Community Admin@EA_Blueberry "Needs to be slightly nerfed"?!?!? Omg please read the comments just following that last reply of yours -
@TheJumpingJawa "You've pushed ring damage up so high that this risk/reward decision had been almost entirely removed; no finesse, or complexity of choice, just a binary 'in ring -> good, outside ring -> dead'"
@h5mf0vcnd32w "no it needs to be extremely nerfed - no actually reverted!"
@WookieSlayer_x "The change in circle damage from standard Apex to Elite is very unbalanced. This should be reduced greatly."
@GUZZ_ZYN "We literally do not have time to even fight unless you get lucky and drop inside of circle 1. Why should I be punished for dropping at the most aggressive position for the current game in a game modes that supposed to promote competitiveness and aggressive play? It’s absurd"
@GhostRaiden91 "legitimate players are all dying to the storm either after a fight or don't even make it because the storm kills us in less than 3 seconds!!! i get that you guys are trying to stop the outside storm camping, but to increase the first storm ring damage from 1% to 15% is just crazy!!!"
and
"Man This new Storm/Ring update makes apex not even fun.... :'\"
@Gidoru "I dont know how good you are at math, but it seems to me like the game LOST a lot of strategy."
and
"Respawn needs to stop listening to Reddit echo chamber for feedback. This change is bad."
@Dargone21 "Yay! Three squads killed by ring while fighting, with no chance to escape."
Sry @EA_Blueberry but I think you're just seeing what you want to see. Most people think this is WAY TOO FAR and mostly completely unnecessary. I still think 7dmg per tick on first ring is way too much as it doesn't give players time to do anything except run...
Mid combat? Forget it - you'll still die way too fast to hang about fighting
Looting after win? No chance can't loot and heal.
Respawning? Not a hope, you'd be down before you got to respawn beacon and your teammates wouldn't stand a chance without healing items and wouldn't have time to get them
Imo anything above 4dmg per tick is too much, and even that will seriously reduce options in some situations. Like I said in previous posts it wouldn't be difficult to create a system whereby damage in scale depending on the situation.
4dmg per tick base.... if you are currently in combat then you get a 75% damage reduction until the combat ends (i.e 1dmg per tick)... if combat ended in last 30 seconds you get a 50% (2 per tick) reduction... 30-45 seconds you get a 25% (3 dmg per tick) reduction and more than a minute no reduction.
OR have a system whereby while the ring is moving it does more damage the deeper you are in it... so when it first crosses you you only take 1 dmg per tick... 50 meters in it ups to 2 dmg per tick, 100m in and it goes to 3dmg per tick, 150m goes to 4dmg per tick and 200m or more it goes to 5. Then multiple those numbers by the time you are outside... up to 30secs x1; 30-45 x2; 45-60 x3 and over 60 x4. That way you give players a little more time and freedom.
Once again, where is the proof that SO many players are abusing this anyway? As people keep saying, this reduces many useful and legit strategies and makes the game "dumber" to play... sure it's annoying if you do get caught by campers, but if it's only one team out of 20 or maybe more who actually do this you are screwing over the majority of players to stop the odd idiot team... I don't think camping is destroying the Apex community (although hackers might)
And news flash now teams can exploit this and be encouraged to camp, teams with a pathfinder can get a few nades, camp in a bottleneck just inside the next ring, and simply wait for teams to come though who will be very weak and have lost all their health to the stupid ring damage and then nade spam them to death... great strategy, really deserving or rewards, they don't even need guns... if you nade spam a team as they are coming into the ring you stop them going forward into the nades and keep them in the ring until they are knocked... then with a lifeline you can loot all their stuff by running in and out of ring to get their things.
If you want to specifically target campers then in my previous posts I suggested ways to do that, but yes they involve more complex calculations rather than just applying blanked damage to every single player regardless of situation. The suggestions in this post however are really not that complex to introduce and can be applied to all players without that much work. Octane already has a system which decides whether he is "in combat"... then you just need to add a multiplier based on time... jeez I am pretty sure I could code that (well maybe not in Source but certainly in Unreal or Unity - thanks for keeping up with the times Valve)
Are you really that stuck for resources that you are unable to provide a more nuanced solution than one damage all the time for everyone?
I agree 1dmg per tick is maybe a little low in Elite mode as you can stay outside healing for a long time if you want, so I am in favour of a slight increase... but I think even just doubling it would discourage a lot of people as you use more health items and spend more time healing thus less time looting... going above 4 is. imo totally ridiculous and complete overkill. I also think second ring should not be increased that much either, it's only when you get to ring 3 that the damage should start seriously ramping up.
Community Manager
@kartikins wrote:
OR have a system whereby while the ring is moving it does more damage the deeper you are in it... so when it first crosses you you only take 1 dmg per tick... 50 meters in it ups to 2 dmg per tick, 100m in and it goes to 3dmg per tick, 150m goes to 4dmg per tick and 200m or more it goes to 5. Then multiple those numbers by the time you are outside... up to 30secs x1; 30-45 x2; 45-60 x3 and over 60 x4. That way you give players a little more time and freedom.
@kartikins
First, thank you for writing all the feedback and quoting responses from the thread. That takes time to do and also helps summarize feedback from the discussion for those just jumping into it.
Second, the community has spoken! The damage was too strong and based off the feedback we've been seeing the team adjusted it.
