Player Shortage

I haven't really been looking at player counts lately. I assume they spike at the beginning of each season and then drop off quickly afterwards as they have for years now. Not really sure how it could work any other way in a six year old game. But overall I can completely agree that this game has A LOT to learn about player retention. How hard could it be to poach people from Epic to show them how to do it?

Could not agree more about the disruptive and ultimately corrosive nature of the "balance" adjustments they've taken to relying on. I'd call them "imbalance" adjustments if we want to be accurate. It's all short-term desperation at the expense of long-term viability.

The matchmaking is a horse of a different color. I take exception to the observation that quality should be prioritized over speed in ranked play. It should be prioritized in every single mode in the game. Rank vs. Unranked is completely irrelevant, imo. But this is a chicken and egg thing. Is the matchmaking bad because the population is too low or is the population dwindling because the matchmaking is bad? The truth is, it's both. And the harder truth is that this problem is baked into the formula of every single multiplayer shooter that ever has existed or ever will exist. For one very simple reason. Developers believe that gamers will tire more quickly of a game that is easily mastered. So they build their games with ridiculously high skill ceilings. Which creates literally dozens of different problems for the game and its players, none worse or more intractable than cheating and smurfing. If you make your game in such a way that a normal person cannot even reach a level of basic competence without quitting their job and aim training full time, then you haven't, imo, built your game right. When you build a game with a skill ceiling so high that legitimate high-skill players appear to do things easily and regularly that defy game physics... then you are actively encouraging a gigantic cheat industry to grow up around your game. And when cheaters decide they're not having any fun anymore because it seems like everyone else is cheating... then they just start a new account in order to get at the last bastion of normal, non-cheating players in the game: the scrubs. And then the scrubs leave. And suddenly season 26 mid-gold looks an awful lot like season 4 diamond. Suddenly there is no where in the game that isn't a sweat-soaked **bleep** hole of three stack hard pushes and multi squad pile ups.

So here's my call out to all fps developers (a call out I've been making for decades now and will continue to make until I quit gaming): Stop building your games for professionals and streamers and just expecting the rest of us to go along for the ride. The ride sucks. Start building your games for normal people.

reconzero​ 

The quality of Matchmaking  requires a sufficient player population. While fostering new players is necessary for this, measures to deter inactive/abandoned accounts can also be expected to secure the MM player pool. This might be particularly effective in higher ranks, where abandoned accounts are common and frequently lead to player shortages.

Master-tier players and above may lack sufficient end-game content. This could be a result of the widening gap between Apex Predator and Master tiers. It may be necessary to introduce a system that stokes competition and encourages Master-tier players to be conscious of their ranking ( Master League equivalent).

Apex's balance adjustments should not be made primarily for the sake of professional players and streamers. On the contrary, they should be expected to adapt to the game content. The ability to adapt to the environment is part of a player's skill set, and it is an opportunity for competitors and streamers to demonstrate their expertise.

For example, adjustments that add new functions to a character (e.g., Blink, EMP Smoke) excessively raise the player's skill ceiling.Conversely, quality-of-life adjustments (e.g., better Jetpack handling) raise the skill floor. A powerful skill with limited usage, such as Maggie's Drill, exemplifies a better adjustment: its design allows players to use Perks to choose between maintaining the usage limitation for better accuracy, or easing the limitation in exchange for a reduced effect.  When the range between the upper and lower limits of player skill (skill ceiling and skill floor) is wide, the environment becomes comfortable for highly skilled, heavy users, but it is exclusive and unwelcoming to casual and new players, who are essential for increasing the player  population.

I personally have gone from hours upon hours of Apex to quitting if not every split after like half way I would usually grind to quitting during split, taking a few off and coming back like 3-4 times lately just to check one thing: how EA is limiting hackers in Diamond (now already Plat3+) lobbies.

And they have done basically nothing. To be fair back in season what was it 21 or 22 when rage hackers were common sight and what not they reacted (eventually) rolling out anti-Linux stuff...now situation for me as player is actually worse than in season 22 which I did quit but it didn't feel this daunting.

