casuals are harming Apex, although casuals tend to attribute pros with every negative update. Regarding self-res removal (extremely happy it’s gone), many casual players simply didn’t comprehend how it destroyed high level end-game lobbies. And it was broken in the end-game since their squad would still be alive even after killing all three. nor the possibility that they would self-rez. The Kraber nerf was the same way; professionals simply wanted it removed from competitive lobbies! We just wanted it gone; we didn’t want a nerf. Casuals don’t appear to comprehend that, either.

Respawn Entertainment has been contacted by Kotaku for comment.

It’s not the first time that professional and casual Apex Legends players have accused one another of destroying the game. The contentious discussion was started last summer when posts from non-professionals on social media, including Reddit and publisher EA’s forums, bemoaned the power of professionals. Even T-Pain claimed that streamers like Nicholas “Nickmercs” Kolcheff, a co-owner of the FaZe Clan, were degrading the experience of casuals.

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