This doesn't mean that's the end of changes and the damage will stay there. The team will closely monitor everyone's thoughts on this damage adjustment and review the data for games.
I quoted that section of your response above because I just love it and it would indeed make for an interesting system. We've actually seen this mentioned before from other players too, but not sure if there's a technical limitation behind it. We'll make sure the feedback here gets passed along to the team though. 👍
Keep on voicing your thoughts and hope you all enjoy the weekend in the ring!
@EA_Blueberry TYVM for a longer, more considered response. Let me be clear that the numbers I gave before were just an example of the kind of direction I think it would be best to go IF the consensus of a majority of players is that changes do indeed need to be made at all to the damage how it was prior to these changes. I do feel however that your previous response of, "people are okay with the changes but think the damage should be nerfed a bit" did not capture the majority of sentiments expressed in this thread and certainly didn't address my own personal concerns... as to me the majority were, "nerfed a lot" and/or "why change it at all".
I do fully agree that 1 dmg per tick does afford players the possibility to spend a long time outside the ring for little penalty, and as a result does leave for the possibility for players to exploit that and ignore the "spirit of the game". I personally have a play fair attitude and once the ring closes in I will always head as quickly as I can towards the new zone, grabbing any loot I can easily get which is on my way. And to be fair in my experience most other players seem to do the same thing.
Apex is basically a very well designed game in the sense that by far the quickest way to get well kitted out is to get in fights and loot your victims, and in the late game teams with purple everything will have a great advantage. Imo high ring 1 (and even 2) damage undermines this idea by discouraging fighting OR preventing players from reaping the rewards of fighting... or from recovering from a failed engagement (repsawning).
Now, if you see a team but the ring is coming in 30 seconds you will be far more tempted NOT to engage so as not to get caught when the ring comes in... OR you do engage with 30-60 to go, have a furious battle and win against two teams, but then cannot reap any rewards and have to run to zone with nothing and without even having the time to recharge your still white shields... this totally goes against what I believe is great about Apex.
Personally I am not really convinced that people exploiting the low damage of ring 1 to loot/camp is really that much of a problem, if you were to ask me to list things which I think harm the experience for players I would put cheating, hitreg, sound bugs, latency and even loot distribution (why in some areas can you get nothing but p2020s, shield cells and the odd arc star in 90% of buildings, then you go into one room and find purple shields, peacekeeper, r301 and light extended mag all next to each other?!) higher on the list. But also I think that players who have the "camping"/"exploit" mentality will always camp or exploit... there is very little you can do against that. Like I said if you want to exploit now, all you need to do is drop in a more central area, grab as many grenades as you can carry, then go camp a choke point and wait for teams coming in with the ring... dead easy exploit and if the ring is doing huge damage, impossible to defend against.
I have often thought that all players in Apex should get slowly regenerating health when not in combat (like Octane at least half the speed)... you could discourage camping in all circumstances by making health regen dependent on keeping moving... but that's probably a topic for another thread. 🙂
@kartikinsWhat they are saying.
The change does not make sense even if you're getting a lot of positive feedback, which I highly doubt that you are. Unless you count Reddit which is literally just an echo chamber in which one side of an issue is up voted and the other is down voted and pushed to the bottom without justification or explanation.
What are you gaining from this change?
1. People can not longer camp the zone to reach top 5
What are you losing from this change?
1. Ability to loot in the zone, something which helps to equalize RNG elements of the game
2. Ability to fight in the zone, something you cant always prevent
3. Ability to revive teammates in the zone. If nothing else this thing alone is not worth losing. The ability to revive teammates and make clutch comebacks is part of what Apex so much fun. Ive won multiple games where my 2 partner died and I ended up making an epic escape, revived them and won the game.
4. Ability to reposition in the zone to counter edge campers. In the current Elite if you're caught between edge campers and the zone you're dead and lose the game 90% of the time. There is essentially nothing you can do, they have a better position and all the time in the world, yet you have no choice but to run right into them and cant stop.
You're losing a core part of the fun and identity of the game for something thats not even a big problem.I dont remember A SINGLE person complaining about zone camping ever. I understand you're probably testing this out for the Ranked Mode in Season 2, but you need to look at other solutions or other metric for determining ranks.
Honestly I could see the damage of the first 2 zones going up from normals because the first zone is pitiful but it shouldnt COMPLETELY REMOVE all zone based gameplay. AT MOST it should be something like 3,6,9,12 for the zones. Anything higher compromises gameplay and tactics.
@Gidoru Sry man, but why are you addressing that to me? Its more or less exactly what I have been saying since the start. I 100% agree, this change does way more harm than good.
I personally am skeptical that campers and exploiters are posing such a problem to the game anyway, but if people feel they are then I have already suggested a number of ways to address that without undermining all these other things.
In my opinion, those who camp/exploit will always find a way to do that anyway... in my last post I said how players can jump centrally, stock up on nades, goto a choke point and nade spam any team trying to get back into the zone... either they will have to run into the nades (and go down) or stay back in the ring (and also go down)... then you just run in and out looting for a few seconds at a time until you've got all their stuff.
Anyway, you should be addressing your comments to Blueberry or someone, they are the ones who need convincing, not me. I am only one person and I don't claim for a second to speak for other Apex players, but it certainly seems from this thread that a much greater percentage of players feel these changes are detrimental than positive.
Take care.