These days every game basically contains hackers, like every **bleep** ranked game. You kinda roll for:

1. whom hackers will kill first
2. how good your randoms will be
3. how teams will rotate - mass push your POI or give you some breathing room

Quality of games for me is all time low, really playing just for fun to actually win vs some dumb wallhackers that I spot and can take on if I have a  good soloqing teammates.
Rest is just 80%+ either teammates running away as duo and dying <15th place, having hackers on my team actually ripping lobby up, having 1-2 tier lower ranked players on my team who perform accordingly bad, hackers just W+mouse1 into me and rolling me over.

I think I will play a bit and soon (within a week or so) quit Apex again. This is just sad that legit players can't grind and run into so many hackers already in Plat lobbies. On the flip side - who cares...before it was Diamond 4+ lobbies, then after easy rank given by Respawn it became Diamond 2+, now it is Plat 3... eventually you run into dumb hackers and if you manage there you run into your streamers and pros grinding with top tier hacks on... More on that -> Youtube Zeus, watch, he has a lot of educational videos about the topic and how bad EA is doing in Apex in that regards.

Apex is alive only while someone is making money streaming, buying profiles / boosts, buying hacks.

Similar as CS was / is booming while skin market is booming and people make tons of money from trading those.

As soon as low IQ people that spend money on the game realize that they can e.g. spend money on hacks their boosters are using -> that part of "economy" will break and hackers will play vs hackers, you can already see that for quite a while in lower population servers (I assume that's why EA made the change in server list).

Later when noone will donate to streamers grinding using hacks and acting as clowns or see no value (like it would be now :D) in badges like Masters / Pred -> that part of "economy" will die and probably game will die with it unless influx of legit players will bring it back.

e1b2b41da38ee689​

The total number of accounts Banned (BANs) for violations is enormous. However, the developers are also implementing countermeasures, such as strengthening the anti-cheat team and blocking specific access routes. Reports of hundreds of thousands of monthly BANs and millions of cumulative BANs have actually been publicized. (Please check with the developers for details.)

The reason your gaming experience isn't improving is likely because the volume of cheating incidents is still exceeding the number of successful detections and bans.

This situation indicates that the current measures are insufficient, and there is a need to fundamentally re-evaluate the strategy.

For instance, it is necessary to increase the number of initiatives, such as removing the Kill Point cap to make abnormal values easier to detect, and segregating violators into separate matches reserved for cheaters.

Sure if you check official data it seem "positive" yet I never paid attention to it because it was mainly focusing on bot farms and similar stuff like blunt rage hacking. Which imo is NOT such a big part of the issue because even totally low IQ / new player of Apex would recognize those and understand that ok this person / bot is hacking.

I personally haven't have I think a game over 10k hours in Apex vs bots...maybe 1-2 where I warmed up and randomly popped into other modes, but in ranked - never.

What upsets me is seeing accounts level 500+ in some cases e.g. yesterday 1000+ running blunt wallhacks and reports do nothing / Respawn is not reviewing those clearly (based on the info in web / latest Zeus video on YT) as there are probably just too many to handle and only banning that is done manually is if Imperialhal cries about it on his live stream. Rest are automated bans only.

And that is what creates the negative experience for legit higher level player like me and probably alike = people (soloqers) as stated below in at least 50% of the cases are unaware of how to spot those next level hackers (not to mention top tier hackers like streamers / pros grinding ranked) and it creates fake standard of performance / degrades quality of the game for legit players as you 9 out of 10 times will not be able to counter that (e.g. yesterday I managed to counter just 1 clearly hacking team out of like 4h+ grind and I am not sure if one of my teammates were not hacking as well, did end up with lesser stats than I did but he came out clutch basically every of 4 fights we took).

I have been asking this question - how come Respawn still fails to have some background process in place that analyzes accuracy and flags accounts / suspends them until review is done for say hitting 90%+ of the shots (your one-mags by R99) or millisecond fast flicks from one enemy to another (which is humanly impossible)...yet they do. Was kinda happy to hear in latest Zeus video that there is some sort of AI service side anti-cheat working on that yet I guess it is far from operational, given how often I see in Plat+ lobbies people who just do 180 and instantly hit you with sentinel as soon as you start shooting them - hilarious how they don't even hide it.