The main problem on Apex right now is that too many people read "Battle Royale" as "Team deathmatch". Hence ruining BR.
I made a couple stats: about 82% of my games (out of ~100) had irresponsible behaviour within the first 60 seconds of game (splitting away, ragequitting, insults, tilts, suiciding by engaging full squads alone, leaving before touching the ground cause they didn't like the spawn point, yelling at last teammate alive, etc.).
We also know reporting will never do anything: the game is F2P for multiple accounts and people who put a single penny in the game cannot be revoked access to playing.
A good case of trying to fix UX / PX on Apex is how to prevent players from behaving like animals and playing the core BR mode as a TDM.
This has been a creeping and growing problem among games for 4 years now.
So Respawn made a TDM mode, that solved it all. And called it Arena. Perfect, but still not a quick respawn, and most achievements were still awarded on BR.
So they did ANOTHER TDM mode that was called "Control", based on a KOTH variant (could also mention the train capture). Brilliant, but still asking tactics from low IQ players without giving precise directions was a failure.
Just capture opposite points and let people fight on B point like primitive animals, you win. That's in the nature of games: finding how to abuse them and use what you found. Every game gets solved sooner or later.
So now they create ANOTHER TDM. This time, they understood that even being creative on a name was too much for them, so they named it straight: "TEAM DEATHMATCH".
People still behave worse and worse on BR: Deadpool-2 drops all the time, ragequits unless spawning instantly, splitting away (stricly equals suiciding without even a KD), tilts, abilities spamming, etc.
I stopped streaming long ago: the only shield I found against that behaviour was trying to voice lead them. It still fails half of the time, and you make 1-2% of them friends and potential future teammates. Good. But not enough.
The monetization, the Battle Pass effect, the lack of training, of map testing, of fair games trials, all this generates frustration and lack of understanding game basics. Adding banners crafting goes the good way, too.
There's only one question now: will it work, this time? It seems like it doesn't. You can't use BR mechanics on a TDM. Every patch is a rebalance of all legends, there's a reason for that.
But changing game rules requires changing mechanics within each game rules.
So there need to be different mechanics for non-BR games. Control, TDM, Arena require different mechanics. Rules can be changed.
I'm a Loba main: this character is strictly useless in all non-BR modes. And no, the bracelet warp doesn't do much. But what if, for instance, it recharged twice as fast in those modes? (this is just an example).
The good thing is that Respawn understood the main problem by adding more and more non-BR modes.
- Solos
- Duos
- Shade fight (halloween seasonal modes)
- Control / KOTH
- Train capture / CTF
- TDM
- (etc.)
So that the toxic-cause-unadapted crowd migrates to other game modes. And this is a perfect move.
Note: BR variants like "hardcore BR" are unaffected.
But yet the problem remains.
Two things need to be done, as a rule of thumb:
- Fix BR problems in BR (like locking teammates to the jump master, raising the rematch time for people dying too soon, adding search options for teammates queueing -winning, kill/achievements, farming/BP/stats-, finally allowing free map exploring, finally creating a REAL tutorial on "how to play a BR Apex Legends game" and not "how to throw a grenade and shoot at mannequins", etc.)
- Fix each game rules INSIDE each game rule (changing how legends work, bonus/malus depending on their uses, reworking the global rules -no respawn until death, winning conditions, adding "quick join a running game" instead of using a fake "Searching for players" loader that struturally cannot find a player, etc.)
