Let's talk about the elephant in the room: punching.

@nebwise Season 9 drop loot update temporizes this a little.

The core problem (which I won't address in details here) is the addressing of brutality, animalty and stupidity of players. Which... Works.

Against all the odds, it's part of what generates money on this game, so don't expect it to be wiped away.

If you imagine Apex Legends with less primitive/bestial functions, that would be awesome, but part of the player base wants those things.

Which includes:
- Octane (we all know it, this character is for kids and immature players, and guess what? It works like a charm. Any Octane on our team drastically lessens your winrate, I did stats, this is mind-blowing), this would need an option to check "Disallow in party", but that's too controversial and not really "public relations friendly".
- Ordnance (which was adressed with march 3 patch with stack removal, season 9 arcstar stun removal)
- Hammer Points hop-up (adressed in season 9 vaulting)
- Bloodhound scan (still to be changed, however it is done)

- Hot drops and primitive cannon fodder behaviour (this was partially solved by may 12 location challenges removed, see next point)

- No game training (no tutorial, I mean, the game tutorial is about anything but battle royale, just about items) and no map discovery training (this is intentional, partially solved on season 8 first 15 days with damage-free exploring). Like simply telling people "you need 1m50s at least in time-to-action between two games, if you die before 1:50 in game, you basically spend half your time in lobbies". This was partially addressed with the addition of arenas in season 9.

- Melee damage (partially adressed in season 9 starting loot patch), the loot removal of players' drop positions doesn't really help that to change.

- Solo drop possibility (this should be allowed 100m from the ground only)

- Banner ping / beacon ping limitations to one

- Battle Pass quests-only gameplay and dumb grinding, this was adressed with ranked penalty, but only for ranked (even though ranked penalty actually affects all "Play Apex" modes).

Without those things, the game would be more interesting. It's really cool like that, but I still personnaly regret those aspects not being taken into account every day.

But as a game developer myself, I don't blame anyone. I know how hard it is, especially when the marketing and management layer come in. 😉

As you can see: season 9 seems the be the update that adresses to people's intelligence the most so far, so even if I'm still sighing a little from time to time, we have to recognize we just had the best update ever.